Best performing 64GB cards for Kobo?

[diskette]

i would like to see if i can get the experimental browser a good bit faster for quora.com, and also i read articles much more than ebooks which means alot of reloading OS files to go back into menus, the delete process is slow, little things like that.

but yes sandisk ultra might be overkill if the card reader inside the kobo itself has a low max transfer speed, or if the device then becomes more bottlenecked by the processor, etc

[JSWolf]

I would say from my experience that Sandisk is the overall best brand.

[diskette]

just switched to a sandisk ultra 8GB and.... no big performance increase of the kobo !
and this card came up well in alot of 4K benchmarks, and the amazon reviews for people using it for raspberry pis were always very positive.
so i don't know what the bottleneck here is, but probably the processor or the internal card reader itself, or both.

i think there is some increase, though i'd have to do side by side videos to compare. i suppose since i've gone to the hassle of DD'ing the cards over (after running fsck along the way) i should do a few quick videos to really investigate speed changes. but it's certainly nowhere near the speed of an iphone 5, for example

[Lucas Malor]

Maybe because Iphone 5 as 16 GB of RAM at minimum, while Kobo Aura H2O only 4? Furthermore Iphone's CPU is designed by Apple itself for its products and OS. Not considering the huge difference of the software quality.

[diskette]

oh yes, it was just a general example to gauge real life perception speed, i didn't mean that they were genuinely that similar in hardware !

i think consumer demand for smartphones being far far higher than for e-readers also means you generally get more power per buck, whereas i'm guessing e-reader processors are more heavily optimized for low battery consumption, as oppose to interface snappiness

i'd still like to try and make it faster though, so i think i'll experiment with changing the filesystem to ext

[JSWolf]

You probably bought a high-speed microSD card. Those are best for larger files. eBook files tend to be smallish files overall. So you might be best with a slower card for better speed with small files.

[Lucas Malor]

Originally Posted by diskette

i'd still like to try and make it faster though, so i think i'll experiment with changing the filesystem to ext

Linux kernel is already on ext. If you mean to change the flash partition, it's definitively not a good idea, since the system mounts it as a flash partition when an USB cable is attached.

I'm quite sure the ereaders that Kobo uses load into memory the book once opened. So the only disk I/O operations are at Kobo boot, at book open and when you use the database (writing notes etc). And when you add books of course. So speed disk is not a bottleneck.

If you really want to improve the speed of Kobo, I suggest you to learn C

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by diskette

i'd still like to try and make it faster though, so i think i'll experiment with changing the filesystem to ext

To change the user accessible filesystem to ext or something other than FAT32, you will also need to change one of the startup scripts. That's what mounts the partition and from memory, it checks the format. There has been discussion of doing this in the past, so you should be able to search for it.

As Lucas said, the device probably loads the full book into memory, so unless it is a very large book, the I/O won't have an affect after the initial opening of the book. It is possible that the load is done for each internal file, so faster I/O might help. There are also writes to the database while reading. The current position is store plus events such as page turns. But, I have no idea when this is done. It could be for every page, or when the book is closed.

As you mentioned wanting to improve the browser speed for a particular site, I don't think the user partition is used when browsing. It isn't used for browser cache or anything. If any temporary files are used, they will be on the root partition. That is already ext3.

[Lucas Malor]

Originally Posted by davidfor

There are also writes to the database while reading. The current position is store plus events such as page turns. But, I have no idea when this is done. It could be for every page, or when the book is closed.

Even if it's done at every page turns, the bottleneck there is CPU, GPU, ereader screen and how page turning is coded.

Improving browser I/O speed may make sense if you want to use Wikipedia offline, as discussed in other threads. But IMHO the real problem in Kobo performance is 1) the hardware 2) the code quality.

Anyway you can try to monitor I/O usage and see if there's really an intensive use that justify the effort.

[Larla]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Surely you must know someone who uses Windows where you could have access to run the benchmarks.

Of course, the smart thing to do is go buy a copy of Windows and install it in a dual-boot setup.

Don't call me Surely --