Any benefit to fast Secure Digitl Cards?

[Avenger]

I am in the midst of purchasing a DR 1000S (thanks to all the great threads and people on this board). I was wondering if you experience greater performance if you buy a faster SD (or SDHC) card? There is a class 6 variety that is faster than class 4 and I know it makes a difference in my digital camera. Does the DR 1000S use caching so efficiently that the greater speed doesn't make a difference? I'd rather buy the cheaper card if it doesn't make a noticeable difference.

[Grimulkan]

I think someone did some tests while connecting the DR to the PC (via USB) and there wasn't much different in speeds between different classes of SD cards. Now, this does not exactly tell us if the DR can access them faster by itself (instead of the PC), someone will need to write a small disk benchmark app and compile it to run locally on the DR to tell.

Edit: I was wrong. Here is the original thread (courtesy davidspitzer for the tests). Of course, the comp shows that the higher classes are faster, duh! We still don't know about the DR though.

I suspect that the DR does not have the necessary circuitry to take advantage of those higher class SD cards like a camera does, so it shouldn't make much difference. The random access times don't vary too much between classes, so folder navigation, document switching etc. will remain unaffected, IMHO.

I did some crude (stopwatch) tests pre 1.6 with an Extreme III Sandisk and a regular Sandisk (the blue one), and large documents took about the same time to load (so maybe disk read speeds are not the bottleneck). I didn't test boot up times, but I doubt they would be different. I haven't tried stuff post 1.6.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Grimulkan

I did some crude (stopwatch) tests pre 1.6 with an Extreme III Sandisk and a regular Sandisk (the blue one), and large documents took about the same time to load (so maybe disk read speeds are not the bottleneck). I didn't test boot up times, but I doubt they would be different. I haven't tried stuff post 1.6.

Isn't the primary difference between "slow" and "fast" cards the write speed? That's obviously vitally important in a camera, but probably makes little difference with a device primarily used for reading.

[Grimulkan]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Isn't the primary difference between "slow" and "fast" cards the write speed? That's obviously vitally important in a camera, but probably makes little difference with a device primarily used for reading.

Good point. The tests in the other thread showed some improvement in read speed, but not much. Write speed may be important if the device is using a lot of scratch space (say, to store pre-rendered pages or cache documents while switching), I don't know what the DR does. I'd still like to find out whether its the the read speed (even for the faster cards) or the processor that is the bottleneck for opening documents etc.