ned Productions Consulting


Technology musings by Niall Douglas
ned Productions Consulting
(an expert advice and services company based in Ireland)


Sunday 7th April 2013 7.23am

It occurred to me that for my workstation an upgrade of its Renesas USB 3.0 controller's firmware might help: it now has firmware 3034 and driver v2.1.39. And look at the difference it makes: 86Mb/sec reads and 63Mb/sec writes for that Sandisk Extreme Pro microSDHC. Write speeds are still a good bit below what they should be, but I ain't complaining.

For comparison I threw in a Sandisk Ultra UHS-I microSDHC, and it gets 43Mb/sec reads and 9Mb/sec writes. Note the hard drive like write latency of 8ms or so.

One BIG concern is the random 4Kb writes which are awful even by SD card standards - I think they sacrifice random access for throughput in these newer fast cards. Must admit I can see me turning off barriers, any form of write guarantees etc.

So, on to finding a SD card with reasonable random read and write scores …