What’s Your Bottleneck?

So the other day I posted about a sweet deal I found on a 16GB Class 10 MicroSD card.  I purchased it to replace my 8GB Class 4 card.  Well, the new card came in today, I transferred all my pictures/videos/podcasts over and did some speed tests to compare.  Hit the full post for more information on the tests.

To start, I used H2testw (defaults to German, has English radio button) to read/write a 3GB (3072MB) sample block.

On the old, 8GB Class 4 card my results:

Warning: Only 3072 of 7592 MByte tested.
Test finished without errors.
You can now delete the test files *.h2w or verify them again.
Writing speed: 9.68 MByte/s
Reading speed: 16.3 MByte/s

On the new, 16GB Class 10 card my results:

Warning: Only 3072 of 15799 MByte tested.
Test finished without errors.
You can now delete the test files *.h2w or verify them again.
Writing speed: 14.9 MByte/s
Reading speed: 16.0 MByte/s

The write speed went up quite a bit, but the read speed remained fairly similar.  I can really tell a difference when browsing through the photos saved on my device.  I notice a slight difference after taking a picture, the time it takes to go to from “Saving” to saved and image name, with ability to scroll over to send to Facebook/E-mail, or jump back and take a new picture.

My recommendation would be to download H2testw, it’s a single executable file, connect your BlackBerry and throw it into the Mass Storage mode.  Then write a sample file, I chose 3GB because I figured that’d be plenty big to give a better average than a 1MB file.  When you’re done testing, be sure to remove the file it creates, else you’ll suddenly see that 3GB has vanished from your available storage on the card.

What’d I do with the 8GB Class 4 card?  Gave it to the wife, to upgrade her 1GB Class 2 card:

Warning: Only 512 of 967 MByte tested.
Test finished without errors.
You can now delete the test files *.h2w or verify them again.
Writing speed: 4.14 MByte/s
Reading speed: 15.3 MByte/s