# What do I need to do to change my SD Card?



## stueycaster (Aug 24, 2011)

I have ordered a faster SD card that will be here some time this week. When I put it in my phone will I need to format it with my phone first before I copy the files to it? I'm using GummyCharged GBE 2.1 with Imoseyon 4.0 and Voodoo converted to Ext4.


----------



## moosc (Jun 15, 2011)

How fast did u go? Anything above class 6 you won't see any peeformace increase. Don't need need to do any thing special. Just copy old SD card to PC then copy to new SD card.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk


----------



## lane32x (Aug 1, 2011)

If you want optimal performance on an SD card, Google "Panasonic SD Formatter" and get the free program. It helps line up the formatting and optimize things a bit.



moosc said:


> How fast did u go? Anything above class 6 you won't see any peeformace increase. Don't need need to do any thing special. Just copy old SD card to PC then copy to new SD card.


What are you basing your statement on? Do you have a tech sheet that lists the maximum read and write of our internal SD chip? Now I'm curious.


----------



## moosc (Jun 15, 2011)

There are plenty of threads on the Android os sd speed limitations.


lane32x said:


> If you want optimal performance on an SD card, Google "Panasonic SD Formatter" and get the free program. It helps line up the formatting and optimize things a bit.
> 
> What are you basing your statement on? Do you have a tech sheet that lists the maximum read and write of our internal SD chip? Now I'm curious.


Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk


----------



## imnuts (Jun 9, 2011)

lane32x said:


> If you want optimal performance on an SD card, Google "Panasonic SD Formatter" and get the free program. It helps line up the formatting and optimize things a bit.


If you think that does anything significant to performance, I have some blinker fluid to sell you. Odds are, it's just another low-level formatting utility, of which there are hundreds out there. And after using the SD Card for 10 minutes, anything special it may have done will be wiped out by putting new data on it.


----------



## stueycaster (Aug 24, 2011)

I read in another thread a while back that a class 10 will be a huge improvement. Are you telling me the class 10 that I ordered isn't going to improve my performance over the class 2 that it came with? Or will it improve it about like a class 6 would?


----------



## imnuts (Jun 9, 2011)

stueycaster said:


> I read in another thread a while back that a class 10 will be a huge improvement. Are you telling me the class 10 that I ordered isn't going to improve my performance over the class 2 that it came with? Or will it improve it about like a class 6 would?


It will be a big improvement over the class 2, but you likely won't be able to use it to its full potential. You'll probably see read/write speeds somewhere between class 6 and class 10.


----------



## lane32x (Aug 1, 2011)

imnuts said:


> If you think that does anything significant to performance, I have some blinker fluid to sell you. Odds are, it's just another low-level formatting utility, of which there are hundreds out there. And after using the SD Card for 10 minutes, anything special it may have done will be wiped out by putting new data on it.


I've actually seen a few speed tests that compare it with other formatting utils.

Also I was thinking that transferring files will be much improved.

Lastly just because there are multiple threads about something, that does not lend to the credibility of that information. Do you know how many threads I have seen that tell people to wipe all caches 3 times? Or that Samsung created special USB cables for our phones? What about all the people who think that they *must* use the .pit file, even though we haven't changed the partition layout at all? (I used to be one of those people).

There are a lot of uninformed people online.
That being said, there are a lot of people talking about the SD card speed limit on the Evo, and on the DX. I'm going to try to play with my phone tonight and see if I can get the speed to improve at all (probably not with just a class 2 card).

*EDIT*
Here's another little blurb from the official SD association. But I'm sure they don't know what they are talking about either <rolls eyes>
"Using generic formatting utilities may result in less than optimal performance for your memory cards."
--I realize that this could also refer to the lifespan of a memory card. But again, nobody here ever complains about their SD cards dying an early death...








https://www.sdcard.o...ds/formatter_3/


----------



## stueycaster (Aug 24, 2011)

OK cool. Then it'll be able to deal with anything my phone gives it without being a bottle neck like the class 2 card is now. Thanks for the info.


----------



## shrike1978 (Sep 2, 2011)

I've been thinking about getting a class 10 card. Mine came with a class 4, and while it works and will do HD, I wouldn't mind some extra speed. However, based on what I know of the way SD cards work, I'm skeptical that anything beyond the card class will do anything for a card's speed. This isn't like a HDD that has physical read limitations...the logical sector order on flash could be completely different from the physical and it shouldn't make a difference. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, most SD cards have systems built in to automatically spread the writes around so that one spot doesn't get written to too much so they'll last longer.



lane32x said:


> Lastly just because there ate multiple threads about something, that does not lend to the credibility of that information. Do you know how many threads I have seen that tell people to wipe all caches 3 times? Or that Samsung created special USB cables for our phones?


There's an FAQ thread on XDA spreading the legend USB cable has an "extra pin". After being corrected on it in thread multiple times, he forbade anyone from mentioning it again in the thread and people should PM him if they had a problem with any of the answers. So, I sent him a PM, with links to various articles and tech specifications on USB cables and ports (including what that 5th pin that is in *all* mini and micro-USB cables actually is), along with a plain English interpretation of the specs for him showing how ludicrous the idea is that _any_ USB cable could have an extra pin that actually did anything when connected to a standard USB port. I never heard anything back from him and the FAQ never changed.

My hypothosis: he tried to use a charge-only cable to transfer to a computer and it failed. He went online and found other people had the same problem and, with significant reinforcement, concluded that the cable in the box must be magical. Meanwhile, I use a no-name 6ft cable I got 3 years ago for $0.50 to do everything on my phone. I'm not even sure where the cable that came with my phone is.


----------



## kvswim (Aug 20, 2011)

imnuts said:


> If you think that does anything significant to performance, I have some blinker fluid to sell you. Odds are, it's just another low-level formatting utility, of which there are hundreds out there. And after using the SD Card for 10 minutes, anything special it may have done will be wiped out by putting new data on it.


So ah, can I get that blinker fluid from you?


----------



## lane32x (Aug 1, 2011)

shrike1978 said:


> I've been thinking about getting a class 10 card. Mine came with a class 4, and while it works and will do HD, I wouldn't mind some extra speed. However, based on what I know of the way SD cards work, I'm skeptical that anything beyond the card class will do anything for a card's speed. This isn't like a HDD that has physical read limitations...the logical sector order on flash could be completely different from the physical and it shouldn't make a difference. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, most SD cards have systems built in to automatically spread the writes around so that one spot doesn't get written to too much so they'll last longer.
> 
> There's an FAQ thread on XDA spreading the legend USB cable has an "extra pin". After being corrected on it in thread multiple times, he forbade anyone from mentioning it again in the thread and people should PM him if they had a problem with any of the answers. So, I sent him a PM, with links to various articles and tech specifications on USB cables and ports (including what that 5th pin that is in all mini and micro-USB cables actually is), along with a plain English interpretation of the specs for him showing how ludicrous the idea is that any USB cable could have an extra pin that actually did anything when connected to a standard USB port. I never heard anything back from him and the FAQ never changed.
> 
> My hypothosis: he tried to use a charge-only cable to transfer to a computer and it failed. He went online and found other people had the same problem and, with significant reinforcement, concluded that the cable in the box must be magical. Meanwhile, I use a no-name 6ft cable I got 3 years ago for 0.50 to do everything on my phone. I'm not even sure where the cable that came with my phone is.


Well, there ARE some pretty significant speed differences between different makes and models of memory cards. And I did a speed test on our phone and found that even the default class2 card in the phone is getting faster speeds than the HTC phones with the speed lock.

Buy a chip and do a speed test on the phone. If ours doesn't handle the extra speed, take the card back and tell the store your device didn't support it.

Regardless, transfer time for CWM files will decrease significantly and so will transferring multimedia files as well.

*edit* I hate autocorrect. How did it get the word "doped" out of "speed" ???


----------



## stueycaster (Aug 24, 2011)

I got my new SD card. I copied all the data from my old one to it and it worked perfectly. It's definitely a lot faster. I wish I'd have done it sooner. Thanks for the help yall.


----------



## Fryguy101 (Oct 14, 2011)

shrike1978 said:


> I've been thinking about getting a class 10 card. Mine came with a class 4, and while it works and will do HD, I wouldn't mind some extra speed. However, based on what I know of the way SD cards work, I'm skeptical that anything beyond the card class will do anything for a card's speed. This isn't like a HDD that has physical read limitations...the logical sector order on flash could be completely different from the physical and it shouldn't make a difference. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, most SD cards have systems built in to automatically spread the writes around so that one spot doesn't get written to too much so they'll last longer.


Well... sort of.

You're right in that an SD card is free from most of the limitations of spinning rust disks, however, it has some limitations of its own which do not affect spinning rust drives...

Any time you want to write to a block on NAND Flash, the entire block must be written to at the same time. If the file system's blocks don't align to the NAND Flash blocks, then two blocks must be written every time you try and write one. Aligning the file-system's blocks to the NAND Flash blocks results in a significant speed up.

Then there's stuff like TRIM... NAND Flash can only write to an erased block, so any time it modifies a block, it's read-erase-write... some formatting utilities will essentially mark all blocks as having data, even when they don't. If this is the case, a formatting utility which properly erases empty blocks and marks them as empty will make a card faster initially, but the more it's used, the more it's dependent on the device having TRIM, otherwise it will experience the same slowdown...

But yes, other than that, the formatter used doesn't affect the speed... the physical speeds of the disk aren't changed, just the circumstances around what a 'write' actually does...


----------

