Database Users

[Q] Performance of Focus with and without an SD Card?

Hi All,
I was wondering if someone who has added an SD card to their Focus could comment on the performance of it with it in and with it out.
Maybe a video of before and after showing a game loading or just a general comment on what they've noticed?
Thanks very much and looking forward to your responses!
Jonno

I got my Focus yesterday. Played with it all afternoon and evening. I already had a 16GB Sandisk class 2 card which is listed as compatible, so I went ahead and installed it.
Set everything back up and played with it some more, plus this morning. I've noticed no slowdowns or lagginess of any kind. I've got 22GB free after the install. Also tried the tethering and it worked great.
FYI: I did order the 16GB Kingston class 4 card, but didn't want to wait for it. I'll put that one in my old phone.
Verdict: very happy!

Thanks very much!
I saw a video just now with someone who had added a SD card to their Focus and it still outperformed the HD7. BUT, it was relatively empty (< 2 GB of storage used) which means that it is possible that more of the data was on the NAND memory than on the SD Card.
It would be interesting to see someone install an app without the card in and run it to see how long it takes, then add a card and install the same app and time it, and then fill up the card with media and THEN install the app (once the storage is almost full) and then time it.
May take some time but should be worth it in the end .
I know the data is supposed to be spread across any of the storage facilities available but we're not sure how it is done (simply filling it up, striping the data).

Yes, that's video was unfair, need a full data card to test, waiting
Http://Ricky119.com

Jonno2343 said:
Hi All,
I was wondering if someone who has added an SD card to their Focus could comment on the performance of it with it in and with it out.
Maybe a video of before and after showing a game loading or just a general comment on what they've noticed?
Thanks very much and looking forward to your responses!
Jonno
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I ran for a week without an SD card and encountered many of the same issues reported (app hang/crash, marketplace lag/hang). I had to reboot a couple times my first week for one reason or another.
I've since added a class 2 sandisk 8gb and do not notice any difference, performance or otherwise. Incidently I have not had to reboot since I added memory. I have rebooted it once only verify the data was still there after reset.
Hope this helps,

I tested my coworker's Focus vs mine. He had a 16GB Sandisk class 2 card with >8gb of data. I had no card with ~7GB of data. I launched ilomilo on each phone about the same time. They finished pretty much at the same time.

I'll second the above, I've noticed no difference between having a card and not having a card except for the amount of storage available. I'm not saying there's no difference, I'm saying I've noticed no difference so I didn't bother measuring. Programs load and run at the same speed either way, media loads and plays at the same speed...no difference.
Guess I should add that mine is an 8GB Sandisk class 2 card. No problems whatsoever as far as speed, rebooting or anything else.

In my opinion, the best type of test would be a stock Focus vs a Focus with an added micro sd card with the phone+card loaded to the max with content.

I will test this and report back. I have a Focus stock and my wife has one with a 16GB Sandisk Class 2 card in it. I'll load it up and see if there is a difference over the weekend.
My Focus with no memory card has not crashed in the marketplace yet, my wife's does a lot...

Great, thanks very much!
Looking forward to the results.

This is really weird. My first test has one focus with a Class 2 Sandisk 16GB card but only 4.5 GB used total on the phone. The other Focus is stock with no card and about 4.5 GB used also.
Speed tests so far
Stock Focus -
- Marketplace and browsing the catalogs - much faster the first time I tested. after however it was mixed and occasionally the 16GB was quicker.
- People Hub - faster load and browsing.
- Bing Faster load just barely.
Focus+16GB - faster at loading Uverse and Netflix
- Loads Uverse faster
- Loads Netflix a second faster.
Both phones always get back to the main screen at the same speed, weird Also, occassionally the 16GB is slower, then the next test its faster.
I'll load up the card and report back.

The way you should test
Try this place the sd card in then add 9 gb of music and videos then install the program. I highly doubt the sd cards are causing program and marketplace crashes as I can get those to more noticably with wifi on. Also no one really knows what is running in the background. There is multitasking just not available to 3rd party apps so who knows if we are getting facebook syncs when things act weird. I would suggest not setting any accounts up and power off the phone then power it back on if you want a real comparison. The OS files would run from the NAND so dlls and other files that games and programs use should always run from the NAND but not the program it's self so loading the card with data that fills the nand then installing a program to the sd card would show if there are performance issues.

I've been very curious about this. I have a pny 8gb class 4 in mine. I've been paranoid about performance decreases, but i haven't seen any clear difference. But i would certainly appreciate a video or something confirming that there is no performance decrease, just to settle my paranoia.

When I first bought my Focus it was about a week before I actually installed a SD Card in it. Im using a 8gb Sandisk class 2 right now and have noticed NO difference in performance at all. Its still fast, smooth and runs beautifully. Ill be getting a 16gb Sandisk class 2 card very soon...I would assume that wont change things either....Seems Sandisk is the way to go if you wanna be safe...since Sandisk in used for phone memory by Samsung.

I have the Kingston 32GB card in... no issues what so ever and I have over 15GBs on the card to date. I took the chance and so far *KNOCK-ON-WOOD* nothing has come up

Should be getting a Sandisk 16GB Class 10 soon, will update.

Solution to SD Card Problems!

I started using my HD2-7 with an 8Gb class 2 Sandisk SD card that worked perfectly. But I wanted a bigger SD card, so I bought a 16Gb class 2 Sandisk card that gave me a lot of hanging, reboots and lags in the HD2. I had to abandon the card and went back to the 8Gb card...until I stumbled on this post. I followed it and now the card has been working perfectly for about 4 days without any trouble.
If you are having trouble with your card, please try this method and post your result. I think the guy might have stumbled on the solution to the SD card problems.
Barmalei said:
Many people are experiencing problems with SD cards and/or random reboots, and I think I solved mine (I am rather a newbie), so here is my report.
Few days ago I installed WP7 (thanks a lot, DFT guys) on my U.S. T-mobile HD2 with its original 16 GB class 2 micro SD card, using radio 2.10.50.08.2.
Installation went very well, the phone worked very smoothly and very fast, except it started freezing and randomly rebooting. Hard resets didn't help. Then I removed SD card and reset the phone - it worked very well and fast and did not have any reboots.
I tried reformatting the SD card to Fat32 (using free software SDformatter - it fully clears the card after WP7 use and removes partitions, make sure you put Format Size Adjustment "ON" in Options) and reset the phone with the card. It did not help, the reboots were the same as before.
So I decided that the 16 GB card wasn't good for WP7 and bought a PNY 4 GB class 4 card for $10 at Staples. I reset the phone with this new card inside. At first everything worked very slowly, but at least the reboots completely disappeared. In few hours everything became fast, except for certain things, like it would take 15-30 seconds for the camera to reset after shooting a 1 min video.
Finally, I decided to try something else. I reflashed radio to 2.15.50.14 with the original 16 GB card (reformatted again), and everything seems to work very well -it's fast, and there has been no reboots so far in few hours. The battery also seems to drain with a normal pace.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

The guy did alot of different thinks to try to fix his SD card problems, in my opinion it would be hard to identify what actually fixed the problem if any. I had 2.15 radio and changed it to 2.10 as others where saying it would lower battery drainage which it seemed to have changed slightly. The only reason I posted this is to just make people aware before they start reseting there phones with experiments but I also understand that without the above sort of posts the forum wouldn't exist as so much is discovered by experiment.

New SD Card

Has anyone laid out the procedure for what to do with a new SD card and WP7 install? I've noticed many posts about it but no one saying exactly "this is what to do". I think this might be why there are so many posts about SD card failures. So if I have a new SD card and an HD2 and I want WP7, what do I do? Thanks ahead of time... Mod if there is an answer to this, I couldn't find it.

thuddome said:
Has anyone laid out the procedure for what to do with a new SD card and WP7 install? I've noticed many posts about it but no one saying exactly "this is what to do". I think this might be why there are so many posts about SD card failures. So if I have a new SD card and an HD2 and I want WP7, what do I do? Thanks ahead of time... Mod if there is an answer to this, I couldn't find it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you're just planning to run WP7 (so no fancy dualbooting with Android), there's not much to do, besides backing up anything on the card that you would like to keep. Your phone will create the necessary partitions and take care of the formatting on first boot, if I'm not mistaken.
Not really sure what you mean by "SD card failures". I don't recall reading any posts about that, unless you're referring to the random problems people are having with WP7 and some brands/types of SD cards (not really the result of any card failure).

aye what he said, if you have issues such as lag, wifi not working, random reboots etc then its an SD issue, that means you are out of luck with that current card, . Dont believe anyone when they tell you to buy a spacific card, there is no consistancy in the building of these things so where as you might have issues, someone else with the same card may be fine.i personally have had a wee bit of luck by filling my card with more music
the story is, i had no issues at all with my SD card, but one day after dumping some more music on i started getting reboot issues, took the music off and all was well, then i tried slapping more music on, about 200MB more, and that was it, all is ok again.
its a pure guess, well perhaps an educated guess, but i believe that for whatever reason WP7 had issues accessing a portion of my card, by filling it up some more it prevented WP7 from using it, and thus all is ok again, to be clear, the music played fine however!

dazza9075 said:
aye what he said, if you have issues such as lag, wifi not working, random reboots etc then its an SD issue, that means you are out of luck with that current card, . Dont believe anyone when they tell you to buy a spacific card, there is no consistancy in the building of these things so where as you might have issues, someone else with the same card may be fine.i personally have had a wee bit of luck by filling my card with more music
the story is, i had no issues at all with my SD card, but one day after dumping some more music on i started getting reboot issues, took the music off and all was well, then i tried slapping more music on, about 200MB more, and that was it, all is ok again.
its a pure guess, well perhaps an educated guess, but i believe that for whatever reason WP7 had issues accessing a portion of my card, by filling it up some more it prevented WP7 from using it, and thus all is ok again, to be clear, the music played fine however!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's interesting because I have had the same experience. I have been playing around with multiple size cards and brands. I have yet to get one work right. I have also discovered how you format them makes a difference; for example I have a Patriot class 4 16GB card that using EASEUS to format (low level) it worked but had lag at certain times, for example when going through setup on a fresh install of WP7. It was at a dead crawl with the same config with Android. I then formatted it with Minitool and it was unusable (dead dead crawl) with either WP7 and Android. I also tested a Kingston class 4 32GB w/ wp7 and it was about the same as the Patriot w/ EASEUS formatting. No card I have found outperforms (in the phone) the Sandisk Class 2 16GB card that came with the phone. My suspicion is that the cards that came with the phones have had something done to the sectors by the phone manufacturers. I need to hear from someone who really knows the I/O and Cardbus architecture of phones. My point is there should be a way to get all cards working with any phone, might not be to specs of the card but between tweaking formatting and other hacks they all should work.

thuddome said:
That's interesting because I have had the same experience. I have been playing around with multiple size cards and brands. I have yet to get one work right. I have also discovered how you format them makes a difference; for example I have a Patriot class 4 16GB card that using EASEUS to format (low level) it worked but had lag at certain times, for example when going through setup on a fresh install of WP7. It was at a dead crawl with the same config with Android. I then formatted it with Minitool and it was unusable (dead dead crawl) with either WP7 and Android. I also tested a Kingston class 4 32GB w/ wp7 and it was about the same as the Patriot w/ EASEUS formatting. No card I have found outperforms (in the phone) the Sandisk Class 2 16GB card that came with the phone. My suspicion is that the cards that came with the phones have had something done to the sectors by the phone manufacturers. I need to hear from someone who really knows the I/O and Cardbus architecture of phones. My point is there should be a way to get all cards working with any phone, might not be to specs of the card but between tweaking formatting and other hacks they all should work.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My phone came with a Sandisk 2GB card and WP7 has offered me a SD Card Failed message regardless of what technique I have used to Format it...

thuddome said:
That's interesting because I have had the same experience. I have been playing around with multiple size cards and brands. I have yet to get one work right. I have also discovered how you format them makes a difference; for example I have a Patriot class 4 16GB card that using EASEUS to format (low level) it worked but had lag at certain times, for example when going through setup on a fresh install of WP7. It was at a dead crawl with the same config with Android. I then formatted it with Minitool and it was unusable (dead dead crawl) with either WP7 and Android. I also tested a Kingston class 4 32GB w/ wp7 and it was about the same as the Patriot w/ EASEUS formatting. No card I have found outperforms (in the phone) the Sandisk Class 2 16GB card that came with the phone. My suspicion is that the cards that came with the phones have had something done to the sectors by the phone manufacturers. I need to hear from someone who really knows the I/O and Cardbus architecture of phones. My point is there should be a way to get all cards working with any phone, might not be to specs of the card but between tweaking formatting and other hacks they all should work.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Lower class sd-cards have way better random reads/write speeds. This means they are better for storing file-caches, system files, and other rather small/scatered files. A higher class card will have awesome read/write speeds, but they do sacrifice the random speeds (they will preemptively load huge chunks of the file they are writing/reading to/from. So, they will have an overhead when accessing a file, that will be attenuated only if the operations made with that file are long. If u wanna write/read a large chunk of small non-sequential file/s, a class 2 is awesome. Which means that these cards are adequate form OS being run from them. Of course, when syncing with zune, you WILL notice a very decreased speed (since the files are being passed sequencially), but the system per se will operate silky smooth.
Hope this helped. Kudos mate

ei05035 said:
Lower class sd-cards have way better random reads/write speeds. This means they are better for storing file-caches, system files, and other rather small/scatered files. A higher class card will have awesome read/write speeds, but they do sacrifice the random speeds (they will preemptively load huge chunks of the file they are writing/reading to/from. So, they will have an overhead when accessing a file, that will be attenuated only if the operations made with that file are long. If u wanna write/read a large chunk of small non-sequential file/s, a class 2 is awesome. Which means that these cards are adequate form OS being run from them. Of course, when syncing with zune, you WILL notice a very decreased speed (since the files are being passed sequencially), but the system per se will operate silky smooth.
Hope this helped. Kudos mate
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
just about to write all of that myself but you beet me too it!
to add to that, no two cards are alike, make and model makes no difference hence my issue with the "working SD card" thread on here, there is no way to know other than trying it
My wee issue is possibly related to some dodgy parts within the card, it reports perfect but if internal components are not consistant it may explain my rather odd situation

dazza9075 said:
just about to write all of that myself but you beet me too it!
to add to that, no two cards are alike, make and model makes no difference hence my issue with the "working SD card" thread on here, there is no way to know other than trying it
My wee issue is possibly related to some dodgy parts within the card, it reports perfect but if internal components are not consistant it may explain my rather odd situation
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In your situation i'd risk say it might have occured some corruption when transfering those musics. At least, considering that all is well now. It is unlikely that a sector of your card is/was permanently damaged, as repeting the operation worked, aye? Also, since I don't know what the file system is used by WP7, I do not know what maintenance the file system requires (such as defragmentation and whatnot)

perhaps, but it is repeatable, if i remove 400MB of music from my device its fine, if then copy 200 on to the card it reboots randomly, if i then copy the additional 200 back to the card it works fine
Potentially your correct, it may be some sign of wear on the card, but either way the music plays fine, which possibly suggests the random access speeds issue again, if it is sub-par sectors on the card that may explain it

32GB SD card issue - validated card as 32gb

I purchased a 32GB micro SD card for my HD2 after my 16GB card died last week. A sad day indeed, but an ideal time to upgrade
I've read a lot of threads on the forum about some people having issues with 32GB cards, and fake cards. This has prompted me to run H2testw, and also try formatting using SDformatterv3.
HD2testw - Verified as OK.
SDformatterv3 - Completes OK.
Now, when I add the newly formatted card to my phone, it mounts, and works fine. No problems at all. I then start to fill up the card with music. I firstly copied about 5GB to the card, and again I had no problems. The card works fine in the phone. I then copied another 10GB to the card. However now I have a problem. With the SD card in the phone, the phone hangs. When the phone is in standby, I press the power button and I get a black screen. If I remove the SD card then it starts to work correctly again.
So, my first thought was, duff card. So, running the programs above verified that the card is OK.
So, I am now wondering if the phone actually supports 32GB correctly (IE, when more than 16GB of data is on the card). I also thought that perhaps the ROM I am using is the problem.
I am running [CWR] BOYPPC-SHIFTPDA_GINGER 2.3.4-Sense.s V25 (24.May) ROM. I see that V35 is the most up to date rom, so perhaps I will need to reflash my phone. I will be testing this later today.
Has anybody else found themselves in a similar scenario, and did you find a solution?
Cheers,

I figured it out. Turns out to be a combination of things.
1) MIUI player locking up when trying to scan newly added music
2) Locking up because of some corrupt files
Tracking down the bad files resovled the problem

Noodleman said:
I figured it out. Turns out to be a combination of things.
1) MIUI player locking up when trying to scan newly added music
2) Locking up because of some corrupt files
Tracking down the bad files resovled the problem
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
good to see you solved it, cuz i have a 32 gb class 6 and no problem.
some to notice its that to some ppl a 32 gb class 10 works with some bugs, a class 4 or 6 seems to works better.
PS: if you are a flashaholic like me, you should have partition your sd card with CWM partition option, so you could use some of the beneffits of sd/ext that some ROMs use

So 32 Gb works well with Htc Hd2. But, it depends which company and speed.

msmkt said:
So 32 Gb works well with Htc Hd2. But, it depends which company and speed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yuupp, pretty much it is
Sent from my Nexus One using xda premium

I got a sandisk class 4 32gb card and seems to work well with android and windows phone 7 its part number is SDSDQM-032G-B35

32GB on HD2 issues
msmkt said:
So 32 Gb works well with Htc Hd2. But, it depends which company and speed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's the thing: I bought brand new 32 GB SanDisk and am using MIUI JB. Constantly upgrading with their daily build to new versions to no avail.
Problem: I filled card with my files to listen. Initially it works alright, after some time however I find some folders are gone, some files are gone, things just dissapear from the card.
Now I wonder is it a card, is it a MIUI JB or is it HD2 that got broken after my intensive use. Some electronics burnt down or something.
Does anybody had this issues : combination of HD2 with MIUI JB on 32GB card (NAND or SD - both). Keeps losing files in very consistent manner.
I also checked the card with different software and formatted it many times and re partitioned.
As an experiment I am trying now old 8GB card to make sure if its card or not.

[Q] SD card slow after fat32 format

Hey all,
So I'm pretty new to android but have been lurking here for awhile and you guys have got me off to a pretty solid footing. Currently running a S4 (ATT) on Goldeneye Rom with some other little tweaks here and there. Phone runs great, smooth, fast, etc, no problems at all.
I had picked up a Sandisk Ultra 64gb class 10 sd card only to find out it likes to use exFat as its format. After working with CWM and even basic things like music files I saw exFat to not be the most compatible and everyone raves how much easier Fat32 is.
So I made the jump and formated the SD via fat32 Gui tool on windows. It failed a couple of times for reasons unknown to me but finally i got a card with 59.4 gb of space in Fat32, good enough for me, although loosing 4gb is kind of strange.
Everything, like CWM for example, reads perfectly but write speeds are incredibly slow. Using the A1 SD Bench app it reports a 9.32mb/s write speed. Impossible, a 37mb file I copied over took almost 3-4min to complete.
Any point in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Might just have to go back to exfat
Thanks.
Edit: Slightly after this post I ran the benchmark again, write speed at 2.93, thats more believable.