Kingmax 60X SD card = fast swapfile Options

[cmisip]

I would like to report my experience with the use of the kingmax 60X SD card which I recently aquired. I created a swapfile on it that is 32 meg in size. Fired up freeswan, shorewall, wireless card and then opera. I went to edealinfo.com and all the images on the site loaded. I was able to scroll up and down the entire page at a fast clip ( some very minor pauses) but opera stayed full on crash free. While not a true benchmark I think this is a pretty good real world test of the speed of the SD card. It is a lot more stable than swapfile on nfs ram. I had not considered SD card speed as a factor in buying my first Sandisk 256 MB card. I would like to advise everyone with a zaurus 5600 that speed of the SD card should be a primary concern as you are going to need a swapfile. One of the reviewers on the newegg site stated that this card is almost as fast as ROM. Don't know if this is true but it sure feels like it is. And I am in no way affiliated with newegg or kingmax.

[bob-london]

Me too,
just got a Kingmax 1 gig SD card to replace my Kingston 256mb SD card and everything seems to be a lot more zippy. Hard to prove conclusively, but definitely seems faster.
A related question, is their anyway I can create a 64mb swap file as Cacko only gives me a maximum option of 32 mb
I also have not links with Kingmax.

Bob

[omega]

bob-london - search for swap file... you can use the dd command to create as large a swap file as you like and then you mount it.

[bob-london]

Thanks,
In answer to my own Q this thread currently running elsewhere on this forum explains exactly what I wanted to do.
http://www.oesf.org/forums/inde...?showtopic=8666
Having tried the Kingmax 1gb for a bit with a 64mb swapfile, I reckon I can definitely confirm significant improvements.
This is maybe because I've got a C700, but now I can set ompi, kopi & kapi to fast load, open them all up and then open up opera and everything remains snappy.
Definitely couldn't do this before.
Recomend this as an upgrade at least to those owners of C700s out there.
How much faster than regular SD cards are the Kingmax ones ?

[Omicron]

How much faster than regular SD cards are the Kingmax ones ?

Well, although the packaging says 60x, I don't really know what "x" is supposed to be.

But the transfer rate of regular SD cards is generally quoted as 2MB/sec and the highspeed SD cards gernally state 10MB/sec.

I cannot remember if this (2 & 10) is megabytes or megabits per second, not do I recall if this is write or read speed (my guess is read speed).

Anyway, this leads me to believe that they average to be 5 times faster. (you can see where I don't get where "60x" comes from)

I wonder what the top-end spped of the Z is for data transfer to these cards? (Meaning at what point does it not matter the speed fo the card as the Z becomes the bottleneck?)

[matrix]

x is the transfer rate of a single speed cd-rom drive: 150kbps

With flash memory cards, if there is only one advertised rating it usually refers to write speeds

so a 60x rated sd card should be able to sustain 9mbps writes.

all in bits

[matrix]

all in bytes that should be, and sleeping i should be

[obscurite]

In a previous topic I was wondering about SD speed, and kopsis did a great mini benchmark analysis, and mentioned some useful stats on SD/MMC throughput:

http://www.oesf.org/forums/inde...l=2gb%20sd&st=0

<paraphrashing>It seems with the Zaurus line, even though the cards are rated really high, you don't see performance anywhere near theoretical max, and the performance is highly CPU-bound for SD... </paraphrasing>

Should be enough for video, I decided, but CF seems to be in a higher league.

-Daniel

[kopsis]

In a previous topic I was wondering about SD speed, and kopsis did a great mini benchmark analysis, and mentioned some useful stats on SD/MMC throughput:

If anyone is interested in running the bonnie++ benchmark that I used against one of these shiny new SD cards, you can grab the binary attached to this post or download it from http://kopsisengineering.com/bonnie.gz. I did't bother with an ipk since it's only one file. Just copy bonnie.gz to your Zaurus and from a shell do

CODE

gunzip bonnie.gz

Make sure that your Zaurus is connected to AC power and that you don't have it set to suspend or turn on screen savers for at least 20 minutes. To kick off the benchmark on an SD card, go to a shell and run the command:

CODE

./bonnie -d /mnt/card -f -b -n 0

Then go take a nice long coffee break

Compare to my results and post your findings. I'm very curious to find out if results from some newer SD cards validate my conclusions.

Attached File(s)

 bonnie.gz ( 29.63K ) Number of downloads: 52

 

[matrix]

i'm running it now against a kingmax 60x 1gb card on a 760 w/cacko 1.21b

[matrix]

It's been running for over 40 minutes now. One thing I've noticed is a large number of error messages spewed out from the sd driver:

sd_wait_for_ready: wait card busy time out. status=0700
sd_wait_for_ready error! in sd_write_multiple_block() - 5
pxa_sd_startclock: clock start time out... continue!

I may not get to post my benchmarks run until later.

the sd driver errors seem a bit odd, looking into the system, I see about 55% cpu utilization on kjournald and another 30% on bonnie++

Which file system did you test against?

[kahm]

I picked up a Kingmax Platinum 1gb SD card with my 860, and I was suprised at how fast it "felt". I will be very interested in seeing those bonnie results on it.

It is a bit of a strange card - Purple in color and as thin as an MMC card - definitely much thinner than my Lexar SD cards.

[obscurite]

My first Kingmax 60x 1GB SD card had all kinds of problems (probably caused by something silly I did inadvertently), so I returned it. I just ordered a second one, and should have it in my grubby hands tomorrow for benchmark fun.

-Daniel

[kopsis]

Which file system did you test against?

My posted data was gathered on a C760 running Cacko 1.21a. The SD card tested was a basic 512MB Lexar formatted ext2. On the same machine I've tested a variety of CF cards with FAT16 and FAT32 formats. I was also able to run this version of Bonnie on a SL-5500 with Sharp 3.x ROM and a 512MB SanDisk CF formatted FAT16.

Do make sure that when you test you use the "-n 0" switch. I had to edit my original post to add that. Without that switch Bonnie does some file creation tests that generate thousands of files. Those tests take forever, aren't terribly useful, and occasionally cause problems on the Zaurus.

[matrix]

here's some results:

c760 / cacko 1.21b / kingmax 60x 1gb sd / ext3

$ ./bonnie -d /mnt/card/tmp/ -f -b -n 0
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Version  1.03      ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
zaurus        300M            1447  21  578  3            856  22  29.3  92
zaurus,300M,,,1447,21,578,3,,,856,22,29.3,92,,,,,,,,,,,,,

c760 / cacko 1.21b / kingmax 60x 1gb sd / ext2

$ ./bonnie -d /mnt/card/tmp/ -f -b -n 0
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Version  1.03      ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
zaurus        300M            1530  41  565  31            833  18  26.9  96
zaurus,300M,,,1530,41,565,31,,,833,18,26.9,96,,,,,,,,,,,,,

c760 / cacko 1.21b / kingmax 60x 1gb sd / ext3 again without "-n 0"

$ ./bonnie -d /mnt/card/tmp/ -f -b
Writing intelligently...done
Rewriting...done
Reading intelligently...done
start 'em...done...done...done...
Create files in sequential order...done.
Stat files in sequential order...done.
Delete files in sequential order...done.
Create files in random order...done.
Stat files in random order...done.
Delete files in random order...done.
Version  1.03      ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
zaurus        300M            1324  10  553  3            796  19  26.4  86
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                16    29  24  7786  76    48  2    31  25  666  96    26  6
zaurus,300M,,,1324,10,553,3,,,796,19,26.4,86,16,29,24,7786,76,48,2,31,25,666,96,
6,6