How to Benchmark Read/Write Speeds On My SD Card vs. My Hard Drive?
December 27, 2008 8:18 PM   Subscribe

Is there a free and/or clever way to find out if the SD card plugged into my laptop is faster or slower than the laptop hard drive regarding read/write operations? I am running Windows Vista Home Premium. I'm wondering, for example, if the SD card would be a better scratch disk for Photoshop, and other apps that require non-RAM swap/scratch space. (I'm not intending to use ReadyBoost.)
posted by sidereal to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
The SD card should have a class rating on it. Due to the slow write speeds of SD cards, using it as a scratch disk would probably impair performance.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 8:48 PM on December 27, 2008


Best answer: Your SD card is slower than your harddrive, almost assuredly.

But, if you wanted to know for sure, here's a program that does a speed test based on writing a file. I've never tried it (I'm on linux, and would use something like "time dd bs=2048 count=1000 if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/my_sd_card").
posted by Netzapper at 8:59 PM on December 27, 2008


Response by poster: Thanks Netzapper - DISKSPED.EXE indicates that the HD is almost an order of magnitude faster than the SD card. I appreciate the response. It's good to have some real numbers.
posted by sidereal at 9:22 PM on December 27, 2008


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