Hey all!
Just got an original N-Gage about a week or so ago, and in my eagerness I immediately went looking for a 1GB MMC. The only list I could find at the time listed the 1GB Integral and TEC cards as compatible, so I bought the Integral one. However, it looks like I might not have made the best choice in tems of performance:
http://forum.ngagegaming.com/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi/ubb/get_topic/f/1/t/003052
Basically, the poster in that thread says that his N-Gage is pausing every now and then, and blames it on the same card I have. I haven't experienced any slowdown yet, but if it's going to cause problems in the future I'd rather get a better card now. I ran Sandra 2005 on it and got pretty much the same results as above, which is apparently pretty crap. I've also run FDBench (http://www.hdbench.net/lzhokiba/fdben101.lzh), and got speeds of around 500K/s for sequential read/write and random read, and around 200K/s for random write. According to the specs for the ATP 1GB card, it seems to reach around four times this speed.
Have any of you run FDBench on your cards? I'm thinking of selling off my current MMC and getting an ATP or Transcend 1GB card instead. Is there an accepted "best" card in terms of performance and reliability? Would I be likely to see a noticeable improvement in performance, given that I'll be using it pretty heavily for MP3s, games and videos?
Thanks!
hiredgoon wrote:Hey all!Just got an original N-Gage about a week or so ago, and in my eagerness I immediately went looking for a 1GB MMC. The only list I could find at the time listed the 1GB Integral and TEC cards as compatible, so I bought the Integral one. However, it looks like I might not have made the best choice in tems of performance:
http://forum.ngagegaming.com/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi/ubb/get_topic/f/1/t/003052
Basically, the poster in that thread says that his N-Gage is pausing every now and then, and blames it on the same card I have. I haven't experienced any slowdown yet, but if it's going to cause problems in the future I'd rather get a better card now. I ran Sandra 2005 on it and got pretty much the same results as above, which is apparently pretty crap. I've also run FDBench (http://www.hdbench.net/lzhokiba/fdben101.lzh), and got speeds of around 500K/s for sequential read/write and random read, and around 200K/s for random write. According to the specs for the ATP 1GB card, it seems to reach around four times this speed.
Have any of you run FDBench on your cards? I'm thinking of selling off my current MMC and getting an ATP or Transcend 1GB card instead. Is there an accepted "best" card in terms of performance and reliability? Would I be likely to see a noticeable improvement in performance, given that I'll be using it pretty heavily for MP3s, games and videos?
Thanks!
I haven't seen an MMC 3.2 spec card that has outperformed ours yet since our MMC all use Samsung SLC, something rare among MMC. Integral is actually a brand of Justrams (www.justrams.com). They are not a card manufacturer, in fact they used to (perhaps still do now in the UK) buy their cards from us at ATP.
-Jeff
hiredgoon wrote:Hey all!Just got an original N-Gage about a week or so ago, and in my eagerness I immediately went looking for a 1GB MMC. The only list I could find at the time listed the 1GB Integral and TEC cards as compatible, so I bought the Integral one. However, it looks like I might not have made the best choice in tems of performance:
http://forum.ngagegaming.com/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi/ubb/get_topic/f/1/t/003052
Basically, the poster in that thread says that his N-Gage is pausing every now and then, and blames it on the same card I have. I haven't experienced any slowdown yet, but if it's going to cause problems in the future I'd rather get a better card now. I ran Sandra 2005 on it and got pretty much the same results as above, which is apparently pretty crap. I've also run FDBench (http://www.hdbench.net/lzhokiba/fdben101.lzh), and got speeds of around 500K/s for sequential read/write and random read, and around 200K/s for random write. According to the specs for the ATP 1GB card, it seems to reach around four times this speed.
Have any of you run FDBench on your cards? I'm thinking of selling off my current MMC and getting an ATP or Transcend 1GB card instead. Is there an accepted "best" card in terms of performance and reliability? Would I be likely to see a noticeable improvement in performance, given that I'll be using it pretty heavily for MP3s, games and videos?
Thanks!
Benchmarking flash memory cards is heavily dependent on the USB controller and the card reader used. Unless you're running the test on the same set of hardware the results are completely meaningless... Plus, even if you have a fast MMC card the N-Gage won't be able to take advantage of the faster card anyway.
Most MMC cards should be able to go up to 1.5 MB/s. Typical USB 1.1 card readers will only do 800K-1MB/s.
I don't know about the original N-Gage, but the QD has a little memory card activity icon that blinks whenever the card is accessed, which can easily tell if any system slowdown is caused by the memory card.
Benchmarking flash memory cards is heavily dependent on the USB controller and the card reader used. Unless you're running the test on the same set of hardware the results are completely meaningless... Plus, even if you have a fast MMC card the N-Gage won't be able to take advantage of the faster card anyway.Most MMC cards should be able to go up to 1.5 MB/s. Typical USB 1.1 card readers will only do 800K-1MB/s.
I don't know about the original N-Gage, but the QD has a little memory card activity icon that blinks whenever the card is accessed, which can easily tell if any system slowdown is caused by the memory card.
No, the original doesn't have an activity icon - that WOULD be quite handy 😊 I realise there's a degree of uncertainty, but AFAIK all of the Sandra tests were run on original N-Gages connected to the computer via the USB port, so the MMC would seem to be the only major variable in those cases. Does anyone know what the maximum read/write speed of the NGage itself is? And is there a way to identify whether the card is MLC or SLC? I've looked through all the specs I can find on the Integral card, and it doesn't say one way or the other.