Anyone else notice a bump in SD card write speeds?

[Zeep]

So I remember when I first started to fill up my Wii system memory I tried copying VC games onto an SD card, only to figure out that it takes quite a long time to write each channel to the card. I also remember after WiiWare launched, trying to save WiiWare games onto an SD card and finding out that it would sometimes take upwards of 10 minutes to copy a game to the card.

However, something today prompted me to try again, so I figured I would start copying a game onto the SD card and then just leave the Wii on and go do something else for a while. However, the copying finished relatively fast. Even though it was a full-size wiiware game, around 300+ blocks, it had copied in just a few minutes.

Now, that's still really slow, obviously. The biggest WiiWare games are allowed to be is 42 megs, and there's no reason it should take 4 minutes to copy a 42 MB file to an SD card. But I went and redownloaded a lot of my VC and WiiWare games so that I could save them all on the SD card, and I did find that copying times were a lot faster than I remember them. I timed a whole bunch of games and found that it was averaging about 0.92 seconds per block. Anyone else have experience trying to copy channels to the SD card? Want to try again and see if it's any better?

[Viper]

I've read this a lot around the net the past month or so. Seen a few articles on fan sites too.

I think one of the updates tweaked the security algorithm (they are usually what eats up the time in media transfers that have proprietary formats) so that the transfer rates appear much faster.

Couple this with the SDHC update next spring and it should move very fast.

[Generosity of God]

i think it may have been the latest update. i'm not 100% sure but mine still seems just as slow. and since i havent done the latest update, i'd assume it could be in that. i'll do the latest update and test it again.

[Mr. Coww]

SDHC? I was under the impression that was a hardware thing and not software. Not that i doubt you but im kinda confused on how that will work.
Ill admit im not overly adept in the workings of flash memory cards.

[Viper]

Not hardware related at all. You can already update the firmware on many SD drives to support SDHC cards and speeds.

The file system is the only real difference between the 2 formats. That's it. FAT16 for SD and FAT32 for SDHC.


SDHC cards also work in standard SD slots with a firmware upgrade.
Straight from the official SD/SDHC web page.

http://www.sdcard.org/developers/tech/sdhc/

[Mr. Coww]

That makes pefect sense, i totaly forgot about FAT16s 2 gig limit.
The site was rather helpfull too, ive been wondering what the 2 in the C was for a while.