Think Your Smartphone is Sluggish, Your Memory Card is The Culprit
Source Source Source
This was a revelation waiting to happen. After spending thousands behind that latest dual core android beasts, do you still think, it lags in performance. Your Memory Card is to be blamed for that...
Reason perhaps Apple Still does not allow Memory Cards in iPhones after all this years!!!
As per a recent study, "Revisiting Storage For Smartphones" at the Georgia Institute of Techbology on File and Storage Technologies..
Download Full Study Paper >> http://static.usenix..._papers/Kim.pdf
With manufacturers focusing on the speed and number of cores a smartphone’s processor features, megapixel numbers, and network technologies like LTE, the performance of an Android handset should largely be based on its hardware, right? Wrong, according to a new study undertaken by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The type and brand of microSD storage installed in the device could just as well be the culprit. Their study that found that flash storage often accounted for a 100 to 300 percent drop in performance. In one instance the numbers dipped by an astonishing 2,000 percent.
The researchers tested top selling 16GB embedded flash memory cards in several Android smartphones and found performance over WiFi varied between 100% to 300% across applications.
In one flash memory test, performance dropped more than 20X.
Ironically, benchmarking tests showed that some lower grade microSD cards performed better than some higher grade cards. As for naming names, Kim writes that Kingston's microSD card performs so badly that its results need to be removed from test data to get realistic averages. Transcend performs the best for random writes by as much as a factor of 100 compared to the competition.
The bottom line is that the brand of microSD card you use in your device does make a difference in how fast it runs. Kim checked the launch time for eight popular apps including Angry Birds, Twitter and YouTube and found that Kingston's microSD cards offered up the slowest times for most of the apps.
And for those who complain about how sluggish their Android model is, a change in the microSD card brand you use could make the difference.
"A good chunk of time for users is spent waiting for websites to load ... [and for] applications to load," said Hyojun Kim, a Ph.D. student in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.
And, while waiting for apps to load is annoying, a more nefarious impact of poor flash performance is that it depletes a smartphone's battery.
Kim said wireless network performance has kept pace with most of today's mobile applications, as have the single and dual core CPUs being used in today's sophisticated smartphones. What hasn't kept pace is the bandwidth of NAND flash, he said.
"Why would anyone want to see a 20-second wait time on their phone, particularly if the network is not the problem," he said.
The research identified the problem with poor flash device performance to be rooted in random I/O from application databases such as heavy random writes.
In flash memory, random write performance is orders of magnitude worse than sequential writes, Kim said.
The smartphone tests involved the use of applications such as WebBench Browser, Facebook, Android Email. Google Maps, App Install, Pulse News Reader, and RLBench SQLite. The flash cards came from Transcend, RiData, SanDisk, Kingston, Wintec, A-Data, Patriot Memory and PNY.
"Apart from the benefits of selecting a good flash card, there are some fundamental ways we're using storage in a bad way," he said, referring to the way many applications are created to write data randomly, which causes flash performance to fall of a cliff.