rajanmehta 4,056 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 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. 23 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
KapilAgrawal 340 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 Never knew this.. SD card & that too Kingston.. Thanks for the helpful info Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Genius 817 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 That's an eye opener ... Sow how do you choose what's good card for you, we can't run test all the time to see what to buy. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nitink 279 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 nice info, ty Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
_Kailash_ 63 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 nice rajanji +1 4 you Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
KumaarShah 143 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 Yes its a fact! I also experienced a lag in performance of my phone sometime back and I removed the SD Card. After removing it, the performance improved. After that I changed the SD Card. Now no problems.... +1 to RM Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
sougatadc 358 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 I thought it logically before. If any application is stored (a major portion of many applications, mostly data are stored) in the card, when the application runs it becomes sluggish if the data transfer is slow. Thanks Rajan ji for the reproduction of the useful information here, and kudos to Vinay ji for pictorial representation of 'eye-opener'. You are so witty! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mihirf2003 7 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 surprise... surprise... never thought sd card would play such a major role in performance.... good info rajanbhai.... +1 for you... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ami1 237 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 Thanks Rajan. So is it correct that we should generally go for Transcend ? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
abhi.r 95 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 I use class 10 transcend 16gb card, and but my phone still becomes slow especially when I install apps in SD card. I always knew that SD cards are bottle neck for mobile phone speed.. This study confirms it today. Infact all kinds of storage is a bottle neck for any device. Be it a phone or a computer. Search samsung 24 or 27 ssd on YouTube where some techie connected 24 or 27 ssd in raid.... And speed of any tasks was super quick. Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
thilak.kmb 19 Report post Posted February 20, 2012 One more thing. It is aways better to keep the memory card size as low as possible. Higher capacity may lead to sluggishness 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
csmart 472 Report post Posted February 20, 2012 so its always better to have memory on board rather than SD card.. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
@v@nit 3 Report post Posted February 20, 2012 Nice info! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mauk 0 Report post Posted February 20, 2012 Nice Info..I've observed that my Nokia 5800 is also sluggish...The memory card is "Nokia" make. Does anyone who manufactures memory cards of Nokia? This is only to make effective use of the above data Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
rajanmehta 4,056 Report post Posted February 20, 2012 @ami1 Probably yes if we are getting the same Transcend here in india as in the US market where they tested it. There are some apps in the Android Market which allows to change the Read Cache properties for rooted phones. Generally in most stock ROM's, the cache size is very less, sometimes few k only. However this will only improve the read performance. What we need better is random write speed as the study suggests. I think we should try to move atleast browsers to phone's inbuilt memory than SD Card if we can. Should give a better performance in browsing. Random thought. Will try it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Honest 836 Report post Posted February 20, 2012 Very useful information Rajan Babu. Thanks for sharing. +1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
garry1313 7 Report post Posted February 21, 2012 Useful info Rajan Bhai, +1 for you Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Bablus 66 Report post Posted August 11, 2012 Exactly why we find Apple phones fast Something that Samsung and HTC should learn? Why dont they provide better onboard memory options with better cache? I am sure it wont increase the price significantly Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
n_iceman 97 Report post Posted August 11, 2012 Thanks for the great information +1 to u Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
shreesh 406 Report post Posted August 12, 2012 Awesome info Rajan Sir (Googler of Rimweb) +1 for you!!!! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
a1cellsolution 84 Report post Posted September 26, 2012 Really EYE Opener Maybe phone manufacturers like HTC have already realized this as new high end sets like rezound, evo lte, Htc one s have 16 Gb on board memory Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
::: VA ::: 531 Report post Posted September 27, 2012 thankfully i have 32gb class 4 Transcend received from ebay as gift Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
shadow 119 Report post Posted September 27, 2012 yes,SD cards are to blamed, but expansion of internal memory as per the user request is impossible, with out the SD slots,and this was used as one of the main selling point for android and we used it to blame apple, now the case is changing as we are getting larger internal memories , Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
