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Crucial Technology 128MB MMC Card Copyright 2002 Todd Ogasawara
The Crucial Technology CT128MBMM MultiMediaCard provided a couple of pleasant surprises. Curious? Read on.
Device Requirements
What’s Hot
Note
Finally a large MMC card for my Jornada PC Card Sleeve!
The Crucial Technology 128MB MMC card finally provides me with a large enough storage card to use with my HP Jornada PC Card sleeve. The sleeve has both a PC Card slot and an MMC slot. Note that this slot does not work with SD cards. So, the availability of a reasonable sized MMC card is very important to the Jornada PC Card owners. I can now, for example, store a reasonably large PowerPoint presentation on my 128MMC card and use the PC Card or CF VGA card to present it. Or, i can use a WiFi card and still have adequate storage space available.
Figure 1: Crucial 128MB MMC next to a CompactFlash card.
Usable Storage Space
I fully expected my review of the Crucial 128MB MMC card to start and end with the paragraph above. However, that is not how this review turned out.
I bought a SanDisk 128MB Secure Digital (SD) card a few months ago and checked to see the how much free space each card had (assuming that the SD card probably used some space for encryption).
Surprise #1: The Crucial MMC card provides 3.38MB (+2.9%) more usable storage space than the SanDisk 128MB SD card. So, yes, my assumption was correct.
Write Speed
One of the most important features storage cards provide me is a place to create a full system backup that I take with me. I generally create a full backup once a week. I also create a full backup anytime I install new software or make a significant system modification. So, the amount of time taken to backup my Pocket PC is very important to me. Here how I tested backup speed.
I repeated this procedure for each of the cards. The system backup required 10,856.47KB (a bit less than 11MB).
Surprise #2: The Crucial 128MB MMC card was significantly faster than the CF and SD cards. The time required to backup to each of the cards is listed below:
I converted this to bytes-written per second and generated the chart seen in Figure 2 below. The Crucial MMC card is 236.53% faster than then SanDisk 128MB CF card and a whopping 656.73% faster than the SanDisk 128MB SD card for the backup procedure I used.
Figure 2: Write speed observed when backing up a HP iPAQ 3850 to three storage card formats.
Conclusion
My little (and unscientific) study does not pretend to study all or even the most important aspects you should use to select a storage card. However, it demonstrates that we should not take even things we view as commodities for granted. Testing can reveal differences that may be important to you. I, for example, now know that when I need to quickly backup either my HP Jornada 565 (with PC Card sleeve and MMC slot) or HP iPAQ 3850, I am definitely going to reach for my Crucial 128MB MMC card.
Note: My sample size for card type is one (1). So, it may be that I have slower SanDisk or faster Crucial cards than others in use. If you have data that disagrees with mine, please run the same test procedure I ran and let me know what your bytes-written-per-seconds ratio is during a system backup. |
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