Can an SDHC card compete with an SSD or hard drive?
What a great question and even better set of testing. Folks that have been following flash storage speeds, capacities and implementations likely already know the answer to this one, but mainstream consumers or those new to mobile tech will really appreciate Jerry Jackson's efforts. He's a got an excellent set of tests to compare SDHC cards, traditional hard drives and Solid State Disks. After all, flash memory is flash memory, right? Not so since there are different speed classes and interface capabilities.
The long and short of it: with a fast card reader in your mobile device, an SDHC card offers good value, i.e.: expanded storage capacity that can be accessed quickly, but not written to or read from nearly as fast as a much more expensive SSD drive. Well worth the read for a better understanding of this technology especially since SSD drives are still not cost-effective for widespread adoption. This could really come into play if more manufacturers go with the low-cost, low storage capacity model like the 2-, 4- and 8 GB Asus Eee PCs. Having an SDHC card reader there can go a long way to complement storage in the cloud of the web.
Biggest difference between SDHC and SSD drives- the SSD drives can be booted and you can run the OS from them.
Posted by: James Kendrick | February 18, 2008 at 01:35 PM
Hmmmm, over on the eeePC forum, there are a lot of folk who seem to be booting their OS (windows or ubuntu) from their class 6 SDHC's.
Evidently there is a BIOS option to allow boot from the SDHC
..wiley
NW Houston
Posted by: wileyj | February 18, 2008 at 02:04 PM
Yup, bootable SD has been around for several years. The Toshiba M205 I bought in 2004 had it and if I recall, I was running a flavor of Linux from it directly.
Posted by: Kevin C. Tofel | February 18, 2008 at 02:08 PM
I run my Eee with an 8Gb class 6 SDHC card and run all my apps quite happily off it, Office 2007, Photoshop SE, PDF Editor and others. Certainly it all runs fast enough.
Posted by: Gavin Miller | February 18, 2008 at 02:10 PM
Are you using the built in reader or the USB one that comes with the faster SDHC cards?
I just destroyed the HDD in my TX1000 and I think I might be testing this shortly with Ubuntu.
Posted by: vm-01 | February 18, 2008 at 02:21 PM
I should add that because the TX1000 has a CDrom I have successfully used a live CD and can see the SD card for storage.
I did have to use the GOS Rocket beta in order to recognize the NVIDIA card but the very latest Ubuntu should work. Unfortunately it doesn't recognize the Wifi card.
Posted by: vm-01 | February 18, 2008 at 02:38 PM