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  • DanNeely - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    And in completely unrelated news, the Crap Flash Swindlers Association has announced that once again it's figured out a way to game the new benchmarks so that they can put the same performance labels on their cut-rate binning rejects - that the SD Card Association expected would only be possible on top tier cards - without actually improving their crappy cards usability in real world situations.

    (Cynical? Why yes I am.)
  • iranterres - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    The problem is... There's always a trade-off between performance and reliability.
  • III-V - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    No there's not. Not in every case. Take a look at SLC vs. MLC vs. TLC vs QLC -- the faster types are more reliable/durable, they're just more expensive.
  • hojnikb - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    more durable flash isnt necessarily more reliable
  • Bullwinkle J Moose - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    Sequential speeds and IOPS do not tell me how fast an SSD or SD card actually is

    Why does a Samsung 850 Pro copy and paste data to and from the same SSD twice as fast as a Samsung 840 Pro when the performance numbers provided do not indicate a doubling of internal throughput, instead providing numbers that indicate "external" throughput (To or from the drive but not both simultaneously)

    and how does labeling an SD card make PNY suddenly start labeling accurately?

    Grab any 2 SSD's with different internals but similar specs and prove me wrong!

    Start testing what matters
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link

    IO Meter's mixed read/write tests should be similar to that use case. Depending on your average file size the 4k or 128k results could be closer. Comparing the 850 pro/evo because the 840's were benched under a different set of tools:

    http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1429?vs=146...

    I have no idea what you're going on about with the PNY label remark.
  • Bullwinkle J Moose - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link

    WOW
    That was a waste of time

    Forget overly complex setups with iometer and go for a simple repeatable method that give ACCURATE results, like copying and pasting a non compressible file

    Try 10GB and one of 100GB and see if the numbers match your iobullshit

    "Remember to reboot between tests to get an accurate and repeatable number without caching issues"

    Keep it Simple St......um Danny

    As for PNY....

    I bought a newegg sale PNY USB3 thumb drive that barely reached 1/2 of claimed write speed although I admit it might have been a newegg advertising problem and not the fault of PNY

    But, when I bought a PNY SD card that was rated at twice the write speed that I was seeing in actual use using test gear that far exceeded PNY specs when testing much better cards, I knew there was a problem with their labeling

    Product labeling should list the max transfer rate of the worst unit sold under actual end user conditions (Not the Best unit they can find under very specific ideal conditions)
  • Samus - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link

    I don't know, I can't help but laugh at 500 IOPS write performance. An average USB 3.0 flash drive can do 2000 IOPS and that's ignoring the performance models.

    Are these limitations of the SD controller or are these cards just not capable of parallel writing across flash/NAND die?
  • saratoga4 - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    Swindlers aren't even going to bother gaming the benchmarks. They're just going to counterfeit fake devices from low grade NAND, same as they do now.
  • yannigr2 - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    About 2-3 years late.
    Anyway, better late than never.
  • Alexvrb - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    Except they're still essentially behind even with the new spec/labeling. They need A2 and maybe A3. They need UHS speed classes to cover UHS-II. Look at the new sandisk extreme pro UHS-II cards. Also, not SD but on a related topic, what happened with Samsung's UFS cards? Is UFS going to see any traction? If they're smart they'll include it in the S8.
  • ZeDestructor - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    I want UFS/microSD/SD slots in ALL future phones, tablets and laptops.

    Reality is that the SDcard protocol is shit for random IO, despite the NAND being capable of much higher, so UFS can't land fast enough. I'll take updated PCIe x4-capable XQD cards for cameras and laptops as well.
  • Samus - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link

    SD sucks for phones. The interface is super power hungry. Even in DSLR's the storage bus accounts for the MAJORITY of power consumption when shooting RAW. Every phone I've ever put an SD card in had piss poor battery life, not to mention the performance of an SD card is crap compared to the internal phone storage.

    SD slots are a convenience in phones, for shuffling data around or reading a memory card. People who actually use it as full-time storage are just time raping themselves and should have bought a phone with more internal memory.

    What would you rather have, a 32GB SSD + 128GB SD or just a 128GB SSD?
  • UtilityMax - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link

    32GB SSD + 128GB SD is just fine for me. After all, I just put my media on the sd. I use it mostly for audio and video, which means mostly sequential read operations, and even that is not very frequent.
  • Moizy - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    What is the Google SD card benchmark the author is referring to? I did a search for it and couldn't find anything.
  • ikjadoon - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    Yeah, what? I know of Google's deep RAM stress test that some overclockers use, but not of a SD card test.
  • mkaibear - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    Gosh it makes much less sense when you read it as "to classify performance of Memory Cards via Lego"
  • iranterres - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    LOLOLOLO I've just realized the opposite.
  • 0iron - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    How about new UFS card, no update news? Is it compatible with SD?
  • ZeDestructor - Monday, November 28, 2016 - link

    the cards are not, but the UFS readers can be made to support both microSD and UFS.

    /me looks at samsung to ship em out already!
  • Guspaz - Tuesday, November 29, 2016 - link

    So now there are at least six different competing performance ratings for SD cards. WTF!

    You've got the x rating (like 400x), the speed class rating, the UHS speed class rating (which is different from the UHS bus type rating), the video speed class rating, the app performance class rating, and oh yeah, many manufacturers also put the read speed rating on the cards, since NONE of the previous ratings that I mentioned say anything about read speeds.

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