T61 pcmcia sd card reader extremely slow

[alisan]

Hello,

I got this SD SDHC SDXC to PCMCIA PC Card to use with my T61 (middleton bios). However I'm experiencing extremely slow read/write speeds with a class 10 Kingston sdxc 128gb card the read/write is not more than 900Kb/s - 1Mb/s. I have tested both with Linux and with Windows 10.

Any idea why?

[dr_st]

The CardBus controller in the T61/X61 is atrocious, but your numbers seem low even for that. I tested in an X61 once, and would get ~10MB/s for an adapter/card combination that could do ~20MB/s in my T60. But 1MB/s is very strange.

Is there high CPU usage when you transfer to/from the SD card?

What speeds do you get in CrystalDiskMark?

[alisan]

I would be very happy to get 10MB/s, this will allow me to read a 8MB image quickly, but with the current speed that I'm getting, loading an image slideview is a terrible experience.

I notice a high CPU usage, about 30%. On windows the DMA options of the ATA/PCmcia controller is grayed out and I cannot activated, did not test on CrystalDiskMark yet as I'm on Linux now. but with any program I'm using I'm able to achieve a max of 1MB/s which is terrible.

[wujstefan]

I've got such card as a drop-in bonus in a trade some time ago, and it works great. I did not check the speeds in detail, but copying a 10gig folder of small files (music) took ~8mins. It definietely should work better.

[dr_st]

Is this by chance a PCMCIA (not CardBus) controller? That would explain the low speeds and high CPU usage.

Could you find the hardware IDs of the controller? Does it have PCI IDs? If so, what is the vendor ID / device ID? What is the full device chain in Device Manager? (you can see it if you select 'View devices by connection').

Edit:Reading Digigear's page + the information available here so far leads me to believe that this indeed a PCMCIA (not CardBus) device. In that case I don't think there is much you can do. They are really that slow.

The SDCBA-C01 will be much faster.

[alisan]

It appears under PCI-to-PCI Bridge --> Ricoh R/RL/5C476 --> PCMCIA IDE/ATAPI Controller. Here are some screenshots.

http://imgur.com/a/gCgeN

Do the SDCBA-C01 card mentioned supports sdxc?

[alisan]

I've got such card as a drop-in bonus in a trade some time ago, and it works great. I did not check the speeds in detail, but copying a 10gig folder of small files (music) took ~8mins. It definietely should work better.

Can you provide further details? Which os, did you install a specific driver?

[dr_st]

Do the SDCBA-C01 card mentioned supports sdxc?

Yes, depending on drivers. By default, Windows will load a built-in driver by Microsoft for this card. The one for XP does not support SDXC. For Vista/7 it may support it (not sure), and 8.x/10 should support it. You seem to be on Win10, so should be fine. I have no idea which revisions of Linux support it.

[alisan]

You seem to be on Win10, so should be fine. I have no idea which revisions of Linux support it.

I'm mostly on Linux, windows 10 came preloaded on a 100gb hdd that I was using just for test. My setup is a 500gb Linux+1TB for storage. I will buy that device, but first I need to make sure that I can do nothing with the digigear that I have.

[alisan]

Reading the reviews on amazon, it seems typical to have 1MB/s , waste of money for me. The card is mostly used for cars for loading mp3 files, for photo/video it is completely unusable.

[Omineca]

You seem to be on Win10, so should be fine. I have no idea which revisions of Linux support it.

I'm mostly on Linux, windows 10 came preloaded on a 100gb hdd that I was using just for test. My setup is a 500gb Linux+1TB for storage. I will buy that device, but first I need to make sure that I can do nothing with the digigear that I have.

I sometimes get extremely slow speeds using a USB-SD card reader with Debian Linux on my R500. For some strange reason, if I umount the drive after it auto-mounts, and then mount it again (I created a mnt folder in my home directory for a mount point), the speeds pick up dramatically. I don't know why it works, but you might try the umount/mount trick.

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