Thinkpads Forum

I wasn't getting any answers on notebookreview so I thought I would try here...

I purchased a Sandisk Extreme III 4GB SDHC card with plans to use the entire thing for readyboost. I have a T61 with internal memory card slot. I have read on the forum that this reader is SDHC compliant.

Vista accepted the card. I noticed that the read and write speeds are 7386 kb/sec & 6692 kb/sec, respectively. These scores seem slower than what the card should be capable.

I then noticed that the card is formatted as FAT32. This card should be capable of NTFS. Should I reformat to NTFS? Will that improve the speed?

Also, I was going to reformat until I got the message "this card is in use by another application" Obviously it is in use by readyboost. Can I proceed anyway or how do I temporarily disable readyboost in order to format.

I believe ReadyBoost only works with FAT32, not NTFS. From a performance standpoint, this makes sense because FAT32 is faster than NTFS.
If you still want to format it to NTFS to test it, right click on the device, choose properties then uncheck the box "Use this device for ReadyBoost."

I guess I thought that when you had over 2GB of flash memory is was suppose to be NTFS. I must be confusing this with something else

EDIT: I suppose I was confusing SDHC with NTFS. SDHC is just a specification that allows SD capacities of 4GB and above. http://www.sandisk.com/sdhc/SDHC.pdf

So now I'm confused about the speed of the card. The packaging and the website says it has read/write speeds of 20MB/s. Yet it also says that it has a class 6 (6MB/s) speed rating which is the fastest speed rating (I think).

The 6mb/s correlates more closely to the score/numbers that Vista readyboost gave it.

SDHC class 6 simply means that you'll get a minimum of 6 MB/s transfer rate.   it has nothing to do with maximum transfer speed.

it'll be interesting to see how fast my delkin UDMA 32 cardbus adapter reads my sandisk extreme IV CF cards.   i'm expecting at least 30 MB/s since the cards and adapter are rated to 40 MB/s.

Be careful using readyboost on cards bigger than 2GB... Microsoft has some issues with SD cards bigger than 2GB right now. It does some funky stuff and may overwrite sections of the memory. They may have released an update to fix it, but I'm not sure.

I haven't heard that before. Can't you provide a link that supports this information? Thanks.

erik wrote:it'll be interesting to see how fast my delkin UDMA 32 cardbus adapter reads my sandisk extreme IV CF cards. i'm expecting at least 30 MB/s since the cards and adapter are rated to 40 MB/s.

Did you manage to test that?
I have them both and they seem incompatible in two laptops that I've tried...
Windows just locks up...

xtypestereotype wrote:

erik wrote:it'll be interesting to see how fast my delkin UDMA 32 cardbus adapter reads my sandisk extreme IV CF cards. i'm expecting at least 30 MB/s since the cards and adapter are rated to 40 MB/s.

Did you manage to test that?
I have them both and they seem incompatible in two laptops that I've tried...
Windows just locks up...

same here.   i ended up sending the adapter to delkin for repair.   i tested the adapter in my T42p under server 2003 and XPP and a friend's T60p under XPP -- all three OS instanced locked up with the adapter using sandisk extreme III and IV CF cards.   the adapter was sent to delkin before my T61p showed up so i didn't get to test under vista.   i'll probably call delkin on tuesday for an update as i haven't heard from them yet on what's going on with the adapter.   knowing that yours is bad is somewhat reassuring since it tells me that i didn't screw up somewhere -- it's definitely the adapter.

the only issue i now foresee is that the adapter might not work under vista ultimate 64.   if that's the case than a delkin expresscard/54 CF adapter might be the next best thing (assuming it works natively under vista x64).

i'll keep you posted.

Funny I was beginning to think I had a fake Sandisk Extreme IV...
But I haven't ruled that out yet...
I also have Sandisk's original 16-bit CF-to-PCMCIA card and the transfer rate I get usually sits around 700~1800 KByte/s when the card should be doing 20,000~40,000!
I dont think the 16-bit bottleneck is the problem here - PCMCIA specs state 4~20MBytes/s are achievable on 16-bit.
So I thought the card could be a fake, hence it not working with the Delkin adapter as well...

Anyway, I still need to look into this a bit further before I can draw any conclusions...

Let us know how you go...

where do u enable this feature ? and how can i tell if my memory is fast enough ?

update : ok i found it ...it's too slow

danny_isr wrote:where do u enable this feature ? and how can i tell if my memory is fast enough ?
update : ok i found it ...it's too slow

What type of adapter and memory did you use, and what sort of speed did you get?

just a simple 2G PNY USB , it just said it's not good enough. i didn't see any numbers there.

xtypestereotype wrote:Let us know how you go...

delkin just called me and said that my cardbus 32 UDMA adapter is indeed defective.   they are currently out of stock but should be shipping a replacement to me by thursday or friday.   you should definitely call them for an RMA number and send yours in for replacement.

on a side note, i asked if their expresscard/54 adapter is as fast and it's only rated for UDMA 4 where the cardbus 32 adapter is UDMA 6.   so, their cardbus adapter is currently the fastest thing going right now for CF cards.

ow really?
[censored], i'm in australia and I bough it off ebay in the us...
hope i don't have any problems because of this...
my wireless router is also going in for an RMA
it seems like everything is falling apart around me
oh well...

xtypestereotype wrote: it seems like everything is falling apart around me
oh well...

Hey your internet connection still works ...

Interesting Thread

xtypestereotype wrote:[censored], i'm in australia and I bough it off ebay in the us...

[censored]... i just noticed your location.   all i can recommend is emailing delkin support and seeing what they have to say.   international shipping might not be too bad for something that small.   time would be the bigger issue but it's not like the adapter works right now anyway.

The shop I bought off ebay is willing to replace it for me...
But I am wondering if he didn't get a bad batch of several cards, in which case I would be getting another bad card again?
But he also said I can contact Delkin, which I haven't had the time to yet...

erik wrote:

xtypestereotype wrote:

No issue with reading my SanDisk Extreme III 2GB SD card under Vista 64 (Ultimate), planning on trying faster 4GB Ducati SanDisk when it comes out.

tinkererguy wrote:No issue with reading my SanDisk Extreme III 2GB SD card under Vista 64 (Ultimate), planning on trying faster 4GB Ducati SanDisk when it comes out.

are you referring to the expresscard/54 adapter or cardbus 32 UDMA adapter?   what did you use for a driver?

erik wrote:

tinkererguy wrote:

Sorry, I was just talking about the built-in Ricoh SD card reader on the T61p.

ahh, crap... i didn't see that you said "SD".   my SD reader works under vista x64, too.   thanks but that doesn't help.

xtypestereotype wrote:The shop I bought off ebay is willing to replace it for me...
But I am wondering if he didn't get a bad batch of several cards, in which case I would be getting another bad card again?
But he also said I can contact Delkin, which I haven't had the time to yet...

here's my latest update... my failed UDMA adapter is officially the first one delkin received.   they're is out of stock of the cardbus 32 UDMA adapters but offered to send me an expresscard/54 CF adapter in exchange or do what they can to source me another cardbus adapter.

so far i'm VERY impressed with their customer service.   now i just have to decide what to do.   the expresscard adapter is slower but there's a better chance of getting it to work under vista x64 so i'll probably go that route.

For people having problems with complete lock ups of the OS during the install of drivers for the Delkin UDMA cardbus 32 CF adapter, the following worked for me.

I had just received one of these adapters sent to me in Australia from a major NY photo retailer and on both my T60p and X60s running XP sp2 the system froze rock solid immediately after the drivers had been loaded but before the CF card became visible as a drive.

I had downloaded the latest drivers from the Delkin driver page ver 0.99.14. The install .exe. creates a temp directory containing the utatar inf, mpd and sys files. However, critically, there is a reg file; utata32.reg. The normal driver install routine doesn't install that reg file. I imported the reg file contents into the registry and hey presto, working Delkin UDMA 32 cardbus on both systems. Also repeated the install on my a31p with identical OS and exactly the same problems; all fixed by importing that reg file.

No mention of this at all in the driver "readme".

So, hope this helps some others with apparent system freezes with this card.

@ toulalda: great find!   what OSes did you get the card to work with?   anything 64-bit by chance?

btw, i got my delkin expresscard/54 UDMA CF adapter on tuesday and it works natively under XPP, server 2003, and vista x64.   i'm [censored] happy.   vista isn't looking so bad after all.

Only running XP sp2 on my machines. No 64 bit (yet). Glad to hear that your Expresscard variant worked OK. May well be just a cardbus 32 adapter issue.

Must say the fast ransfers are really nice!