Thinkpads Forum

I bought a 95meg per second 32gig SD card to use as extended memory for my w510. After leaving the store, the thought occurred to me that allocating 32 gigs from the SSD would probably be a lot faster than using the SD card for that purpose. So, is using the SD card going to speed things up?

No not even close. The main factor is the interface. When compared to RAM, any external add-on is not even close to RAM speed. When compared to a SSD, I highly doubt the interface and OS overhead is fast enough. What machine and OS are you using?

It's also much more expensive to use the SSD, in terms of the increased read/rights and rated life expectancy of the drive.

I'm using win7pro. So, you're saying the 32gig SD won't really speed up anything? The HD is a Samsung 500g, which only has about 80g left on it anyway after I loaded everything via the cloning.

No

D L Davis wrote:I bought a 95meg per second 32gig SD card to use as extended memory for my w510. After leaving the store, the thought occurred to me that allocating 32 gigs from the SSD would probably be a lot faster than using the SD card for that purpose. So, is using the SD card going to speed things up?

You're a day early. April fool's day is tomorrow. Unless you live in Russia.

^ +1
@D L Davis: Reading your title to this thread can be interpreted in two ways. If you intend / thought that using an SD card for extending the amount of main memory, that is, memory that would be used by Windows to run programs from, then no it doesn't work that way. On the other hand, if you are trying increase the amount of disk storage (for files/data), then yes that can be done using SD cards but I'd say at a significant speed penalty if lots of re-writing is done on the SD card.

If your talking readyboost type disk caching then unless your running what today is considered an absurdly low amount of RAM it wont do much as Intel found out with their Robson cards. Adding more RAM speeds up the system by a far bigger factor.

in 2017 there's a few knowns... get more main memory.

8 - 16Gb should do 99% of people for 99% of tasks.

4Gb might even be ok.

I have a few laptops with 120Gb ssds... I have used 64-128Gb SD cards to expand SSD space... I dump downloads and videos and whatever and it feels the same as SSDs... it isnt. I know the speed difference is there but it feels about the same if you're limiting the use as a download dump.

Random I/O is horrible on almost all SD card and write endurance...

Yes...about the day late for April Fool's post...I've always been a day late and a dollar short.

My w510 has 8g ram. I was indeed referring to readyboost.

As to upgrading ram, I'm not sure of the configuration of the chips...so if I were to upgrade, I may or may not be able to use the memory already in the machine. I guess it's fast enough 4me now, anyway. I'll just put the 32g SD card in my DLSR and be happy.

There's a reason Intel abandon readyboost. It's doesn't work.