All the USB fun!

Yesterday I brought several gadgets that are low cost and yet pretty fun to play with. Here's my shopping list:
- A Bluetooth USB dongle. Price: HK$25
- A SD card reader. Price: HK$18
- A Toshiba 2Gb SD Card. Price: HK$190
- A Kingston 2Gb SD Card. Price: HK$180


My first test is to test the speed of the two new SD card I brought and the KingMax SD card that I have. The goal? To figure out which low end card I should buy next time :-D. I tested the file copy speed using the $18 SD Card reader that I brought:

+---- Toshiba 2Gb SD Card
Copy 1.43Gb of mix files (a huge one and a bunch of small files) from PC to SD card
10 minutes 19 seconds

Copy 1.43Gb of mix files (a huge one and a bunch of small files) from SD card to PC
5 minutes 12 seconds


+---- KIngston 2Gb SD Card
Copy 1.43Gb of mix files (a huge one and a bunch of small files) from PC to SD card
9 minutes 32 seconds

Copy 1.43Gb of mix files (a huge one and a bunch of small files) from SD card to PC
5 minutes 45 seconds

+---- KingMax 2Gb SD Card
Copy 1.43Gb of mix files (a huge one and a bunch of small files) from PC to SD card
Trial one: 7 mintes
Trial two: 6 minutes 40 seconds.

Copy 1.43Gb of mix files (a huge one and a bunch of small files) from SD card to PC
Trial one: 6 minutes 29 seconds
Trial two: 5 minutes 33 seconds

Conclusion? So it seems like there's not much differnce between the so called highspeed KingMax. That also means that my next SD card will be a Kingston card.

Reference Price (as of 2 Jan 2007):
Toshiba 2Gb SD Card (Blue color) - HK$190
KIngston 2Gb SD Card (Normal Speed) - HK$180
KingMax 2Gb SD Card (High speed) - HK$26x



Next I tried the $18 SD Card reader, and was shocked to find out that the card reader, with SD card insert, become a flash drive harddisk, and I can use it to boot up machines! This is totally awesome.

However, I found that my home machine (Asus P4 2.8GHz motherboard) behaves differnetly comparing with the DELL Optiplex GX620 in my office and HP laptop WHEN 128Mb SD card (Toshiba brand) was being used.


On Asus P4 2.8Hz Motherboard:
*When using 128Mb Toshiba SD Card
- Treat the cardreader as a removable drive.
- NO BOOTABLE

*When using 1Gb Toshiba SD Card
- Treat the cardreader as USB Media.
- Bootable

*When using 2Gb Toshiba SD Card
- Treat the cardreader as USB Media.
- Bootable


On DELL Optiplex GX620:
*When using 128Mb Toshiba SD Card
- Treat the cardreader as USB media - Bootable

*When using 1Gb Toshiba SD Card
- Treat the cardreader as USB Media.
- Bootable


On Compaq NX9010 laptop:

*When using 128Mb Toshiba SD Card
- Treat the cardreader as harddisk, put in hard in category and show [SD/MMC Card Reader-(USB)]
- Bootable

*When using 1Gb Toshiba SD Card
- Treat the cardreader as harddisk, put in hard in category and show [SD/MMC Card Reader-(USB)]
- Bootable

This is no big deal, as I will only buy cards that are 1Gb or larger in the future anyway.

The drive also has some minor problems:
- Very once in a while it performed in a flicky way. Like, it may failed copying files, but if I tried it again, the copy will work again. I sort of figured out that it's the connection problem.

It seems like that as long as I push it slight everytime before I use I should be OK. After all, I probably won't leave it in the USB enclosure all the time anyway. As HK$18. It's a great backup device anyway.

Next I tried various test of creating a bootable drive out of the SD card. I successfully use the HP tool and a Windows 98 disk to create a bootable SD card. However, I cannot use the same tool to create bootable drive using Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 boot up disc, nor Acronis TrueImage Server for Windows self boot disc. Sigh. Need more time too study about the self boot thing I guess.

I also cannot create a bootup disc using partition magic 8 boot floppy. That's OK, since the tool sucked anyway :-I .