Great results! And it’s good to know that a Ritek class 6 card will also work on the fuze. Do you use the card with video? There’ve been some posts that Kingston cards are glitchy when used in the sansa for video.
While the test results are very good, a much lower result is gotten when the cards are tested with H2testw when the card is inserted into the player.
Both cards were formatted like before. And I turned on the fuze and let it refresh, then turned it off before running the test.
4gb sandisk mobile ultra class 6
Writing speed: 4.11 MByte/s
Reading speed: 3.99 MByte/s
sandisk card class 2
Writing speed: 2.61 MByte/s
Reading speed: 4.00 MByte/s
As you can see, the read/write speed in actual usage seems to depend on the device that the card is used in. Even the class 6 card didn’t go up to 6mb/s for the writing speed.
As you note, accessing the card while it’s in the Fuze does not work very well! That is one reason I bought a couple of the Rosewill SD-to-USB adapters. I didn’t have an SD slot on my computer otherwise, and everything I read about those “51 card types in one unit” gadgets made them sound like junk. Also they cost more ($20-$40 for a drive bay or USB multi-reader, vs. ~$7 for the Rosewill adapter).
I don’t really do video on my Fuze. The screen is just too small, and in the two places where I use my Fuze the most, I either have no business looking at the screen, or I can’t see it. In the one case, it’s being used in my car to feed the stereo while I drive. In the other, it’s tucked in a hydration backpack I wear while running, so I can’t see the screen anyway.
That said, I do have a few video clips on my Fuze. They play just fine, provided they’re in the very specific format the Fuze demands, of course.
I suspect a class 2 card would also be adequate for video playback. The screen resolution is so low that you’re just not moving that many bits. One could calculate the minimum acceptable card read speed, given the bitrate of the video format the Fuze uses.
I’m not too sure my testing correlates well to real-world use. It’s nice to know the theoretical maximum write & read speeds, but flash memory is a tricky beast. I expect I would see different results writing to a half-full vs. freshly formatted card.
