Read & write speed of sansa clip

SanDisk MP3 players Sansa® Clip | Sansa® Clip+
1

Hi, all, I am getting a sansa clip and intending to use it as a flash drive as well. I looked all over the internet and couldn’t find any information regarding its read & write speed, can any sansa owners help with this?

Does your sansa clip feel fast?

How long does it take to transfer say a 500mb file.

Does it feel fast enough to replace your current thumb drive?
Is it fast enough to run applications such as Ceedo or FeedDemon directly from the drive?

Thank you all very very much.

2

Hey, that’s funny. I’m a new owner of the 4GB Clip (which I love, of course :smileyvery-happy: ) and I was wondering about that as well. I did a bit of testing and found that the write speed is around 3.7 MiB/s. I used 7 files of 45-95 MiB each (total of 486 MiB). Writing those to the Clip took about 2:10 (130 sec). This was in MSC mode.

Later I’m going to test a larger number of smaller files and also measure the read speed. Stay tuned for more.

3

Thank you very much Eliasf, although 3.7Mb/s does sound fairly slow. I was going to wait for the 8GB version and replace my thumb drive and portable HDD all at once, but it is probably not a good idea with the speed like that. i probably will just get a 2 or 4 GB version right now.

4

OK, here are the final results:

  READ:  3.5 MiB/s (fixed)
  WRITE: 3.3 MiB/s (variable)
   
The write speed depends on the number of files. A large number of small files takes longer than few big ones. This is probably the overhead of creating the file entries. The detailed write tests are:

  59 files, 294 MiB (min: 1.5, max:16, avg: 5.0) => 2.8 MiB/s
  91 files, 692 MiB (min: 2.5, max:14, avg: 7.6) => 3.1 MiB/s
   7 files, 486 MiB (min:45,   max:95, avg:69)   => 3.8 MiB/s

All tests were performed in MSC mode using firmware v1.01.30f. I also tried to minimize the harddisk overhead (using cache/memory) so real-life speeds may be a bit lower. Although these speeds are not spectacular, I believe there’re pretty decent for an MP3 player. The Clip sure beats my previous USB1.1 player! :wink:

5

Thank you, Eliasf, very informative.