Made in Taiwan or made in Japan ?

[Gaffer]

I thought I'd put peoples minds at rest for my next entry here. Reading around various places, i've found that people tend to be over sensitive about where their specific model flash memory cards come from. The general perception is that those made in Japan are faster than the equivalent made in Taiwan.

I thought I'd debunk this with a very simple test (you can do this at home quite quickly).

First, get your spare / used SD cards out. What I did was to perform simple read and write tests onto the cards. I chose to fill a folder with about 13Mb of jpegs. I then plugged in my card reader and wrote the folder (and therefore it's 13Mb's of contents) onto the root of the card. This was timed as the "write time". I then copied the file from the card to my desktop and recorded this as the "read time".

Variables: speed of hard disk and card reader, but as these are the same for all the tests, it doesn't really matter what they are (ie, all else is equal - meaning that differences in results are due to the cards themselves).

After getting the times, I simply divided 13Mb by the number of seconds to get the transfer speeds.
Here are the results (all images are representative only):



First Up: Standard Generic SD card, made in Japan


I got this card bundled with my Palm Treo pda-phone. It's currently used as a spare card for my camera

Read = 1.3 Mb/s
Write = 0.52 Mb/s



Next: Standard Kingston SD card, made in Taiwan


I got this card from Amazon UK. It's currently used in my Wii.

Read = 1.86 Mb/s
Write = 0.35 Mb/s



For comparison: XS range (high speed) Dane Elec SD card, made in Japan


I got this card from ValueMedia UK. I wanted a high speed one as it is for use in my digital camera.

Read = 2.6 Mb/s
Write = 1.00 Mb/s

I was contemplating swapping the Wii and Camera cards around but felt that the Wii doesn't need high speeds, but the camera does. The Dane Elec gives me capacity for about 200 photo's on my 5MP panny leica camera, which I think is enough even for prolonged holidays.



Just out of interest, I stuck in the Sandisk microSD I have (made in Taiwan):


I got this card from Amazon UK. It's currently used in my R4DS.

Read = 4.33 Mb/s
Write = 1.30 Mb/s

The microSD stomps over everything



The results show that, comparing the standard speed cards, the "made in Japan" one writes to the card about 43% faster than the "made in Taiwan" one, but conversely, it reads from the card about 49% slower than the "made in Taiwan" one.
These are obviously rough figures, but I think that it shows that they are about the same overall (ie, when doing both, they're approx. equal)
The difference isn't due to where it's made, it's more due to the type of card rating (as can be seen from the Dane Elec & Sandisk figures, which are far better than standard.)

Overall: Rough test (not the most "rigourous" I know) but indicates that, when comparing like for like standard speed cards, it doesn't matter whether they're made in Taiwan or Japan .....they average out to an overall similar speed.



EDIT: Wikipaedia has a useful page that may be helpful (esp. the "speed" section) .

[jiffk]

surely there is more difference from different manufactures rather than different countries/races

unless the japense are better at writing in general?

This is some wierd racisim

[jiffk]

BTW how do you get the mem card out of the wii

I seem to remember just having to push it in and it poped out ... it doesnt do this any more :s

[wii_man76]

Originally Posted by jiffk

BI seem to remember just having to push it in and it poped out ... it doesnt do this any more :s

If it doesn't pop out anymore then that suggests it is broken/stuck...

[Gaffer]

Originally Posted by jiffk

surely there is more difference from different manufactures rather than different countries/races

unless the japense are better at writing in general?

This is some wierd racisim

That's exactly what I thought when I first heard it ...

....but I kid you not

Go over to many other discussions boards and you'll find lots of threads with people worried about only getting "made in Japan" SD cards, and going to lengths to avoid the Taiwanese ones.

Bizarre to say the least and, I think, slightly condescending to try to condemn a whole country with such a narrow minded view.

I disagreed with it so much, it prompted me to write this piece .

Hopefully I've clarified that country of origin has no bearing on the speed of a card......the speed rating does.

[dom96]

i don't care about speed of my sd card and the country it was made in i just care about the capacity

[TheCoda]

Speed is important if you're using the card in for example a 10mp DSLR and you are taking 3-4 fps. I am in this scenario quite regularly, and have several cards that I recently tested.

To be honest, 13mb of files for a test is not enough, because some OS will cache this amount of data and give you a false reading. I made 100mb files from random data (/dev/random) and made sure that I unmounted the cards before doing each read and write cycle.

[Gaffer]

Aaah, but all cards were tested under the same conditions, so any differences will be due to the cards (the OS caching will be taken "into account" as we're only looking at differences here?)

Although I get your point re: higher amount transferred = more precise time measurement, but it was only a rough test.

You're right about the camera transfer, my lowly 5MP panny is slow enough even with the dane elec card

[wii_man76]

Originally Posted by TheCoda

Speed is important if you're using the card in for example a 10mp DSLR and you are taking 3-4 fps. I am in this scenario quite regularly, and have several cards that I recently tested.

To be honest, 13mb of files for a test is not enough, because some OS will cache this amount of data and give you a false reading. I made 100mb files from random data (/dev/random) and made sure that I unmounted the cards before doing each read and write cycle.

I think you are missing the point here. The country of origin is not important when it comes to purchasing an SD card.

Your are right in saying that speed is important if you are using your card in a 10MP DSLR camera, but I have tried to take photos with my Wii and I can't seem to find the lens...

[TheCoda]

Originally Posted by wii_man76

I think you are missing the point here. The country of origin is not important when it comes to purchasing an SD card.

Your are right in saying that speed is important if you are using your card in a 10MP DSLR camera, but I have tried to take photos with my Wii and I can't seem to find the lens...

I didn't make the inference to the country of origin. Did you misquote, or did you mean something else?