I have used SD cards for several embedded applications over the years. However, as cards have gotten larger, the single block read and write speeds have dropped. I suspect this is largely because the page sizes are larger and larger. Most SD stacks do not perform multiple block read/writes and so therefore in embedded applications we can never get megabytes per second like you can using a PC. Part of this is due to the clock rates we can use, but most of it is due to the time it takes to do single block read and writes. Does anybody know of any SD cards which are 'optimized' to do this? If there are any other suggestions for getting around this limit, I'm all ears. However, it would be VERY difficult in my application to implement multiple block requests for various reasons.
Electronic – Are there any SD cards optimized for single block read/writes
embeddedsd
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Best Answer
Smaller capacity SD cards will often perform better for single-block writes, because their erase page size is smaller. When you write to the card, even if you only write a single byte, the card's internal controller may have to read an entire page (often 4K) into a buffer, modify your one byte, erase the Flash page, then write the whole thing back to the Flash memory. So cards with a smaller erase page size will have less of a penalty for small writes at random addresses.
What microcontroller are you using? SdFatLab works on AVRs and does support multiple block read/write operations. Your files must be in contiguous blocks on the SD card to take advantage of it.
Check out some of the discussion and benchmarks at http://elm-chan.org/docs/mmc/mmc_e.html