Does MicroSD size affects R4 flashcart peformance?

[MrDevourer]

Bought a pre-owned Nintendo DSi with R4 flashcart with 8 gb micro sd in it. I put Pokemon Black (DSi Enhanced) in it and tried to play it and noticed a significant loading times when entering/exiting house, Menu, Battle, and lags/framedrop when moving from route to route. I've been googling about what might've caused it. some says it's the flashcart, some says its the microsd. Idk if this has been asked before or no, but Thanks for anyone that answered this

 

[CoolMe]

An 8GB? It's either a very old micro sd card (and is failing), or it is some no-brand/ Chinese-made sd card.. Either way, i would try getting another sd card instead. Format the new sd card as Fat32, and copy the kernel files from the older sd card along with your roms, and try again.
Additional step: highly recommended to test any sd card before using it with h2testw, to make sure it's not faulty or defective.

 

[MrDevourer]

So micro sd did affect the performance. I see, thank you very much! I'll try getting a new 32gb one to use. Thanks for the answer, Kind stranger

 

[lifehackerhansol]

The DS is too slow to take advantage of newer speeds. Any average SD card will be fine, as long as you format it correctly, preferably as written in this guide: https://dsi.cfw.guide/sd-card-setup.html

Of course, getting some random brand off Amazon will have degraded performance (but not really slowdowns, usually it just fails to do its job entirely). But any known brand should perform nearly the same.

 

[KimKong]

So micro sd did affect the performance. I see, thank you very much! I'll try getting a new 32gb one to use. Thanks for the answer, Kind stranger

The R4 has a limit on how big the microSD card can be. So don't go buy a card that's too big now.. Always check your tech!

 

[N7Kopper]

The R4 has a limit on how big the microSD card can be. So don't go buy a card that's too big now.. Always check your tech!

Telling people what the limit is helps. A lot of things claim to not work with SDXC, but they really just don't support exFAT.

 

[Jayro]

Yeah, DS flash carts don't really use any speeds outside the scope of a Class 10 card. Older Class 2 and Class 4 cards could have slowdowns like you mentioned though. It also helps if you align the sectors in a partition editor. Formatting the card with a 32K cluster size is ideal for best performance and minimal issues.

 

[KimKong]

Telling people what the limit is helps. A lot of things claim to not work with SDXC, but they really just don't support exFAT.

I have no idea what R4 card this person have. There are many types, old and new. And some have a larger support range when it comes to the microSD.

 

[ghjfdtg]

Worth mentioning but in my experience newer microSD cards have more variable timing for random reads. I saw stutters in a few games with genuine microSD cards that kick ass in a fast card reader. Most of them are just not optimized for random read and write. Didn't see these problems with most older cards.

 

[JaapDaniels]

Worth mentioning but in my experience newer microSD cards have more variable timing for random reads. I saw stutters in a few games with genuine microSD cards that kick ass in a fast card reader. Most of them are just not optimized for random read and write. Didn't see these problems with most older cards.

Since i only have that effect with new cards on older cardreaders, could it be that these cards have dificulties throttling speed?
I mean it could be that finding balance in file/bit transfer rate takes too much for too small files.
This for it being an async data transfer...

 

[Jayro]

Since i only have that effect with new cards on older cardreaders, could it be that these cards have dificulties throttling speed?
I mean it could be that finding balance in file/bit transfer rate takes too much for too small files.
This for it being an async data transfer...

Could be. Playing around with the cluster sizes might also yield different results. I say different, and not better, because I have not tested this theory myself.

 

[FAST6191]

Largely solved but I have some witterings that might add to the discussion.

One of the more notable cases of things here was Castlevania Portrait of Ruin.
Here it was noted the game would crash and those using faster SD cards (and for many it would have still been SD, got to have that Japanese Kingston, rather than SDHC), no fragmentation (don't defrag, format and copy everything back), options to boost speeds on the cart itself, those removing audio (removes need for long reads) and more would suffer fewer crashes. Latency rather than raw read speed being the issue at hand.
Ultimately it was found to be a bug and the fix exported around various flash carts (though sometimes not for quite a while). https://gbatemp.net/threads/which-flashcart-for-castlevania-por.343239/page-2#post-4559271 (did post the download of the whole thing around here somewhat more recently but can't find the post in a casual search, that is what most people care about though)

Anti piracy had been seen to cause slowdowns here -- if you have thousands of checks per second it can have an impact. Scrolling lists and menu timings usually being where it is most noticeable.

Various flash carts actually increased speed above and beyond what stock games might do. AKAIO (also basis for the Wood firmware) being the most noted of these but others also went there. Depending upon your point of comparison then you might have even been used to better than stock.

 

[ghjfdtg]

Since i only have that effect with new cards on older cardreaders, could it be that these cards have dificulties throttling speed?
I mean it could be that finding balance in file/bit transfer rate takes too much for too small files.
This for it being an async data transfer...

There are multiple reasons i can think of. The cards not being optimized for random read/write as mentioned above, cheap/slow flash memory and the complexity the flash translation layer has to deal with to compensate for the short lifetime of the flash.

Most SD cards on the market are rather optimized for multimedia like pictures and videos. You can see this in most benchmarks. The speed is total garbage for random read and write. See for example this:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-card-performance-comparison-2019

 

[JaapDaniels]

S

There are multiple reasons i can think of. The cards not being optimized for random read/write as mentioned above, cheap/slow flash memory and the complexity the flash translation layer has to deal with to compensate for the short lifetime of the flash.

Most SD cards on the market are rather optimized for multimedia like pictures and videos. You can see this in most benchmarks. The speed is total garbage for random read and write. See for example this:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-card-performance-comparison-2019

Since pi is known for abusing the SD-card as a HDD replacemt, it's hard getting real good test results for it's constantly writing towards the SD-card (most Pi osses even use it to dump the pagefile).
In most other systems there's the OS layer done on a drive more designed to handle this (SSD, HDD or eMMC), the SD-card is not a good multi-tasker, so if writing is on it's not reading.
I really never had issue's using new model SD-cards on consoles except for cheap clone R4 cards, never had the problem with pc not camera's.
On my retro-pi (3B) however, it didn't be a constant problem, but each and every card got either fucked up or got random results, mostlikely for the complexety of tasks runing in the back of linux.
I'm not sure if these test really help me for i read tested with a raspberry pi, i don't understand why tested with raspberry pi, it's no good base for testing for there's too much interference to really get results that can be clear defined.

 

[MrDevourer]

I've been reading all your responses guys and much thanks to everyone here that answered. I've learned lots of things from this. I might try to test some SDcard I have and probably bought a New one if it turns out really is the problems.

Again, Thank you very much for the kind and elaborate responses folks!
One question though. How do you tell what cards have good random read/write as you guys mentioned above? Is there anyway to check?

Edit: Oh and I saw someone mentioned about what R4 I used and what kind of microSD I have. It was an R4 2021 with an 8GB V-Gen microSD

 

[Sypherone]

The Cards have specific symbols wich determine the minimum write speed.
Depending on the model you can then check the manufacturer manuel for read/ write speed details. There are also a lot comparisms and test tools available on the web.

 

[MrDevourer]

Thank You very much!