Hacking Slow Cyclo?

[Joey Ravn]

I've noticed that my CycloDS Evolution + Kingston Japan 1GB TF card combo is significantly slower than my old M3 Simply with the same card. Pokémon DP, for example, takes more than 4 "hours" to save (if you've played the game, you'd have noticed that there's a little clock that appears when saving), when it takes only "45 minutes" on my R4 with the same card. Games like GTA:CW, Animal Crossing Wild World or DQIV suffer small slowdowns, almost unnoticeable, but they are there nevertheless. What could be causing this? I've tried switching the Kingston card with the Transcends card I have on my R4 and the increase in performance is obvious. Isn't the Japanese Kingston supposed to be faster?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Vengeful Stick]

Not sure, but I had almost no slowdown using my Kingston 2GB card but when I "upgraded" to a 8GB SDHC card I noticed that the menu (A+B+X+Y+L+R) takes around 15 seconds to load now

 

[DeMoN]

Well is one MicroSD more cluttered than the other? That could be a problem.
Or you could try turning off the Battery saver mode, that seems to make slow MicroSDs perform better.

 

[Rayder]

It seems to me that the Cyclo just has issues with certain microSD cards, especially SDHC class cards. I bought a Transcend 8gig Class 6 for it and the damn thing acted all flaky with it....ingame menu either failed or took forever to come up.....certain games (UMK for sure) refused to boot, etc. I put my older Transcend 8gig Class 4 back in and everything went back to working just the way it was supposed to.

The only real difference between the two cards was the response time and the write speed. Read speeds were about the same between the two, but the Class 6 was slower to write, whereas the Class 4 had about the same write speed as it did read speed. The Class 6 also has much better response time (0.8ms) than the Class 4 (1.6ms). I don't know if the problems stem from the response time or the difference in write speed or if it's just some issue with how the Cyclo reads SDHC cards, but there is a definite issue with certain microSD's and the CycloDS. None of my old 2gig cards ever had any issues like that.

And before anyone says it, YES, I tested the Class 6 in other devices and it worked fine......no errors or corruptions or any other stupid little problems. Problems only occur when I try to use it in the CycloDS. Oh, but I could play Castlevania PoR with it no problems, unlike the Class 4.

I've seen way too many people complaining about the above mentioned issues on the Cyclo, both here and at the TC forums. It's not just a localized issue and TC really needs to look into it.

Long story short, try a different microSD.

 

[Joey Ravn]

Well is one MicroSD more cluttered than the other? That could be a problem.
Or you could try turning off the Battery saver mode, that seems to make slow MicroSDs perform better.

The Transcend card was far more cluttered than the Kingston I always use on my Cyclo. And turning the Battery Saver mode off doesn't seem to imply a performance boost, mainly because the Kingston microSD is in fact faster than the Transcends... Well, I guess Rayder's right: the CycloDS Evolution is somewhat picky with microSD cards.

 

[SoLuckys]

I think the problem is the new firmware cos when i uptade to 1.54b1 it started to slow down and on 1.54b3 wasnt even working

 

[TheShadowRunner]

Using a Sandisk class6 here on fw 1.54b4, fast as fuck, no problem whatsoever.

 

[Ballistic]

Where, if I may ask, did you get that SanDisk microSDHC?

 

[Joey Ravn]

OK, after some time thinking about it, I've decided to get a new microSD with more capacity. . I'm currently between a 4GB card and an 8GB. The former is €10, the latter is €20, both are Class 4. I've tested my current microSD with HDTach and this is what I've got. Do you think upgrading to one of those cards will carry a noticeable upgrade in performance? Does the size of the card matter much for read/write speeds?

PS: I'll ask in some other shops here in my city, but AFAIK, none of them carry Class 6 cards. Is there much difference between Class 4 and 6? I mean, will my Cyclo actually perform substantially better with a C-6 than with a C-4, or the flashcart can't fully exploit that speed?