datel max memory 64mb

[yoshi314]

i recently bought datel's max memory 64mb card.

the thing looks genuine and it works with the mc exploit nicely.

the thing is - transfer speed is incosistent - when copying my old saves via ulaunchelf from original 8mb sony memcard speed sometimes dropped to mere 4kb/s!

also booting ps2 with the mc exploit off this card works, but at least 3x times as slow. when i used standard 8mb memcard i would see ulaunchelf's screen ~1 second after flash of white on the screen, now i have to wait at least 3 seconds. also accessing the card from uLaunchELF seems pretty slow.

i haven't tested ps2's native memory card browser yet, nor tried any games with it.

is that performance hit normal with all datel's ps2 cards or memor32 cards?

oh, if that matters - i plugged the card to the 2nd memcard port.

[Titch]

hey yoshi,
yeah the bigger the card the slower they are. If you remember there was a post in the freevast forum with a link to how the ps2 memcard system works. I cant remember offhand but i think it has to do with the fact that it basically reads sequentially from the start of a block/page and depending on the size of the block/page it may take longer. Something like that. Anyway I have the basic 64mb datel and the first thing I noticed was the reduced loading times.

[yoshi314]

that seems to explain why aren't the any bigger memcards for ps2 :]

i don't understand why can't they put some kind of faster storage in those cards, that takes faster to rewrite and access. or perhaps that's the limitation of the memcard port in the console.

perhaps the console validates the memcard this way as well?

[JNABK]

I believe they partition the MCs into 8MB each in order to be acknowledged as a valid card, this would explain why the cards are divisible by 8.

I remember older cards that had a 'switch' to press in order to access the other partition(s), so im assuming the switch is no longer required, but the partitions are still needed.

[yoshi314]

i started copying my old memcards over and i noticed that the card is not really that slow, only certain operations are slower.

seems like locating the file on memcard is the most time consuming part or creating the file and accessing it. the writing of actual data is pretty fast.

the copying itself happens with ~50kb/s which is pretty neat (seen with big [>100kb] files), but the overhead with file creation/deletion/directory listing is pretty big.

also the ps2 browser has no slowdowns with memcard access. maybe something with homebrew memcard drivers then?

i guess the filesystem is to blame then ;-)

[E P]

also accessing the card from uLaunchELF seems pretty slow.

That's mostly do to the 'mcfreespace' call that is used each time you open a directory. I have discussed this before at great length. At the time the 64MB Datel cards weren't as readily available, so we chose to do nothing to workaround the issue.