Faster memory cards for the PS2?

[Gestalt]

Hi,

I have HD Loader setup and am very happy with the reduced loading time. It still seems like it takes a long time to load saves from the MC though. Are some memory cards faster than others? Which ones are the fastest? I have a 3rd party 64meg card, could that be making it slower than it should be (it says Max Memory on the front)? Any other ideas on how to make saves load and save faster?

Thanks for any info.

[yoshi314]

smaller memcards are faster. at least when you compare 64mb datel to 8mb original sony card.

the best way to speed up would be to use usbmcemu/mcsioemu to save to usb/hdd, although results and compatibility is varied.

i wish somebody would come up with ps2 card that would simply be a mmc/sd reader plugged into ps2 memcard slot.

[Gestalt]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Thats exactly the kind of info I was looking for. I think i'll try mcsioemu and see if that works for what I want. I didn't know what to search for to find that... or even what I was really looking for, so your reply was really useful. And now I know that my mem card probably is slowing stuff down a bit too.

[urbigbro]

I did some test with different MCs and USB drives to make FMCB boot faster a while back. You can see the results in the thread below. The ones that use 8 MB pages are fast and large, if you get the Katana, or Nyko they are also 100% compatible and officially licensed.

http://psx-scene.com/forums/showthread.php?t=59616 (Fastest FMCB 1.7 MC Tests)

[Gestalt]

Ok, cool. So if I want a real mem card that is fast I should get one of those.

I'm trying to setup the virtual memory card thing first to try that out. I can't quite figure it out. I found this tutorial: http://www.console-exploits.com/foru...ad.php?t=10198. But that seems to be for loading the saves off of a USB drive. How would I go about setting it up to load them off of the HDD? I'm specifically trying to set this up for Burnout 3 as it auto saves a lot and it would be nice that have that be fast.

[TnA]

I heard and read in some ebay-auctions, that (some) 128MB-Cards are much faster.
Can anyone confirm that?

[Badcrew]

The 128 MB cards in my experience are very slow and unreliable (not always detected by PS2, and requires you to switch off the system for a few seconds before switching it back on again, to enable it to work). Once I even lost the whole memory card contents when I was copying a large amount of data to it from uLaunchELF (but thankfully this was all backed up)!

What I do is simply make .psu backups from uLaunchELF and copy them to a partition on my internal PS2 hard disk drive. Then I remove any game saves that I don't intend to use for a while from the memory card, in order to make space for ones that I do intend to use. In my opinion this is a better alternative to the large memory cards (except for the Nyko cards and also the Katana 32 MB paged memory cards linked to by urbigro, which are officially licensed by Sony and work just as good as the official Sony cards), since it has the best compatibility rate with games, and is faster and more reliable than most 3rd party cards, since you are using the original 8 MB cards. The only thing that I would use the large 3rd party cards for is storage of homebrew in slot 2, since they have no issues there (this includes that 128 MB card, except for the fact that it is unreliable even for this due to its occasional boot-up failures).

If that method is too much hassle for you, then the Nyko and Katana cards are your best alternative. I would probably purchase a few if they were sold in Europe, but I can't find them in any stores here.

Edit: @TnA: would you mind provided a link to the discussions to which you refer in your post?

[TnA]

Ebay DE, Ebay UK, here...


THX for your info.
I would have buyed one for testing, if they really were faster.