SP1 additional storage options

[Isaac T. Cedron]

So I was thinking of buying a external hard drive with an ac powered usb hub (to make the drive have the power supply needed to work with no problems) but I´m seeing that it would be a lot more expensive than buying a single MicroSD card, but I feel that 64gb won´t cover my needs and the fact that it reads/writes about 30-40Mb per second doesnt convince me much since I like to play games (not so demanding games but a little), at least if I could put there an 128gb card I´d buy one but Im not sure the SP1 can handle it. So I would like to ask you guys if its better to save money till I can buy an 1TB external hard drive or buy an MicroSD card and also if SP1 can handle an 128gb card.

 

[Wayne Orwig]

Others have used 128gb cards, so they work.
I just upgrades my laptop hard drive to an SSD. I bought a hard drive case for the old hard drive that I removed for less then $10. Installed that old drive in there and now I have an external hard drive, about the size of a cell phone, that even gets power from the USB, for under $10 , sort of.

On the SD speed. The write speed on them is what is slowest. Does the game write that often, or mostly read? I would have thought it was mostly reading, which the SD card would be fast at.

 

[LinkRS]

Howdy,
I had a similar situation with my Retina MacBook Pro recently (ran out of SSD space), and wanted to add more. I did not want to add an external drive that I would have to plug into it and tote around, so I opted in a "custom" 128GB Transcend JetDrive Lite (http://www.transcend-info.com/apple/jetdrivelite/) card (which is custom MicroSD card shaped to sit flush with the rMBP). The company insists that it is "flash storage" as opposed to an SD Card, but it uses the SD Card controller in the rMBP, which leads to why I am replying to this post. The read speed on SD cards can be "up to 90MBs per second" with a write speed between 15 to 50 MBs per second. This really isn't as big as a problem as you would think, when you realize that a standard Hard Drive has write speeds (sustained not burst) of around 60MBs. Granted this is slower, but as a secondary storage it shouldn't be too bad. However, despite what logic would indicate, the JetDrive Lite does cause performance issues, but I don't think it has anything to do with the read/write speeds. It is my opinion that it is due to the limited number of simultaneous read/write cycles that can be done on an SD card. I don't know what the number is, but I am thinking it is pretty low. When only a single device is accessing the JetDrive, performance is Ok, but as soon as I start tying to do multiple things it slows to a crawl, freezing and hiccupping. If you want to go the SD Card route, I would suggest that you use it for storage only, like move your pictures and/or music to it. Perhaps even "archive" some of your documents folder there, but I would not suggest you try to install and run games to it. Personally, I added a 64 GB MicroSD card to my Surface Pro, and do just that, and put highly used or performance sensitive apps on the internal SSD. Good luck!

 

[GreyFox7]

A USB 3.0 SSD would operate faster than the fastest currently available microSDXC cards 90+ MBps (which is approaching the same as a 7200 rpm HDD) although peak performance of the USB 3.0 SSD could easily be double that. Its a speed, convenience, and power tradeoff. Go USB 3.0 SSD for fastest speed expansion but it will use more power and be more inconvenient in a mobile application. fast 90+ MBps SD card will use less power and be more convenient while providing near 7200 rpm HDD class performance (probably faster than some and slower than others) YMMV.