A Pandora/Pyra SD (and microSD) card benchmark pnd?


Grench

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So I had this idea, but I'm the wrong one to create it.

Back in the early days of the Pandora, there was a lot of back and forth on which SD cards worked 'best' in the Pandora.  There was a lot of back and forth and different benchmarking systems used with numbers put into forum posts - and eventually a self-reported table on the wiki.

Frankly, we should be able to do better.

So, I had this thought...  for the Pandora now and the Pyra in the future, does someone feel like building a proper one?

Things it should have:

  • Benchmarking cards using a variety sequential and random reads and writes with 4K and 512K file sizes.
  • Graphical output for the user - some form of charting.  Kind of like the hard disk benchmarking utility in Ubuntu maybe?
  • Collect information from the card for partition type, card manufacturer, etc - not serial number though (keep it top line), which slot it was measured from, CPU clock speed, CPU usage, etc..
  • Give the user the option to upload the results.  Prompt them for a forum user name, card manufacturer, card model.
  • Have a database (run on ED's server maybe?) that can receive and compile the data.
  • Download the current 'top 5 results' from the database to populate on the user's graph so they can see right off where the card stands.
  • Be able to view online what the ratings are from all of the cards reported.
  • For cards with multiple entries, be able to filter by partition format - some cards work better on an EXT2 or EXT4 or FAT32 or exFAT.
No small task, but as the Pyra starts coming out we're all going to be going through the 'which cards are best' threads again.  Having something like this in place already would be good.  Keeping it simple for the end user, having us all use the same tool to measure card performance and a centralized and automated results repository would be a fair amount of fun.

So, is there anyone interested in building this kind of utility?

I posted this to the OS forum because it's something I see as being appropriate to build into the OS build on the Pyra.  If a mod thinks it belongs elsewhere, please move as you see fit.
 
Sounds like a very good idea.

I would add that some more detailed statistical tools would be useful - possibly a histogram (speed against popularity among pyra users)- and options for comparing historical data on the server.

Standard deviation of database entries?

Ranking of different qualities of the card aginat each other (e.g. this card manufacturer focuses on sequential reads, and makes it disproportionally good at them)

As with everything though, the first step is to make it work at all; and pretty output display comes after accurate mesurement.
 
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It'd be cool if it spat out logs formatted for the wiki or such that you can just upload and it adds it perfectly :D
 
I prefer the idea of a cgi script that allows you to search through a list of results which have previously been submitted to ED's server. Yet another massive wiki list is far from ideal IMO.
 
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