what is the best to use with the m3 ds real, or does it matter. Also if i were to put some nintendo roms on the m3 ds real do i need to purchase anything else
Any brand of microSD will work, though as with most things the good brands (kingston, scandisk, exc) are better than no-names.
Are the japan kingstons from dealextreme any good? I would assume they're genuine, but who knows. They're dirt cheap anyway, and free shipping, so I was going to order one from there.
I have used unbranded cards and with the M3 they seem to work fine, to increase the read write speed (and prevent issues) never use windows to format them, use Panasonics SD Formatter - its free use google to find
I've tried this formatter and it doesn't seem to do anything for me. I've tried it on a few different type cards and none seem to make any difference. What gives? lol
There is a free program called HDTach, this measures the read and write speed of SD cards, the difference on the same card formatted in windows and this formatter is very marked. Certain cards (Kingston) have caused me many problems, especially on some of the RPG games, this formatter solves most (but not all ) problems. It eliminates the slow SD problem, not everyone on this forum is buying branded class 4 or 6 cards, like most problems - removing a possible cause makes it easier to help people.
Hmmmm... I'll have to try HDTach program you mentioned. I did a "real world" test (at least that's what I call it anyway) and formatted the sd card with windows then copied a large file to it. I then formatted the card again using the panasonic formatter and never noticed any difference in write time of the same file. Like I say, I tried this with different cards as well, and nothing changed. Should I be noticing a difference here, or is this something different than what you're talking about for speed?
I just tested it as well, both real world testing and several benchmarking programs. I saw no noticable difference between formatted with windows and with the Panasonic SD formatter. The benchmarking programs did show a slight increase with the formatter, but the biggest boost I saw was increasing the read speed from 7mb/s to 7.3mb/s. Thats a negligible difference.
That's what I thought would happen. I'll give it a try tonight anyway with a few cards I own and let you know what my results are. But like I said, "real world" testing saw no change for me.
I use whatever I can get on the "sale du jour" with no problems whatsoever. I've even used come "no name" completely blank brand name microSD with no problem. I'd be more worried about counterfeit (lots on eBay) cards.
I tested a couple cards and I didn't see any difference at all. Sandisk card Windows formatted 11.4 MB/s 0.9 ms Panasonic sd formatter 11.4 MB/s 0.9 ms Generic card Windows formatted 10.3 MB/s 1.3 ms Panasonic sd formatter 10.3 MB/s 1.3 ms Again, "real world" testing saw no difference either.
Taken from GBAtemp With my class 2 8GB microSD card I tested 2 common fixes that are supposed to speed up your card and fix some roms: 1. Format your card with the Panasonic SD formatter 2. Format your card with "format X: \fs:FAT32 \a:64K" 3. Control with a run of the mill windows format with 4K clusters I did 2 tests on each of these and timed the first one. Test 1: Time it takes for scrolling in YSMenu in my romfolder from top to bottom: 1: 41.8s mean from 3 runs 2: 39.6s mean from 3 runs 3: 52.4s mean from 3 runs Test 2: Does Portrait of Ruin crash when spamming the start button for 3 minutes straight (just to switch between pause menu and game screen for maximal datatraffic)? 1: Doesn't crash, tested 3 times 2: Doesn't crash, tested 3 times 3: Crashes after 15 seconds of punishment, tested once. You can make your own conclusions from this, it seems that the 64K method is faster, but only slightly so. But both methods are leaps and bounds beyond the boilerplate format.
That testing method doesn't seem terribly scientific to me. Using a benchmark program like I did would give better (meaning more consistent) results wouldn't it? Anyway, not trying to argue here... I'm gonna leave it alone now. A straight windows format seems to work fine for me...
I tried the 64k format method and windows says that "The specified cluster size is too large for FAT32"
