The Palm application I'm working on makes extensive use of photos, which are stored on an SD card. Our primary targets are the Zire 71 and Zire 72 due to their photo taking abilities. I've noticed that over time, the performance of the SD cards drastically reduces. I've tried contacting both Palm and Lexar about this, and they both blame each other which isn't terribly helpful. I've tried having the SD cards reformatted, defragmented, etc. and while this helps a little initially, it doesn't take long for the cards to return to the slow speed again. Even if these procedures did provide long term benefits, it's not the sort of thing you could easily ask clients to do in any case.
The reduction in speed is unfortunately quite major. Our transfer times degrade from transferring 100 or so photos per minute to 3 or 4 photos per minute. Even worse, sometimes the transfers seem to time out altogether and sit idle for hours. Since sometimes we need to transfer more than 1,000 photos, this becomes quite unacceptable for the clients. The Install Aide API is being used for the actual photo transfer, so my code isn't an issue. I've tried switching this to direct VFS API code, but there wasn't a very noticeable difference in performance. If I attempt to transfer the photos directly through a USB card reader, the performance is substantially faster, but from a consumer use standpoint it's much easier if all the user has to do is HotSync. Has anybody else experienced this? Any ideas on resolving the problem? Any advice would be appreciated, Adrien. -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
