SD Card Startup in Bolero

[K1W1]

If it wasn't FAT32 you would only be able to access up to 2GB regardless of the size of the card.
Over the weekend I'm going to do a couple of tests my card with various amounts of data on it and see if there is a correlation between the amount of data and the start up time.

[Pietra]

K1W1 - did you get a chance to check if there was a correlation between start up time and data

i reduced the amount of data i had on the card and it seemed to help.

I'm going to try timing it myself this week.

[K1W1]

K1W1 - did you get a chance to check if there was a correlation between start up time and data

Not yet, been painting and trying to get my motorcycle riding gear vaguely clean. Hopefully later today.

Edit:

Just did a quick test.
Sandisk Ultra 16GB SDHC (15mb/sec)

2.51Gb - 10 seconds to start up
3.53 GB - 18 seconds to start up.

I'll add some more later on if I get a chance.

[Pietra]

following some research on Briskoda, VWEOSClub and myGTi.com my findings are as follows:

1) the more files/data on the card, the slower the initialisation and the selection processes will be - stating the freaking obvious but you need to start somewhere

2) the flatter your file structure the quicker the processes will be - the quickest time i could achieve was to have all files in the root folder with playlists - i then organised my playlist from the files by numbering the playlists 1 -50 (i ended up with 50 playlists for artists, genres etc) and the selection process always started somewhere in the mp3 files meaning you need to scroll up from the the last playlist to the first (and i put my most popular playlists at the start)

3) there is a genuine difference in initialisation speeds and selection speeds between SDHC Class 2 and Class 4 cards used on the Bolera system - i don't have a class 6 card so can't comment if this is faster again - there is suprisingly little data on the bolero system on the internet or in the manual such as reading speeds etc that i could find - and despite this being a standard accessory across all new skoda's it appears that dealers and service departments know sfa about them

As part of this process i did the following timed tests over about the last 2 weekends

Scenario 1 - 5.8 Gb music, with up to 3 subdirectories (New Music/artist/album/)

8 Gb class 2 - 1:40 - slowest startup with slightly different selection was 2:20
16 Gb class 4 - :50 ish - so half the time straight away - i didn't see any point testing both cards from here (and the 16Gb card became my backup for files and structure)

Scenario 2 - 5.7 Gb music, sinlge layer subdirectory (typically genre or artist)

8 Gb class 2 - 1:05

Scenario 3 - 5.7 Gb music with playlists in root file

8 Gb class 2 - 35 seconds

I am actually going back to Scenario 2 - i can live with a minute long start up to have the ease of going through folders of music and am living with the 8 Gb class 2 card for now - still not sure what was going on with the 2:20 start up but suspect i still had some album covers in the directories and maybe 6 plus Gb of music -

there was actually quite a bit of discussion across a number of discussion groups about the performance of the RCD510 and SD cards - i hope this helps anyone else lookng for similar answers

[selurs]

I meant to post my results in this thread days ago, but never quite got around to finding out exactly how much data I have.

Anyways, I will confirm later in the week the amount of data, but I guestimate about 9GB on a class 6 16GB Transcend brand card ($70 delivered). Stored with the structure recommended by Kiwi (and others) of one small file in the root directory and then all albums below that, so one layer. Play lists are in the root directory.

Start up is about 20s. Again, I will confirm this at a later stage, but wanted to put up my times while I remembered! Anyway, following Pietra's times, I think what you can probably say about that is that going up SD card classes make a big difference...

[backdoc]

I put 4gig music on 4 gig card, and it's one of those double density jobs. Not sure exactly what the name is but the sales guy said for the digital camera it would hold twice as many photo as a standard sd card. Anyways, besides the fact the sd music playback is fantastic and has completely changed my view on needing the mdi (this is getting installed on Wednesday but I can't see it getting used now), I would say playback begins within 10 seconds. Pretty good and so much easier than using my iPhone. Also means don't have to keep phone in glove box and can use it for nav when required.

[K1W1]

Not sure exactly what the name is but the sales guy said for the digital camera it would hold twice as many photo as a standard sd card.

The number of photos is dependent on the capacity of the card nothing else. A 4GB card holds 4GB. Full stop.
I think what the salesman was on about is that you probably have an SDHC card rather than an SD card. SD cards (with some very rare exceptions) topped out at 2GB.

[backdoc]

The number of photos is dependent on the capacity of the card nothing else. A 4GB card holds 4GB. Full stop.
I think what the salesman was on about is that you probably have an SDHC card rather than an SD card. SD cards (with some very rare exceptions) topped out at 2GB.

I understand a 4 gig card holds 4 gig max but isn't the compression different?

[K1W1]

There is no compression on a card it's just a storage device that holds X bytes. For all practical purposes a card is exactly the same as a hard drive in the way data is stored and accessed.
Any compression is applied at the operating system level.

[backdoc]

My card is a class 4 so I guess that helps explain the speed thing. If resuming a track ie getting back in the car after parking I would say playback begins within 5 seconds or so.