SDCard write slow

Your first sentence is "I have a Dell 5530 that READS SD cards very slow[ly]", but then you talk about write speeds for the rest of the post.  So are read speeds consistently good and write speeds are the only consistent problem, or are both reads and writes slow in certain cases?  Also, it would help to specify the model line of your laptop, e.g. Latitude, Inspiron, Precision, XPS, Vostro, etc, and sometimes the same model number exists in different product lines, so it's not always possible to tell what system you're talking about if you just say "Dell 5530".

But assuming that writes are the only problem, if you've also tried a USB3 reader, then you can rule out the built-in SD card reader and its driver as the source of the problem.  Does that Transcend USB3 reader produce acceptable write performance when it's connected to a different system?  Are you running the same version of Windows on both of the systems you're testing?

I am also facing a similar issue with Dell 5530. For me write speed is pathetic while read speed is average. What could be the solution?

Sorry for the slow response.  I didn't get an email notification for some reason and just decided to check today.

It's a Dell Latitude 5530 which is giving me the problems.

The read speeds are consistent on both dells but the write is not..

The transcend card reader does not produce acceptable write performance which is the big confusing part.

The Windows build on the one that is working well (Vostro) is not the same build as the one having problems (Latitude).  The Latitude is running on an older build.  The reason the Latitude has an older build is because the new build crashes the computer on a clean install.  I "had" to resort to an older build on install of Windows 7 Pro.  I don't want to run the Windows update on it because I don't want to get Microsoft's telemetry stuff put on that computer.

Personally, I will also mention that I was running a dell version initially but bought a solid state and just installed the OS from scratch.  The dell branded install on the drive I put aside had the same issues with writes on SD cards.  I would have to check on the vostro and both drives from the latitude on what exact build numbers were on all 3 drives.

From what you wrote, I'm getting the impression it's probably USB driver related or something underneath that in the OS framework that may need to be updated for this laptop?

I really would rather get the specific OS patch than patching the whole thing.  It really doesn't go online right now and does number crunching for me.

Let me know what insight and suggestions you might have.

If it was an issue with the USB stack itself, I would expect reads to be slow as well, and other USB devices to be affected, but you're saying reads on the SD card and both reads and writes on other devices are fine.  But even if the USB stack could be the culprit, my only suggestion would be to make sure you've got the USB 3.0 drivers installed, which are required for Windows 7, but even checking Intel's site, it looks like the Intel USB 3.0 drivers for the older 7 Series Chipset used in that system haven't been updated in years, so as long as you have them at all, there doesn't seem to be much opportunity for improvement through updates on that front.  I'm not aware of any Windows updates that might address this, but on the other hand I haven't been looking for them either, and Microsoft issues a lot of updates, so it's certainly possible that unwillingness to update your system could be the reason you're still stuck with this issue.

But just to get some cold hard numbers here, you could try downloading and running CrystalDiskMark on both of your systems and benchmarking the SD card performance.  I'm curious how wide this performance gap is.

In addition to the above, I just looked up the SD standards, and the Class 10 designation means that the card is only required to deliver 10 MB/s sequential write performance. That is well below even what USB 2.0 flash drives and spinning drives have been able to deliver for years now, never mind what today's USB 3.0 drives can achieve -- so I'm not clear how much performance you're missing out on even compared to the Vostro that you say works properly.  Again, it would be nice to see those benchmarks.

But just as another suggestion, this is admittedly a workaround rather than a fix, but you may find it preferable in terms of the cost of your time vs. some hardware and the quality of the outcome.  Would a physically very small USB flash drive be essentially as convenient as an SD card for your use case, or do you need to exchange data with some other system that has a card reader but no USB port?  If the former, looking over Sandisk's site right now, I see several products that are roughly the same physical size as an SD card, offer at least 64GB of capacity, and would very likely outperform your SD card even on a system that uses it properly, perhaps significantly so.  For example, according to reviews, the Ultra Fit benchmarks around 150 MB/s read and 70 MB/s writes -- and the 64GB version is available on Amazon for less than $20. I personally own Sandisk's top-end Extreme Pro USB 3.1 flash drive, which can handle sustained writes of 250+ MB/s, though it's larger and more expensive.

I'll try the CrystalDiskMark on both when I get a chance later this week.  I'm kind of tied up with other issues.  Esp when I saw a little bug go inside my Vostro.  I have to disassemble the entire thing to clean it and then reassemble it.  *sigh*  But, I'll let you know what I find out.

Personally, I forget what I have have on SD cards, I've bought several SanDisk and a Wintec (I think).  I don't think I've bought the Extreme Pro.  I'll have to check all the ones I have and see, but I think what I use is beside the point.  Right?

I mean, the same SD card should perform the same on either system using the Transcend USB device on a USB3 port on both machines.

I was basically "trying" to compare apples to apples.  I was "trying" to do as exact of a comparison to figure out what the heck was going on.

Yes, the SD Card should be performing consistently on both systems, at least when used with the Transcend reader in both cases -- but with specs as low as Class 10, I would think that even different SD card readers should be performing consistently.  I just suggested the flash drive alternative in case your core goal was to get better write performance out of the device you're using as portable storage.  If this is instead more of an academic exercise to determine the cause of an inconsistency that shouldn't exist rather than a search for a practical solution for your work, even if it involves other hardware, then my proposed workaround would not be useful.

In the ultimate end, the higher end SD "might" be the solution.  I would hate to buy and see no improvements though.  I "do" want the SD on the machine to work because I use that for backup, but if the backup is a snail's pace then its worthless.  So, that's the reason for the investigation.  Hopefully, I can get a SD working.  I really don't want a laptop drive running all the time for backup as I use the computer.  I rather have a floppy (ie SD Card) to do backups during usage.

Note that I'm not talking about a higher-end SD card; I'm talking about a "USB flash drive" to be used INSTEAD OF an SD card.  I agree it would be nice to solve the underlying problem, but if you're already running the latest drivers and you're not open to running a newer version of Windows or even installing updates for your existing Windows version in the regular way, then unless you want to dig through every update available for your system individually, solving the underlying problem may not be possible.  And for what it's worth, if you take a look at that Sandisk Ultra Fit, it's about the size of a wireless mouse receiver, so it would barely even stick out from the laptop.  As long as you can spare the USB port, keeping it permanently connected to your system shouldn't be more of an inconvenience than using an SD card.

Oh.  Yeah, I thought about that.  I think USB performance wasn't bad on it.  No different than the other computer.  The SDCard this is still baffling though.  Anyway, I will see what the benchmarks test and bench a USB stick also later this week.

Well, this is not what I expected.  My Latitude performs better than the Vostro which confuses me.  My best guesss is that when I do a CTRL-C and then CTRL-V from one explorer window to the next, the execution path is different from an application interfacing with the I/O device for the SD card.  Apparently, there's something wrong from explorer windows (which obviously makes sense where my problem is, but no sense on why the problem exists).

So, if I "guessing" if use my backup app to run and do backups, everything should be fine.  I thought I did this and had issues, but I'm going to try again.  I'll run the backup hopefully this evening.

In the meantime, here are the confusing stats I got.  The USB at the end of each title means I used the Transcend USB 3.0 device to read the SD card in a USB 3.0 slot on both computers and never a 2.0 slot.  50MiB and 500MiB files were used with 5 sample tries for Read and Write.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Latitude_50MiB USB

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]

* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

  Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :    72.771 MB/s

 Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     8.258 MB/s

 Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     6.354 MB/s [  1551.3 IOPS]

Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.410 MB/s [   100.1 IOPS]

        Sequential Read (T= 1) :    72.145 MB/s

       Sequential Write (T= 1) :    11.954 MB/s

  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     5.826 MB/s [  1422.4 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     0.433 MB/s [   105.7 IOPS]

 Test : 50 MiB [E: 17.5% (10.2/58.2 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]

 Date : 2017/10/07 5:53:00

   OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Latitude_50MiB

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]

* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

  Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :    43.230 MB/s

 Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     8.729 MB/s

 Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     8.200 MB/s [  2002.0 IOPS]

Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.424 MB/s [   103.5 IOPS]

        Sequential Read (T= 1) :    62.074 MB/s

       Sequential Write (T= 1) :    11.954 MB/s

  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     6.983 MB/s [  1704.8 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     0.431 MB/s [   105.2 IOPS]

 Test : 50 MiB [G: 17.5% (10.2/58.2 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]

 Date : 2017/10/07 5:36:19

   OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Latitude_500MiB USB

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]

* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

  Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :    73.776 MB/s

 Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     8.257 MB/s

 Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     5.890 MB/s [  1438.0 IOPS]

Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.956 MB/s [   233.4 IOPS]

        Sequential Read (T= 1) :    74.031 MB/s

       Sequential Write (T= 1) :    13.212 MB/s

  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     5.142 MB/s [  1255.4 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     0.925 MB/s [   225.8 IOPS]

 Test : 500 MiB [E: 17.5% (10.2/58.2 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]

 Date : 2017/10/07 5:59:41

   OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Latitude_500MiB

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]

* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

  Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :    44.464 MB/s

 Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     7.549 MB/s

 Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     7.816 MB/s [  1908.2 IOPS]

Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.935 MB/s [   228.3 IOPS]

        Sequential Read (T= 1) :    64.179 MB/s

       Sequential Write (T= 1) :    14.261 MB/s

  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     6.163 MB/s [  1504.6 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     0.925 MB/s [   225.8 IOPS]

 Test : 500 MiB [G: 17.5% (10.2/58.2 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]

 Date : 2017/10/07 5:43:42

   OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Vostro_50MiB USB

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]

* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

  Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :    71.131 MB/s

 Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :    10.486 MB/s

 Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     6.239 MB/s [  1523.2 IOPS]

Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.421 MB/s [   102.8 IOPS]

        Sequential Read (T= 1) :    69.843 MB/s

       Sequential Write (T= 1) :    11.953 MB/s

  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     5.573 MB/s [  1360.6 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     0.433 MB/s [   105.7 IOPS]

 Test : 50 MiB [E: 17.5% (10.2/58.2 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]

 Date : 2017/10/07 6:42:43

   OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Vostro_50MiB

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]

* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

  Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :    19.319 MB/s

 Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     8.258 MB/s

 Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     3.838 MB/s [   937.0 IOPS]

Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.389 MB/s [    95.0 IOPS]

        Sequential Read (T= 1) :    19.295 MB/s

       Sequential Write (T= 1) :     7.130 MB/s

  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     3.468 MB/s [   846.7 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     0.474 MB/s [   115.7 IOPS]

 Test : 50 MiB [F: 17.5% (10.2/58.2 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]

 Date : 2017/10/07 6:15:36

   OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Vostro_500MiB USB

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]

* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

  Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :    73.345 MB/s

 Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     8.258 MB/s

 Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     5.898 MB/s [  1439.9 IOPS]

Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.932 MB/s [   227.5 IOPS]

        Sequential Read (T= 1) :    72.355 MB/s

       Sequential Write (T= 1) :    13.212 MB/s

  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     5.002 MB/s [  1221.2 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     0.919 MB/s [   224.4 IOPS]

 Test : 500 MiB [E: 17.5% (10.2/58.2 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]

 Date : 2017/10/07 6:36:39

   OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Vostro_500MiB

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]

* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

  Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :    19.379 MB/s

 Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     7.104 MB/s

 Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     3.736 MB/s [   912.1 IOPS]

Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.923 MB/s [   225.3 IOPS]

        Sequential Read (T= 1) :    19.295 MB/s

       Sequential Write (T= 1) :     8.179 MB/s

  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     3.280 MB/s [   800.8 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :     0.906 MB/s [   221.2 IOPS]

 Test : 500 MiB [F: 17.5% (10.2/58.2 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]

 Date : 2017/10/07 6:23:20

   OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)