Huge speed increase in pre-test initialization with SD card vs old USB drive

[David (PassMark)]

one from like 2007

So USB1 or USB2 with slow flash memory.

A log is written out during the boot process. It is only a few KB in size, but these old flash drives are really really slow when doing lots of little writes. Each log line is a separate write action.

New drive might be 100x faster for small writes.

You can run your own benchmark if you like with the Advance Disk Test in PerformanceTest.

[TrantaLocked]

I didn't think this would matter but I decided to try installing memtest86 on a high speed micro SD card and found the initialization with SPD Info, Cores and other checks to be way faster than on an old USB drive.

I've always used a Sony 2GB drive, the green microvault one from like 2007, and it has always worked fine but one thing I found is after I updated to the latest version of memtest86 which was compatible with my new Ryzen 5 7600 CPU, the "Gathering SPD Info" part of initialization was taking 15+ seconds to load and I could see the activity light on the USB drive showing that something was being read or written for that period. Now with a new SanDisk UHS-1 microSD with adapter card the whole initialization takes under 10 seconds.

But the reason I made the switch to SD was actually because I wanted to free up USB ports for when I would be running memtest86 multiple times spread out over multiple days. That way I can just keep the SD card in, which I never use otherwise, and have one more USB port freed for other things. I had no idea it was going to increase the initialization speed like this, so I'm quite happy.