SD Card Startup in Bolero

[Pietra]

Not sure how many people use the SD card slot in the stereo but this seemed a good alternative to the MDI interace plus cable plus ... scenario.

However in practise the SD card seems to take forever to initialise.

I am using an 8 Gb card (apparenlty up to 32 Gb can be used) which is pretty much full.

i have tried to use minimal subdirectories within the folder system but it literally takes minutes

start up is the worse, but trying to change folder using selection is not that much better.

Has anyone else had this problem or have any tips on how to shortern the startup time

[Swallowtail]

I use a 32GB SD card in my RNS510 and it is pretty much instantaneous.

[K1W1]

I use a 32GB SD card in my RNS510 and it is pretty much instantaneous.

How much data is on it?

I have a 16GB card in my Bolero with around 3GB of music in a flat file system.
One short track on the root directory (30 seconds long) and then a directory for each album with I guess up to about 20 songs per directory.

I would say that my card takes 20 seconds to initialise it seems like ages but I guess it's not really that long.

I have around the same amount of music on my iPhone and my perception is that that initialises quicker through the MDI.

FWIW I have the single track on the root directory to overcome the Bolero's strange "Mix" function. If you select Mix it will randomly play all tracks in a directory before it then goes and plays randomly from other directories. By having the short track in the root I start that then push Mix then just get random tracks.

[Pietra]

its pretty full

on the 8 Gb card i have 7.98 Gb - road trip to Canberra planned for the weekend - while i don't have a flat directory its no more than 1 subfolder deep (artist, followed by Album)

[JAZ_RS]

SD card

My card is an 8Gb and loads pretty much straight away. I have noticed when flicking through directories that some times it says can't read, yet it starts playing the tracks.

[TuNeS]

i have a 32gb SDHC card that is 16gb full. Same issue which peeved me off at first, however I am used to it now. The only pain is when it initialises when you first start the car. After that, if you need to surf directories, the music keeps playing while you get the delay, so it isnt that bad. The time delay to change CD's would be greater.

I didnt get the MDI interface and I am not paying the cost to get it installed.

But the SD card did get me to rockhampton and back without hearing the same song twice!

[dazag]

You do know not all SD cards are the same, there is Cat 3 & cat 4 cards which are 3Mb/s & 4 Mb/s data transfer cards or you can get the Extreme & Extreme 3 which I think is 20Mb/s & 30Mb/s data transfer rates. You may find you have an older SD card that doesnt have the higher transer rates which maybe causing the slow initialise??
Just a thought

[TuNeS]

Thats only really an issue when writing to the card in a SLR camera. The SDHC card i have is a Sandisk Ultra 2 which suffers the same latency unfortunately. The bolero isnt the fastest reader when you have high amounts of data.

[K1W1]

You may find you have an older SD card that doesnt have the higher transer rates which maybe causing the slow initialise??
Just a thought

Older SD cards are all below 2GB. All the cards people are talking about here are actually SDHC cards and have faster although variable transfer rates. I am going to try a faster card at some stage but i don't think that is really the problem. I think the problem is the firmware in the Bolero more likely. Overall I don't really find it to be a major issue just a "quirk". I can live without music for 20-30 seconds.

[Pietra]

the card is an SDHC Card

SDHC 2 - 8 GB

it feels longer than 20 to 40 seconds so will have to take the time to time it

i suspect that on that basis of peoples response (including a thread on Briskoda) that the Bolero is a bit slow to startup, and because i have pretty much filled the card to capacity it doesn't help

only other thing i can think of is the whole fat32 formating requirement that the manual states as a requirement for cards <2Gb but i have no idea how to even check that - random clicking in the properties section hasn't really revealed anything

thanks for all your input though - much appreciated

[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]

Any conclusions?

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]

my final 2c

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...