Can A Different SD Card Make a Significant Difference in Battery and Performance?

[TNCattleDog]

So, I've been doing some thinking and a lot of it has to do with the big differences I see in peoples battery life. Now, I know that the particular model/network might make a difference as well as your location and signal but I still see a lot of reports of terrible performance and battery life even after hard resets and swapping out for a new model.

I did some thinking... Of course one factor can be apps but some of you have gone so far as disabling or not installing any apps other than what comes preinstalled. I did not make the connection until the other day when I bought a larger SD card and noticed improvements in both battery AND performance.

I started out with a Sandisk "Ultra" 32GB Micro SD when I first got my phone and it seemed like things lagged quite a bit. I attributed it to it being a new phone and things "settling in" over the first couple weeks. After experiencing several lockups and freezes, I swappped to a smaller AData 16GB card and things really worked great. In fact, that was during a period of time that I got over 48 hours of use on a regular basis. Then my Promo card arrived, a plain Sandisk 32 GB C10 card. Things leveled out, battery life was good at about 18 hours of daily use with at least 40 or so percent left at the end of the day. But, I listen to a lot of music and take a lot of pictures and my 32 gb card was getting a bit small. AND.... Amazon had a great deal on the Samsung EVO 64 GB high performance card so I bought one.

Over the last few days there had been a noticeable gain in not only performance but battery life as well. I've been unplugged since 8am today and I am still in the upper 70% range for battery and my SOT is at 1 hour... thats not saying a lot but I have been streaming music to either my BT headphones or JBL Charge almost all day. With average use, I am usually in the 50 to 60 or less % range by this time of day (unless I'm at work where its worse). On top of that, it seems like scrolling through Google+ is snappier as well as using chrome.

Overall "seat of the pants" tells me that switching to a different SD card has made a difference for me. Anyone else able to give it a try and see if it makes a difference?

David

 

[Rukbat]

If you have a corrupt file in the card, it can eat your battery fast. It's not the size of the card, it's the media scanner going around in circles.

I never noticed any significant battery difference between 4GB, 15GB, 32GB and 64GB cards. (I can't, of course, run the phone exactly the same for 4 days, so there are going to be differences, but if I charge to 100%, then let the phone sit for 24 hours, it's down about the same amount no matter which card is in it.)

 

[sswitzer]

So, I've been doing some thinking and a lot of it has to do with the big differences I see in peoples battery life. Now, I know that the particular model/network might make a difference as well as your location and signal but I still see a lot of reports of terrible performance and battery life even after hard resets and swapping out for a new model.

I did some thinking... Of course one factor can be apps but some of you have gone so far as disabling or not installing any apps other than what comes preinstalled. I did not make the connection until the other day when I bought a larger SD card and noticed improvements in both battery AND performance.

I started out with a Sandisk "Ultra" 32GB Micro SD when I first got my phone and it seemed like things lagged quite a bit. I attributed it to it being a new phone and things "settling in" over the first couple weeks. After experiencing several lockups and freezes, I swappped to a smaller AData 16GB card and things really worked great. In fact, that was during a period of time that I got over 48 hours of use on a regular basis. Then my Promo card arrived, a plain Sandisk 32 GB C10 card. Things leveled out, battery life was good at about 18 hours of daily use with at least 40 or so percent left at the end of the day. But, I listen to a lot of music and take a lot of pictures and my 32 gb card was getting a bit small. AND.... Amazon had a great deal on the Samsung EVO 64 GB high performance card so I bought one.

Over the last few days there had been a noticeable gain in not only performance but battery life as well. I've been unplugged since 8am today and I am still in the upper 70% range for battery and my SOT is at 1 hour... thats not saying a lot but I have been streaming music to either my BT headphones or JBL Charge almost all day. With average use, I am usually in the 50 to 60 or less % range by this time of day (unless I'm at work where its worse). On top of that, it seems like scrolling through Google+ is snappier as well as using chrome.

Overall "seat of the pants" tells me that switching to a different SD card has made a difference for me. Anyone else able to give it a try and see if it makes a difference?

David

I can see that happening if you use the files on the SD card a lot (music most likely). I don't think it's a matter of how it affects the battery but instead its how much chip juice is required for the constant reads; I'd expect your phone to be faster and smoother in general wth a well functioning SD card, and battery is an offshoot of that. On a PC you'd see better performance from a faster, well functioning hard drive, but of course battery is not usually an issue there.