Built in SD Card Reader reads at half the speed with Vista, compared to XP

I have an Asus W2J laptop, and it's got a built in SD Card reader slot (for SD, MMC and Memory Stick)

Since upgrading to Vista, I've always known it was reading slower than when I had Win XP on the laptop. I finally did some actual tests ysterday, to get some benchmarks on the speed of the reader. I compared the speed of the built in SD slot, as opposed to a USB2.0 SD card reader.

The results were that the built in reader reads at pretty much half the speed of an external USB2 SD card reader, on 3 different SD cards. It would read at about 3MB/s using the built-in reader, and about 6MB/s using the external USB2 reader.

Does anyone have any similar experiences with a built in SD card reader on their Asus laptop with Vista?

I know that the built in reader used to be at least as fast as the USB2 one, and I'm pretty sure it was in fact quicker.

I'm using the standard Vista SD-card-reader drivers that were installed by Vista, as Asus don't seem to provide any alternative SD drivers. They do drivers to support the other types of cards in the reader.

Can anyone suggest either different drivers, or any solutions? I transfer off my SD card almost everyday, and although it's no biggie to use the USB2 reader, it would be so much easier to use the built in one.

As a side note - the built in reader WRITES about 1MB/s quicker than the external USB2 reader. Weird!


If someone who has Win XP on their Asus laptop (another W2J would be ideal, but any Asus laptop with a built in SD reader would be great) could test this for me I would be very grateful. There is a small self contained utility called CrystalDiskMark here, which doesnt require an install.

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html


Any help or advice would be great!

Thanks

 

I have the same issue on a W2P with Vista preinstalled.....The speeds you get are about the same as I'm seeing.....and for me it's very much a problem as I use the SD reader for Vista Readyboost....it obviously doesn't read the pagefile quick enough which in turn causes my soundcard to crackle....basically anytime I want to watch a movie/listen to music, I have too eject the SD card.

Hopefully someone will post an alternative driver....because I'd really like to fix this annoyance

 

Here's the results I received



--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 1.0 (C) 2007 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World [ http://crystalmark.info/]
--------------------------------------------------

Sequential Read : 3.014 MB/s
Sequential Write : 7.191 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 3.010 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 1.196 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 2.316 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 0.000 MB/s

Date : 2007/05/21 13:54:42