iPhone/iPodTouch. Regarding the flash drive. How much faster is it then a physical disk drive?

Question

Does anyone have a ball park speed comparison between a modern physical disk drive and the flash drive on iPhone/iPodTouch? What is behind this question is this: I want to pull images from the cloud, park them on the flash drive and then sequence through them as a flipbook animation keeping as few images in RAM as possible so as to keep my memory footprint in check.

I would appreciate hearing from folks who have perhaps been down this road. Perhaps there is an open source library that already does this? Dunno.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers, Doug

Answer 1

Hey

Honestly, I can't quite figure out why it is relevant to know how much faster the flash drive is than a physical drive. The slowest part of the chain will anyway be the data download through the network, regardless whether you use Wifi or 3G/Edge. Regarding the second question, you might want to have a look at Three20, a framework which is able to imitate the original photo app.

Here is the link: http://github.com/facebook/three20

Best, Robin

Answer 2

At a guess, the flash drive is something quite like a normal compact flash card, which would make it rather a lot slower than a modern mechanical hard disk.

Answer 3

As others have said, the local filesystem is much faster than your network connection, so what does its exact speed matter?

For an example of implementing a flipbook-style animation, see the second code example on this page, which was pointed out in response to this similar question. In that question, Mo DeJong reports animating 480x320 images from disk at 15 FPS.