Photofast CR-5400 Review

I don't have a contribution section set up on my site yet, but a friend of mine (who asked to be known as Sashimi-Y) contributed this review of the CR-5300, a device that lets you set up some wacky dual MicroSD memory system on your PSP. Read on...

Photofast CR-5400 Review

By Sashimi-Y

As of late, those frustrated by the high price of Memory Sticks have found cheaper alternatives in the form of memory card adapters. Taiwanese company PhotoFast found success with their CR-5300 adapter, which let PSP gamers drop a MicroSD into a Memory Stick adapter for far cheaper than the official Sony equivalent (as of this writing, 8GB of MicroSD costs about 3400 yen and a CR-5300 or equivalent is less than 1000 yen).

PhotoFast took things one crazy step further with the CR-5400, which lets you put two MicroSD cards into the same adapter for RAID 0-style storage. The first batch of the adapter was defective, prompting a recall, but fixed batches have been popping up in Akihabara stores in limited quantities. To make a long story short, this lets you cram 16GB of storage into your PSP for under a hundred bucks, with the possibility of boosting that to 32GB once MicroSD gets cheaper.

The CR-5400 retails for 2900 yen and requires two MicroSD cards of the same capacity. For the test, I used two Sandisk 8GB MicroSD cards, though one of them was a few months old and had a slower read speed than the other. Fortunately, the adapter didn't seem to mind.

Typically, the largest concern regarding third-party adapters is reduced read/write speed. I ran the BlackSpeed benchmarking tests and also ran real-world tests on launching executables, comparing the CR-5400 versus a standard Sandisk 4GB memory stick. Here are the results:

BLACKSPEED TEST:

CR-5400 16gb (2x8gb)

Cluster Size : 32.0 KiB (32768 Bytes)

• read : 9.7176 MiB/sec (Blocksize 1024.0k)
• write : 10.7720 MiB/sec (Blocksize 1024.0k)
• read : 9.2278 MiB/sec (Blocksize 32.0k)
• write : 10.3255 MiB/sec (Blocksize 32.0k)
• read : 5.2254 MiB/sec (Blocksize 2.0k)
• write : 1.1843 MiB/sec (Blocksize 2.0k)
• read : 2.1787 MiB/sec (Blocksize 0.5k)
• write : 0.3627 MiB/sec (Blocksize 0.5k)

Performance Index: 479

Blackspeed test for the CR-5400 16gb

SANDISK 4gb

Cluster Size : 32.0 KiB (32768 Bytes)

• read : 15.9592 MiB/sec (Blocksize 1024.0k)
• write : 5.8087 MiB/sec (Blocksize 1024.0k)
• read : 12.7951 MiB/sec (Blocksize 32.0k)
• write : 6.0352 MiB/sec (Blocksize 32.0k)
• read : 3.9201 MiB/sec (Blocksize 2.0k)
• write : 1.7426 MiB/sec (Blocksize 2.0k)
• read : 1.2366 MiB/sec (Blocksize 0.5k)
• write : 0.4841 MiB/sec (Blocksize 0.5k)

Performance Index: 524

Blackspeed test for a Sandisk 4gb Memory Stick

The Sandisk scored higher overall with much faster read speeds, though the CR-5400 boasted faster writes. Oddly, this was not reflected in real-world tests, where the CR-5400 continually performed slightly faster than a standard 4GB Sandisk.

START GAME EXECUTABLE 1

• Sandisk 4GB: 21 seconds
• CR-5400: 20 seconds

START GAME EXECUTABLE 2

• Sandisk 4GB: 15 seconds
• CR-5400: 14 seconds

START HOMEBREW EXECUTABLE:

• Sandisk 4GB: 12 seconds
• CR-5400: 10 seconds

Obscene amounts of memory for cheap with this device.

The only downside to the CR-5400 is the fact that selecting "Video" from the XMB makes the system pause for about 5 seconds as the video list propagates; I'm not sure if this is the card's fault or the PSP itself struggling with large-capacity storage.

Also, the fit of the card is a little tight. Then again, with 16GB (and theoretically up to 32) you probably won't feel the need to swap out memory cards much anymore. Preliminary testing indicates that it's a nicely engineered piece of kit, and a way to save a few bucks while loading up your PSP with a ton of storage.