Uploading To Micro Sd Card

[+JetMonkey]

I haven't messed around yet with Garmin's POI Loader but after reading many of the posts about it I sure plan to. I was wondering if there is a preferred way to load the POI files and possibly maps themselves to the Mico SD card. Between using a USB cable connected to the GPSr or by using a card reader, is one way preffered over the other for any reason?

 

One last question, if you use a USB cable, how do you know the POIs are being loaded on the Micro SD card and not the GPSr unit itself?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Steve

[lamarieves]

Am waiting on my new 512 card with adapter to arrive to try a card reader--in theory it should be faster than directly to the GPs--I will let you know when I try it--

[lamarieves]

I just finished reading the lengthy Garmin60CSX Observations thread and on the last page (5) there is a pretty good discussion on the Micro load alternatives

[+weakfish]

I've tried both methods and honestly don't see a difference.

The majority of the "transfer time" is spent creating the mapset image.

CPU power seems to be the "bottleneck"

I can fill a 256 card in about 7 minutes start to finish, most of the time spent calculating the mapset image.

 

Since I have enough cards on hand to store all the mapsource products I own, I'm not really all that concerned... POI, Waypoint, Track and Routes still transfer in the blink of an eye.

[lamarieves]

Got my 512 card and loaded 6 city nav segments and 4 western topo segments--took 7 minutes on the GPS and 3 minutes on the card reader--BUT--you can't load waypoints thru the card reader which has been covered at length in other threads--

 

So if you want to just do maps the card reader is faster--did not pay much attention to the size of the stuff I was loading but the CN stuff included St Louis and Chicago--

[toddm]

If it's a big chunk of data going through the card reader is a LOT faster, It took nearly 50 minutes to do about 450 meg through the unit, and right around 10-11 minutes to do the same through the card reader. Considering about 5min of that in both cases is indexing the maps going through the card reader is seriously faster, on the order of about 900% faster for the data xfer. Usb 1.0 bad.

 

My guess is you will see their next unit have usb 2.0, as people start getting 1-2+ meg cards and it takes hours to transfer data to them, they are going to get a lot of feedback to get faster xfer's I'd bet. Thankfully if you use the card reader you can get around it, but most average users probably won't know that, and some cards do not come with the adapter to use them in a standard SD slot.