Ok, so I’ve run into my first real frustration with my hybrid computer. Last night I received my 128gb Patriot chip from amazon. I was excited to have a decent chip to work with, as a $10 256gb chip from China was a no go. As soon as I got the chip installed with a virtual disk drive set up (I used the instructions here to turn the removable chip into a permanent drive), I ran CrystalDisk. I was sorely disappointed to discover the difference between the two chips was negligible.
After reviewing this thread on superuser.com, I discovered that the Intel Baytrail SoC (System on a Chip) Z37xx has issues with the MicroSD port. Like, big enough issues that UHS-1 chips don’t work, and if they do, they are extremely slow (think 4+ hours to transfer 4GB.) I’ve looked at firmware updates and nothing addresses the MicroSD. One of the big challenges I run into is that of the 64gb chip built into the tablet, only about 20gb is available, and that’s not enough to install everything I want, or have my necessities from dropbox functional. If I clear off the backup partition and install windows 10, I could free more space but that’s a weeks worth of messing around. I have discovered specific BIOS updates I have to do for that, as this computer uses WIMBoot, which I talked about in this post.
I had a 32GB chip that seemed to work just fine. Perhaps it wasn’t UHS-1. Unfortunately I don’t have CrystalDisk performance tests available for that. I’m going to reinstall that so I have some usable space.