Faster Map Update
Posted: Sat Jun 26, 2021 1:21 am
I'm not sure where to post this, but since this REALLY affected my 450 and 550 I will post it here.
Faster is an understatement! I use SD cards in my 450 and 550. I've seen suggestions about putting the SD card into a card slot on your PC instead of leaving it in the Zumo. I never tried; never thought it would make much difference and wasn't worth the trouble. I was wrong.
CNNA NT 2022.20 was just released, so I decided to update my Zumos. I tried to update with my traditional method, loading the map to my PC first and then using Mapinstall to load the maps to the SD card in the Zumo. The map transfer was going to take 4 hours. I fell asleep during the transfer, and so did my PC, so the transfer was interrupted and didn't complete. I tried another transfer of just my local area, that took 30 minutes, but it was successful.
Then I decided to try making my SD look like my Zumo and put it into the card slot. All that's required is copying one file; GarminDevice.xml into a Garmin folder on the SD card. That will make Express, and MapSource think the SD card is your Zumo. Instead of Mapinstall, I decided to try using MapSource to transfer the maps. I selected the entire continental US along with a few Canadian provinces, 155 map sets, over 3 GB of data. Mapsource saw the SD card as my Zumo 550 and let me transfer the maps to the card. The process took about 20 minutes, building indexes, traffic files and transferring the maps. I haven't tried this with MapInstall so I can't say that the same improvement will occur.
20 minutes versus 4 hours!
Faster is an understatement! I use SD cards in my 450 and 550. I've seen suggestions about putting the SD card into a card slot on your PC instead of leaving it in the Zumo. I never tried; never thought it would make much difference and wasn't worth the trouble. I was wrong.
CNNA NT 2022.20 was just released, so I decided to update my Zumos. I tried to update with my traditional method, loading the map to my PC first and then using Mapinstall to load the maps to the SD card in the Zumo. The map transfer was going to take 4 hours. I fell asleep during the transfer, and so did my PC, so the transfer was interrupted and didn't complete. I tried another transfer of just my local area, that took 30 minutes, but it was successful.
Then I decided to try making my SD look like my Zumo and put it into the card slot. All that's required is copying one file; GarminDevice.xml into a Garmin folder on the SD card. That will make Express, and MapSource think the SD card is your Zumo. Instead of Mapinstall, I decided to try using MapSource to transfer the maps. I selected the entire continental US along with a few Canadian provinces, 155 map sets, over 3 GB of data. Mapsource saw the SD card as my Zumo 550 and let me transfer the maps to the card. The process took about 20 minutes, building indexes, traffic files and transferring the maps. I haven't tried this with MapInstall so I can't say that the same improvement will occur.
20 minutes versus 4 hours!