Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

I think everyone would much more appreciate fact over opinion in this topic :D


what is, most literally, the best SD card "out there" in context of:

-Speed
-Reliability AND durability
-capacity

all at the same time. I keep hearing so much rubbish about how one card does this, and another this.. and all the same time, the most popular cards seem to fail most often.

ghag!


So.. what'll it be? :cool:

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

I'm not sure what you're getting at here!

Higher speed = better
Higher capacity = better

Both of those are easy to identify with modern SDHC cards. Class 6 cards are the fastest. 32GB cards are the biggest. That bit is easy.

Reliability is very hard to gauge. All a card is is some silicon inside a plastic shell, almost identical between all the different cards. Any widescale problems would be widely reported, instead of one person here and there saying "my card fell apart do not buy", which isn't exactly something you should base a decision upon. SD cards are simple (physically), compared to cameras and the like.

I believe all cards are more or less created equal. I just aim for the size and speed I want, and if it's from a manufacturer I trust, I'll buy it, knowing it's almost certainly (99.99%>) going to survive long after I no longer need it.

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

haha! I suppose I was a bit vague :p



Well indeed, I've heard a number of things from mostly idiots claiming "dont buy this cause it broke (they broke it, lol)" or "it wont read anymore, dont buy"


I've heard a lot of thigns about specific companies and how those specific companies' brand is much more cheaply made, or, seemingly enough, their cards in particular tend to not last long/develop serious problems concerning storage, durability (cards splitting open and such) and 'bricking' some, so-to-speak.


I was just curious as to which brands tend to be more reliable than others, or which can load properly (some 2gb as well as 4 and 8, depending on the company/brand, seem to load 25% less than others. Whereas one may load 987mb on a 1gb card, another brand will only load 768mb, but the 768mb card seems to go faster etc..)

get my drift?


I was looking into dual 16gb.. but jesus christ, where have you heard of 32gb? how stable are they?

And there lies my initial concern.. stability.

From what I've done my homework from, either its the brand, which I'm assuming first, that tends to lack in manufacturing finesse (which is my general inquiry to begin with; are there better brands from others, and which), or is it the user who seems to somehow do something wrong to make cards break/die/(in rare cases, I guess, lock the media on the card)

Let me know; any help will be greatly appreciated.


[EDIT]: and also, which highest capacity cards would work best with my N800 as well as have the best available card speed?

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

any kingston (japan) SDs and microSDs are very nice

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

How is anyone supposed to respond to you? You say you want facts and not opinion. Well... unless someone has the funds to buy multiple cards at multiple speeds all you are going to get is opinion.

I bought an 8GB Patriot, class 6 card for my N800 @ around $40 and couldn't be happier. Since my existing card readers do not support SDHC (< right there is a big reason why some report bad cards.) I was concerned about the speed to transfer files from my PC to the tablet...
In fact, using the USB cable with this card seemed just as fast as my old USB card reader and a 2GB card I have.

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

I use two Kingston 8 gig Class 6 cards (Kingston Part Number: SD6/8GB) in my N800 and I'm quite happy with the performance. Since I also do not have an SDHC card reader on PC, I was also quite concerned with file transfer performance and at first it was simply brutal to the point where it was unusable. However, when I enable write caching on my PC for the N800 internal and external SD card slots, problem is solved. I now get quite acceptable transfer rates between my PC and N800.

A word of caution mind you. With write caching enabled you MUST manually stop the SD card interface on your PC PRIOR to disconnecting from the PC. Mind you, that is a process I would recommend even if I wasn't using SDHC cards anyway. I prefer to have a visual guarantee that all data has been written prior to disconnecting my N800.

Crouching Hamster

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

16 GB Patriot Class 6 here. (Internal slot, I'm using the MiniSD + adapter that came with for file transfer with the external slot.) Works fine.

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

I got the cheapest 4gb sdhc card I could get my hands on, which is apparently called the PQ1 it says on it?, and it's been working great for a month.

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

I heard that this brand likes to fail at 2 months of use. Please keep us posted after another month.

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

I've found SanDisk to know and support their product very well, produce standards compliant parts while others have just been close, accurately state the performance and environmental specs for their parts, and have the best overall reliability. My experience has been from building linux based data acquisition systems for harsh climates. I've used them for swap, constant read/write, even compiling software, and they haven't skipped a beat.

-Jonathan

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

I use an A_data 4GB card - paid just 20 bucks at buy.com. so far so good.

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

Well, not me but my employer ;) has the funds to allow me and my staff to buy multiple SD cards for a range of mobile devices. This is part of our day-to-day business as we are eg. conducting tests with mobile phones, PDAs, UMPCs, smartphones and running VPN clients, activesync push and so on.

From the day-to-day perspective, I mostly don't see a difference whatever SD card I use. That said, we usually buy "our trusted brands", i.e. from brands we know for years now and that (to date at least :) ) never failed us: Kingston, Transcend, SanDisk (random order). With SDHC we also had to try some new card readers (SanDisk, Lian Li, Kingston...).

We use all different kinds of SD cards: microSD, miniSD, SD, SDHC (micro, mini, ...), capacity ranging from 512 MB to 8 GB with 16 GB following shortly. And every single card holds the specified capacity.
Honestly, although I do prefer class 6 SDHC cards the larger the better I only can tell the difference when transferring serious amounts of data. Just using the cards with a mobile device, all we bought to date are fit for the job. At least that's our experience ;)

Bottom line? I don't worry too much as IMHO I would have to spend 80-90% of my time to squeeze out the last 10-20% of performance. But maybe that's just me ;)

(Side note: As I travel a lot and we are field testing the devices, I have my music with me - that's the main reason I prefer SDHC class 6 :rolleyes: )

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

Through accumulated experiance from various users. That's how.


This is a perfect example of what i was looking for.


And this is a perfectly descriptive example of what I was intending to find.

True to this statement, I had contemplated purchasing cards referring only to these listed companies, with Lian Li as the exception. I've heard much that these cards tend to fail often.


Thank you all for the support! :p

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

Just to avoid misunderstandings... I was referring to an internal (3.5" model CR-35A) card reader by Lian Li. I'm not aware of any SD(HC) cards they provide, at least not in Germany ;)

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

Speaking of memory cards, I recently switched out the factory 128MB Nokia MiniSD card for a 2GB Kingston card. I had "virtual memory" enabled on both of the cards.

After installing the 2GB card, it seems like the device is a bit slower. The browser takes a wee bit longer to open, for example. Could it be that the Nokia card is faster than the Kingston card I installed?

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

i got the a-data 16gb sdhc card for 65 bucks from newegg. i also have an 8gb kingston class 6 card. i don't know if the anything faster than a certain class even matters for the n800 though. i just no the 2 sd card would crap out and have a write lock from maemo mapper and these faster cards don't have that issue.

Re: Bottom line.. whats the best -allround- SD card?
 

I just ordered 2 A-Data 16GB SDHC cards from newegg.com and should be picking them up when I get back to Singapore in a couple of week. These cards will reside in my external N800 slot and I will provide feedback on their reliability over the next couple of months. I plan to use these cards for media playback (mostly videos and music)