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Is It Worth Paying Extra For Fast SD Cards?
Barence writes "Are faster grades of SD memory card worth the extra cash? PC Pro has conducted in-depth speed tests on different grades of SD card to find out if they're worth the premium. In camera tests, two top-end SD cards outshone the rest by far, while class 4 cards dawdled for more than a second between shots. However, with the buffer on modern DSLRs able to handle 20 full-res shots or more, it's unlikely an expensive card will make any difference to anyone other than professionals shooting bursts of fast-action shots. What about for expanding tablet or laptop memory? A regular class 4 or 6 card that's capable of recording HD video will also be fast enough to play it back on a tablet. The only advantage of a faster card for media is that syncing with your PC will be quicker. However, a faster card is recommended if you're using it to supplement the memory of an Ultrabook or MacBook Air."
A 16GB class 10 SDHC card can be had regularly for $9 shipped from Chinese import sites like Meritline.
I don't use these cards for cameras, but do use them in my phone, and as primary storage for several dev boards, and for those use cases, even if there was a price premium, it would be worth it.
As an avid amateur photographer I once tried lower-end, slower SD cards. The wait between shots of ~1 second (disregarding the camera buffer) means you cannot even preview your shots during that time. Instead you get to wait with a nice blinking LED on the back of the camera until the preview is ready. I found this nearly unbearable after only a dozen or so shots and when I got a chance I immediately spent the money on a faster card that allows previews basically immediately. NOTE: I am using a D800, so your mileage may vary on this... with 36mp RAW files I was waiting several seconds to just preview a shot.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
I bought an 8 GB Sony U-1 card for $12 USD retail. Rated at 94 MB/s. Writes at about 16 MB/s loading Raspberry Pi images vs 3-6 MB/s for Class 4, real world. It was worth the 4 dollar premium over other name brand flash considering i will be using it for a boot drive for R Pi.
Good-bye
I used to have an old 7" netbook for my daughter to use (I've updated her since). I used the biggest, slowest SD Card I could find. Took forever to fill up the card on a single copy operation, but it played back just fine, and overall it was a great buy. On the other hand it would have sucked for a camera.
This isn't even a real discussion question. Consider what you need the card for and pay for the one you need. If the better than what you need card happens to fall in your range get it instead.
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they forgot about transfering the files to the PC, if you have a lot of really large files, a card that is a power of ten faster, will be far far far better for syncing with a computer via USB, especially if its a USB3 card reader.
imagine filling a 32GB card, and trying to transfer all those files with a class 2 card?
then wiping it securely, and then reformatting it for use somewhere else.
I don't have the time for that. I need fast memory.
today I want 30 mb/s
eventually I want 300 mb/s
the future(15 years) we should be planning for 3 GB/s
If the interface to the sd card only supports slower speeds then a fast card is useless
And for things like watching movies or listening to music the slow cards should be enough
"However, with the buffer on modern DSLRs able to handle 20 full-res shots or more, it's unlikely an expensive card will make any difference to anyone other than professionals shooting bursts of fast-action shots"
UHm, no. Top of the line SLR can't handle 20 shots in buffer, and any consumer grade is 1-2 max. You won't get you 3-5 FPS (mid tier) or 5-9FPS (high end) without a fast card. And don't even think about recording 1080p or 720p@60 without a class10 UHS1 type card. The whole PC PRo exercise is a useless article apparently trying to convince consumers to buy slower things because 640k is enough for anyo....oh wait we've heard this before, haven't we :). I'd love to see them record HD video on Class4 card. Not happening.
Buying a class 4 or 6 card is just stupid these days. That is the PC equivalent of actively seeking out a USB1.1 portable HDD instead of USB3. Because USb 1.1 is all the speed you'll ever need really.
You will never regret buying class 10, but you will almost certainly regret a class 6 so why bother? Heck, in a year or two there won't be any class 6 available anyway - it is too slow...
Cameras: Canon EOS550d, S90.
In my Canon I have to put a pretty fast card in to take more than about 10-20 seconds of video. I don't need the fastest but a 10 is pretty well the minimum. I would say that this test would be best if they had some older model cameras. Older being pretty common because if you bought a good camera even 5 years ago there is a pretty good chance that it still meets your needs and is still going strong.
My personal suggestion is for everyone with a halfway serious camera to not only get fast enough SD cards but to go on ebay and buy a spare battery and charger. When you suddenly need them it is too late to get them cheap on ebay and paying full retail price can really sting.
No. Those are just cheap the leftovers in the storehouse they need to sell somehow.
There's no point buying a Class 10 card if your camera's write speed is no faster than Class 6. Unfortunately, though, some camera makers don't provide this information, or they make make it hard to find the write speed. Thus you may have to do some web research for your specific camera.
That being said, you'll never complain (after you have bought the card) if your card is faster than your camera.
As a side comment, I think it's better to have 2 16gb cards than a single 32gb card, purely from the perspective of "no single point of failure." My goal on vacation/shoots is to have at least one card unused at the end of the trip. (I learned the hard way what can go wrong when I ran out of cards, erased a card I thought was copied to my computer, and then discovered the backup program saw the erased card and said, "Oh, you didn't want that data after all!" No one to blame but myself for that operator headspace error.)
It's very odd to me that they seem to have left out Lexar completely from this little test. Back when I was really into digital photography I spent a lot of time on DPReview and Amazon and B&H Photo looking for the best deals on the fastest CompactFlash and SD cards. The top competitors seemed to always be the SanDisk Ultra/Extreme lines and Lexar's Professional cards. Kingston has usually done well also, but the most prominent/popular over the years have always have seemed to be SanDisk and Lexar.
Even 2-3 years ago I remember Lexar having "300x" cards competing with the SanDisk Extreme lineup. Just now doing a quick search on Amazon shows Lexar "600x" SD cards available, so it's not like they've dropped out of the market.
Maybe somebody at Lexar pissed off the editor of PC Pro? I can't imagine why else you'd leave one of the fastest cards on the market out of a speed test. Hmm...
Oh, yeah. PC Pro. Why the f**k am I even reading Slashdot anymore?
And for things like watching movies or listening to music the slow cards should be enough
Music? Yes. Even lossless stereo audio rarely exceeds 1 Mbps. Standard-definition movies? Yes; DVD Video's maximum bit rate is 10 Mbps. High-definition movies? Not so much. BD Video's maximum bit rate is 54 Mbps. To rip in real time, you'd need at least 7 MB/s of write throughput, or something faster than a class 6.
Don't even bother with cards less then class 10, there not really worth the investment. "slower" or lower class SD cards are perfectly find but for the slight price difference you may as well spend the extra $5 and by the better card, it is faster, has better overall predominance and just lasts longer.
"... with the buffer on modern DSLRs able to handle 20 full-res shots or more, it's unlikely an expensive card will make any difference to anyone other than professionals shooting bursts of fast-action shots."
I have seen a number of reviews for inexpensive video cameras that said a 4x card was not fast enough and caused choppy video, but a faster card fixed it.
How many people _actually_ shoot more than 10 frames/minute on a regular/continuous basis? Really. Think about your personal usage. The likelyhood is that the answer is Z-Eee-Arrr-Oooh. ZERO. or close to it. Those who do are serious about their video, and are much more picky about things than simple capture rates.
While modern DSLR cameras might have large buffers, normal consumer-grade or even enthusiast-grade point-and-shoot cameras don't necessarily have them. IMO it makes sense for an average person to buy a higher speed card. They're probably only buying one card anyway, and the price difference between a slow card and a fast card is small enough to make it worth it.
They're not that expensive. My latest set of 16gb CF cards were $16 a piece and even without the $5 off they were still quite cheap. It reads at 45mbps and writes at 40mbps. And I see ones for about triple the price that double the speed. Overkill for the vast majority of people, but cards last a long time and at $70 a pop, they're not that expensive for those that really need that kind of speed.
I know there are faster cards out there, but that's about half a second to write per RAW file. For most people, that's going to be more than enough speed. Now, for those that are regularly filling the buffer, that would be a different matter.
But, considering that the 266x cards are reading faster than what the HDD usually read at, I think that's probably good enough.
I once went to frys to pick up some extra cards, and the sales rep told me that if I buy the more expensive cards, it will improve the quality of my pictures because they will be sharper and more colorful. I am still trying to figure out how he justifies that statement.
The class ratings from reputable vendors tend to be reliable, but you don't always get this from lesser known manufacturers. Most Class 10 cards get at least Class 6 performance.
A Class 10 32 GB SDHC card costs $33 or less. The same card at Class 6 costs $25 or less, a whopping $8 in savings. Most people buy one card and leave it in their camera except to transfer photos to the PC to upload to Facbook, etc. Is it really advisable to recommend that people save $8 for a one-time purchase of a memory card? I think not!!
For Photography, work out your budget, figure out what you need for your style of taking pictures, and buy the best memory you can afford for your needs. If you can get by with class 4 or class 6 memory, great. If you find that you need class 10, try out some of the budget options noted above and see if they serve your needs.
For other uses, you may very well find that a slower card actually works better for you than a 'faster' card. Class 10 is great for streaming large volumes of data onto the card, but experience has shown in the microsd cards that if you need to do a lot of small file manipulations, read and write, etc. a class 4 may outperform a class 10 card. This is of interest to people doing cyanogen mod implementations running off of the sdcard, but is a completely different use case from a photographer shooting high res photos, or a videographer shooting HD video.
You never know...
I've learned through trial and error what cards actually work on my camcorder. For still photography, I've always been a SanDisk fan. But every class 10 SanDisk SD card I have used is unable to support the highest quality recording on my Canon camcorder. Oddly, class 10 Transend cards work fine. It appears the class 10 rating is a read-speed rating - not write-speed. I've tried 6 different SanDisk cards over the years and they continue to disappoint.
Place nail here >+
When it comes to memory you always want the good stuff.
There are many reasons why.
#1 Buying high end cards pushes the market in that direction. I don't think they should make slow chips anymore.
#2 It makes the experience better. In almost every application. Loading, unloading, device performance. Each device will have limitations but you should seek to maximize the potential.
#3 Memory is cheap. The fast cards are available on-line for the same price as the slow cards in the store.
#4 I forgot what #4 is but I'm sure there are more reasons.
I used to have an old 7" netbook for my daughter to use (I've updated her since).
Ah pubescence 2.0, them were the days.
So, from the summary, it sounds like the article states that slower-rated SD cards are just as good as faster-rated ones, except when they're not.
OK.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It will when you record highres video
From the article (first page, you should have spotted it)
It may seem counter-intuitive that capturing still images requires a faster card than shooting video, but Full HD footage isn’t as space-hungry as you might imagine. Despite the “high-definition” terminology, each HD frame has a comparatively low resolution of just over two megapixels. Plus, since consecutive frames of a video are often extremely similar, clever compression techniques can be used to store moving images efficiently. A data rate of 4-6MB/sec is ample for continuous shooting.
Still photographs have a far higher resolution: a typical consumer DSLR may capture around 12 megapixels of detail, and high-end models often record more than 20 megapixels. Each scene may therefore contain ten times as much information as a comparable video frame
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I wonder how the write times change when they become over-write times, and sectors have to be erased before they can be written.
I have a Canon T3i and have tried to shoot 720P 60FPS video with cheap class 10 cards and the camera pukes after a second or so.
It only works well with a Sandisk class 10 card.
I always buy Class 6 SD cards, why because there slightly cheaper then Class 10 nearly always a smiler or identical card when from the same brand. Do I sound illogical? Study the specification, Class 10 has a less rigorous testing metric, they don't do any random access tests on Class 10 cards. So far I've had the best performance with Sanddisk Ultra class 6 cards. I admit I do push the random access on some of my uses, like using it has the system drive for a Nook Color, booting UBCD4win on a ISOSTICK. and as a system drive for a couple ARM Developer boards.
Brand name cards for reliability & speed. I've seen more than a few cheap cards fail but never a good brand name card.
Lower classed cards of a good brand are usually faster than higher classed cheap brands too. About all a cards class rating really means is that at some point it passed a very specific write throughput benchmark. Slow cards are near useless for many purposes. If you ever want to use the card outside of a shitty camera, you'll appreciate any extra speed.
Note that most benchmark ignore read and write latency too, which can get very significant if using for other purposes.
... would take less burst shots than amateurs since they would know when to take a shot after having already framed it in their mind.
Amateurs (and enthusiasts like myself) can often use burst shooting for shoot-and-pray. Hopefully amongst those photos something good came out!
Since SD cards are the standard storage medium for the Raspberry Pi, what about a speed comparison for that?
I always buy class10 32gb cards I even have one in a sony ereader where I'm using maybe a gb at most and don't need that kind of speed whatsover it's a total waste even I recognise, I guess it's a character flaw with myself I've yet to get a 64gb one but I definitely do want them even if I never use the space.
Yeah, the on board SSD was 4GB. The factory installed version of Linux couldn't even update the day I took it out of the box because the drive was full. I put eeeBuntu on the thing and it worked out great. You would be surprised how many kids movies compressed to PSP size in stereo you can fit into a 32GB SSD card. She would watch movies and even play a few video games on that thing in the back seat. I gave it to my niece and nephew when I got her a newer Acer with a 10" screen.
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I thought that I was fine with the memory I had until I shot raw on DSLR, If you've never shot raw it will change your life. The files are 30Mb for one and 20Mb for the other DSLR that I have, so lets do a quick calculation to see what the time between shots would be on a class 2/4 card (~6Mb/sec) vs a class 10 (~10Mb/sec). If I wanted to save 1 file it would take me 5 or 3 seconds respectively for the larger files. This is absurd when you are shooting photography. So you ask, I have no fancy camera, why would I want a fast card? Lets suppose you fill that nice 32Gb class 4 card you bought up with files and now you want to get them off. Well it will take you around 2 hours to get those files transferred. You might as well burn a few DVD's while your at it. Now I only buy sandisk extreme, they are 45Mb/sec (with some at 95Mb/sec, which is almost fast enough to be a swapfile disk). I do have a Lexar and it is around 40Mb/sec and it does just fine. Not to mention if you do anything with video, they are starting 1080p@60fps or even 4k video on some cameras like a gopro 3, this generates large files and high throughput's, a class 10 card wont even cut it. So, you can buy a nice card now, or buy a cheap one now and a nice one later (unless you just store a bunch of text files on your flash device and only use it for that). You can pick up a faster card on sale for 25$ for 32GB. Don't even get me started on cell phones, I have an s3 and I've noticed a ~10% speed improvement after installing a faster card.
At work, we use them as the boot device and main mass storage device for our embedded systems. We build systems that deal with lots and lots of real time data. You're damn right it makes a difference.
In the newer cameras that have 15+MP sensors that are really good at taking pictures of the Sun and nothing else, and save raw images with no compression, and with rapid burst modes for "spray and pray" photography, you absolutely have to have the fastest flash cards you can get.
I live in Russia. I need a removable boot media which can be easily hidden. I do nothing bad: I just don't want my business to be stopped by seizure of computers containing vital information. Traditionally, if THEY want to extort business, they first seize all the computers under suspicion that they contain pirated OS and child porno. You can wait for end of investigation forever, while THEIR children play with your equipment, of just sell your business to THEM. If you are too impatient, THEY will find child pornography. THEY stop the politicians similarly, too, but there THEY look for MEIN KAMPF.
In such conditions, the higher class the better. And the terminal server under the chair of a crazy old lady somewhere far enough will help, too.
Don't all the high-end cameras still use CF? So much easier to work with. All my camears use CF.
plus... slow SD card = useless SD card in a few years. They're big enough now to be useful for /something/ . But not always fast enough to be usable for anything.
A fast one might still be useful for something... booting a Raspberry Pi 2000, or just transferring movies between laptops.
But the slow SD cards are going to the bottom of the bin no matter how big they are.
Anyone doing any serious video work isn't going to be recording with compression. 1920x1080, 24-bit colour video at 30FPS is going to need 186MB per second, 11GB per minute or 670GB per hour.
Anyone doing serious video work isn't going to be using a dslr that only shoots 1080p.
I recently replaced my SDHC cards for my now aged Nikon D90 with Sandisk ultra 90MB/sec cards. The camera can't take advantage of them at all and I knew that going into it. I did it because it improves processing. Moving photos from a shoot went from a 20+ minute chore to something that is done in a minute or two on the PC. That makes it worthwhile to me. Fast cards really aren't all that expensive. Even though I shoot everything in RAW+JPEG fine, I have never filled a 16GB card in a single shoot.
Professional testing has shown that the cameras I currently use (Canon EOS 1D Mark IV) top out around 66 MB/s when writing to the fastest CF cards.
But in-camera speed is only half of what matters. As a photojournalist and sports photographer who works on tight deadlines most days, I also have to consider how fast I can download the images off the CF cards onto my computer for editing. With the right card reader you can download at up to 97 MB/s.
This is why I always use the fastest cards I can, currently Sandisk Extreme Pro 90 MB/s, because even though the camera can't take advantage of that extra speed it will definitely save me time when it comes to editing.
For people not on a time crunch or those who always download to their computer by plugging their camera in with a USB cord it is probably wise to save money and not buy the fastest cards out there.
Some movies or TV series have been shot with a Canon 5D dslr, like these.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
But there's this whole other class of cameras, video cameras, that write a continuous stream to the SD cards. AVCHD cameras are SD based. There your options are to get a card that's fast enough or to have to turn down your detail (or simply not record at all).
It didn't seem like a good test at all to me, they also left out some other cards that people might be likely to encounter in shopping (like Duracell).
Also, of course slower cards are going to be slower - compare all cards with the same speed rating against each other please, not class 4 against class 10!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And don't even think about recording 1080p or 720p@60 without a class10 UHS1 type card
Erm no. 1080p video or 720p@60 comes out to under 3mb/second. A class 4 card can theoretically do the job. Nikon recommends a maximum class 6 for unimpeded performance on their top of the line video cards. Also my new prosumer camera supports 13 frames in the buffer and my 6 year old DSLR supported far more as well and even with a piss-poor cards of yesteryear behaved admirably when taking fast action shots at sporting events in continuous release.
The reality is that we were taking 1080p videos and shooting fast paced sporting events long before Class10 cards started coming out. Your comment is similar to those "professionals" who say that you can't photograph sports without vibration reduction, and piezoelectric focusing drives. Well I have sporting photographs from 40 years ago that prove otherwise.
It should be a federal offence to claim that anything below 48fps is serious video work.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"Serious" can be highly variable, going all the way from 1 frame a day for long term stop motion work to over a thousand per second.
~60 fps would be an option for some high motion stuff.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm sure I'm not the only one to have read too many reviews of Chinese dealers to not have a healthy sense of 'buyer beware'.
I've heard of things like '4GB' USB drives turning out to be 64-256MB models with the controller chip reprogrammed to report 4GB-which you don't find out until you try to read data written to the drive past the real limit. Class 10 SD cards that turn out to be no faster than class 4. Etc...
I don't read AC A human right
7MB/s is pretty slow by today's standards though. Most of my CF cards for my pair of D800E's are 30, 45, 90MB/s write.
A CF card is also physically a lot bigger than a microSD card, allowing the card's controller to stripe data across multiple flash chips the same way an SSD's controller does.
To a photographer nothing is worse and more distracting than a camera that doesn't go click when you push the shutter release!
I'm not familiar with DSLR cameras, the ones big enough to take a CF card instead of an SD card. Do they play a note after each shot whose pitch gives the photographer an idea of how full the buffer is?
No.
For $500 you get not only a fast SD card but also high quality gold contacts to ensure you photos are crisp and clear.
I'm joking of course, but Monster isn't.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
If you are talking just videos, maybe. But one can always relegate them to be temp storage of just images or music, where speed would be much less of an issue
Flat address space? Is that something the CF interface does? Since the NAND flash doesn't have any 'flat address space' - it just fills up an entire block of 32kB, and operationally, one cycles through the address several times until the appropriate #address lines needed for the memory range is covered.