SD Cards As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
943 words · ~4 min read
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As ubiquitous as secure digital or SD
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cards are these days, it wasn't too long ago that they weren't king of the hill.
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If you bought a digital camera back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, cuz
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you're old like me, you probably remember the confusing selection of
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memory cards that you had to choose from. Compact flash, smart media, memory
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stick. So, how is it then that SD ended up winning the format war? Well,
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although SD was originally pushed by several different companies as a
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removable storage format that supported DRM for music, hence the name secure
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digital. Everyone kind of forgot about that functionality soon after the cards
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hit the market and instead took note of their much more convenient size compared
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to compact flash and their greater storage potential compared to smart
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media. SD also had the advantage of being a more open standard than memory
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stick, which today is almost exclusively found on Sony devices, or the XD picture
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card, meaning that it became relatively cheap for companies to start including
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on their digital cameras, computers, and more portable things like GPS devices.
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Even though you could expect to pay about $200 for a 128 megabyte SD card
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when they first came out in 2001, prices quickly fell as the format was
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introduced into more and more gadgets. So by the mid200s, SD had clearly
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started to dominate the market, but the unyielding demand for smaller, higher
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capacity storage meant that the technology was still being pushed
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forward. 2003 brought us the mini SD
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card, followed by the much more widely adopted micro SD card in 2005. So,
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thanks to decreases in the size of flash transistors that actually store the data
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and an increase in how many can be crammed onto one card, we actually now
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have SD cards in capacities that were unthinkable
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less than two decades ago. with both standardsized and micro SD cards now
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available that can hold over half a terabyte. Meaning that the highest
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capacity micro SD card on the market right now can hold over 35,000
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times as much data as a standard 3 and 1/2 in floppy while being over 50 times
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smaller physically. Unfortunately though, these much higher capacities
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mean that not all SD cards will function properly in any slot that will
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physically fit them. The original SD spec only supported up to 2 GB, while
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SDHC cards can hold up to 32 gigs, and
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the newer SDXC can handle up to 2
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terabytes. Although cards that spacious aren't on the market yet, unlike
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standards like USB or SATA, SD cards
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aren't backwards compatible with older readers that only support an older spec.
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So SDXC cards won't work in that card
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reader from 2007. This matter made worse by the fact that it requires XFAT, a
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newer file system that some older versions of Windows don't support
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natively. Newer readers, though, are usually fine with older cards. So, aside
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from standard SD versus the higher capacity versions, you also need to pay
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attention though to the speed rating. Lower-end models might have a number 2 4
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6 inside a circle giving you an idea of
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the maximum right speed in megabytes per second. While higher-end cards are often
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classified as UHS1 or UHS2, indicating
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both higher bus speeds and right speeds, with UHS2 cards offering right speeds of
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at least 30 megabytes per second, which is important if you're trying to do
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something demanding like record 4K video, as the card needs to be able to
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support the high data rates to keep up. So, while there's still a lot to look
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for when shopping for flash memory, at least the days when there were six or
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seven different completely different physical formats vying for your
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attention are over. Just try not to drop
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your micro SD card between your uh couch cushions, if you know what I mean.
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Was that a getting something stuck in your butt joke?
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