Can you use an SDHC card as an SSD? Any good adapters out there?

[gman24]

I've got a 32GB PNY Elite Performance SDHC card with a rw speed of 90mb/s (at least that is what it claims), and I was wondering if I could use it as an SSD for gaming or is that speed too slow? Are there any reliable adapters out there? I've only heard mixed reviews about doing this.

 

[InvalidError]

Even 32GB real SSDs usually have sub-par performance due to having so few channels and devices per channel to spread accesses between. An SD-card with 90MB/s optimistic rating is not very likely to fare anywhere near quite that well since the space constraints are so much more severe. I would not be surprised if your SD ghetto-SSD ended up performing roughly on par with HDDs performance-wise.

If you want the best results, you should look at 120GB SSDs - this is the smallest size where performance is consistently high across nearly all vendors and chipsets.

 

[gman24]

Very true, considering the fact that sd cards have even less limited writes than an SSD, its probably not worth it. I'll just stick to using the chip for my DSLR or idk a raspberry pi? lol.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[user387]

SDHC cards and flash drives tend to have really awful performance on small files, even if the figures for large files (like 90 MB/second) are reasonable. The Sandisk Extreme series (flash drives) are a notable exception to this rule.

The SSDs I've tried do quite well on small files.

As far as adapters go, you can buy a $5 gadget at Amazon to connect an SDHC card to a USB 3.0 port.