Round-Up: 15 microSDHC Cards, Benchmarked And Reviewed

[rooket]

Ok so I was hoping to see more class 4's in this post since they often go on sale these days. Somewhat interesting read but not very useful for what I've been purchasing as of late. I just got two class 4 8gb kingstons.

I usually go by as long as it works fast in my device, then I bought the right one. At these days prices, I can only lose maybe 3 dollars usually. Nothing really to gripe over.

I was really hoping to see some non speed class branded Japan kingstons in this review and more likely Patriot class 4 which seems like a slow piece of garbage for the most part. So we have the Class 10 in this review only but no more Patriots. These types of reviews are time consuming though so I guess a lot of things can get left out.

I wouldn't consider $40+ (shipped) affordable. Also you have to think that Tom's isn't necessarily buying these cards for personal or business use. 9x out of 10 these cards are donated by their respective companies. Or a warehouse such as Tiger Direct/Newegg.

uhhhh since when is $40 not affordable? this post makes no sense. $40 is nothing these days.

 

[johnlgalt]

I just went to SanDisk's website and the Mobile Ultra cards are different in color *and* specification - they only show the MU cards being a two tone red and gray, and state that the cards are Class 6 cards, not Class 4.

http://www.sandisk.com/products/mobile1-memory-products

I found a card looking just like yours at an online retailer's site and the SKU matches the current card at SanDisk's website that sells for twice as much but is advertised at a Class 6 card.

A case of mis-typed identity?

Time ot grab some of these cards lol...

 

[Guest]

I have a question: I have an aging Lenovo X61 tablet which has an integrated SD card slot. I wanted to ensure faster windows 7 boot times without splurging on an SSD. Would it be a good idea to put the windows 7 OS on the SD card and boot from it everytime?

 

[PIZZA Man]

Thanks you for the great article, just what I needed to help determine which card would be best for an upgrade for my Evo 4G. I'm constantly feeling the need for speed with my phone!

 

[johnlgalt]

[citation][nom]Sleepy Seattle[/nom]I have a question: I have an aging Lenovo X61 tablet which has an integrated SD card slot. I wanted to ensure faster windows 7 boot times without splurging on an SSD. Would it be a good idea to put the windows 7 OS on the SD card and boot from it everytime?[/citation]

I'm not 100% sure, but if your Lenovo will allow you to boot from that SDCard (which I'm almost positive it will not) then sure. However, you'll probably need to make some adjustments to it - like moving your profile folder(s) off that SDCard onto the physical HD (SDCard have limited number of writes, and Windows 7 writes 99% of application data to the profile folders, so that's a lot of reading and writing and erasing and re-writing to the SDCard on every use of the OS). But, this can be easily done using Bootblock's Profile relocator.

Also, you'll want to take the other precautions like with SSDs - moving the pagefile, disabling prefetch, etc.

If your Lenovo has the option for adding a second drive, then an SSD is really your best bet - I have one of the most reliable SSDs, the Intel X-25M G2 80 GB HD dedicated to OS only (I used profile relocator on it to move the profile folders to one of my mechanical 1 TB HDs) and it is a beast. Intel's stuff is very well reliable, and that drive can be had now for around $100, not much more than the price you'll pay for a Class 10 32 GB SDCard. And the performance will be astounding - it's way faster and better than the SDCard, which, if I'm not mistaken, on your laptop will not be making use of the SATA interface nor direct bus, but probably USB (but I could be wrong in this).

 

[Guest]

One test that would have useful is current drain...

 

[krazydawg]

"We asked all major memory card manufacturers to submit samples of their microSDHC-based products. We received a wide range of cards, with capacities ranging from 4 GB to 32 GB, and thus covering the whole range of the microSDHC specification."

This could lead to skewed results if a manufacturer ships a sample of their cherry picked cards. It's not a true random sample.

 

[sjococo]

On 13 Januari 2012 Mediamarkt in The Netherlands sold the Sandisk Mobile Ultra 16 GB class 4 with card reader for Euro 14,99 in their webshop during 24 hours. It is the all black version, just like tested here.

On a Dell E6500 I tested this card with the supplied card reader and achieved the following results in Crystal Disk Mark 3,01:

Sequential read/write: 18,170 MB/s 5,892 MB/s
Random 512K read/write: 18,260 MB/s 1,370 MB/s
Random 4K read/write: 2,565 MB/s 0,544 MB/s
Random 4K Q32 read/write: 2,327 MB/s 0,455 MB/s

It was very suprising the sequential write was so much slower and Random 4K QD 32 write faster than the one tested by Tomshardware.

I ordered a Sandisk Mobile Ultra 32 GB class 6 (red and black version) offered by Ibood early March said to be shipped after 3 weeks, which is odd and made me very curious about this item
Sandisk promisses 30 MB/s read and mentioned no data on write speed.

 

[sjococo]

Oops, the above results were with a file size of just 100 MB.

Here the results of the same Sandisk mobile Ultra 16 GB class 4 (black version) with 4000 MB file size:

Sequential_____ read/write: 18,05 MB/s 5,778 MB/s
Random__ 512K read/write: 17,43 MB/s 0,520 MB/s
Random 4K QD1 read/write: 2,018 MB/s 0,851 MB/s
Random 4K Q32 read/write: 1,985 MB/s 0,643 MB/s

 

[sjococo]

As there are mSATA to SD adapters and even mSATA to dual microSDXC adapter you could try. See http://www.hwtools.net/index.html.

 

[sjococo]

Here the results of the Sandisk mobile Ultra 32 GB class 6 (red-grey version) with 4000 MB file size:

Sequential_____ read/write: 17,76 MB/s 7,917 MB/s
Random__ 512K read/write: 17,38 MB/s 1,500 MB/s
Random 4K QD1 read/write: 2,476 MB/s 1,566 MB/s
Random 4K Q32 read/write: 2,337 MB/s 1,502 MB/s

Tested in Dell E6500 with Sandisk AP1106XXJ mini-USB-stick style card reader as supplied with Sandisk 16 GB. It looks like the card reader is maxed out at about 18 MB/s read. The card reader also gives consequent CRC errors when writing 512 KB random blocks with this Sandisk 32 GB card. Checked it with an identical card and same results.

I'm curious what the results are in a fast UHS-I card reader...

 

[sjococo]

Better links:

http://www.hwtools.net/index.html#SSD_Adapter_go
http://www.hwtools.net/index.html#SD_Reader_go

several solutions for different applications...

 

[Guest]

4k random block write performance has a huge impact! Only swapping one of these default kingston cards against a "ultra high speed" sandisk made my hybrid android/debian installation usable (hurray

 

[boringpie]

Hi Tomshardware, have you done any toughness test on any of these SDHC cards? Last time I took two Sandisk 32GB Micro SDHC to my Japan ski trip and both cards died in the camera due to the cold (-30C). Performance is not my biggest concern here, it's the toughness.