With SD cards being a universal storage medium in digital cameras as well as other small gadgets, it's no wonder why they are getting cheaper, getting larger, as well as getting quicker. Even non-speedy cards are getting faster.
This SanDisk 2 GB SD card is not advertised to be anything but a 2 GB SD card. No speed rating, no claims of being a high-speed SD card. Instead, SanDisk markets their
Extreme III line of cards for this purpose (
2 GB Extreme III card tested here). So does this mean it's worthless for high mega pixel digital cameras?
Packaging
SanDisk, as usual, packaged their 2GB card in a plastic blister pack that have a classy SanDisk red and blue themed cardboard with their logo. The card comes with a plastic SD card holder, but really nothing else. Don't really need anything else, really.
Performance
In informal tests, my Canon Powershot A640 10 MP camera was able to take pictures in succession in the highest quality without any lag or waiting for the last picture to write. Each photo was around 3 to 4 MB.
After that test was done, I decided to use the
Dynex Multi-card reader to test the read and write speed of this particular card. The Dynex card reader is SDHC compatible, and has proved that the bottleneck of my built-in SD Card reader skewed one of my results
here. I just want to make sure that the card reader was not the bottleneck and thus test the true speed of the SD card itself.
It is actually amazing that this card was able to write at 5.25 MB/sec, which is not that much slower than a Class 6 SDHC card. Of course, the
SDHC ADATA card I tested here tested way faster than that, even though it was classifed as a Class 6 card. Read speeds are less impressive at 8.43 MB/sec. The trend still seem the same, where read speeds are faster than write speeds.
While the non-speedy 2 GB SanDisk SD Card isn't super slow, it isn't the fastest either. But looking at the numbers, it's adaqate for high MP cameras that write 3 to 4 MB each photo. It's also just fine when recording video at their highest settings (normally MP4 video that are at most 600 kb/sec).
Transfering photos back to your PC may take the most hit, since the fastest cards now reads close to 30 MB/sec!
Conclusion
Surprisingly, write speeds are not very bad. It's decent enough to perform well for high MP cameras (especially most point-and-shoots). For professionals who have cameras that are VERY speedy, taking high MP photos at almost video-like speeds (5-15 frames per seconds) may actually overwhelm the SD card with data needing to be written. This is what Extreme III cards (and cards like them) are made for.
For MP3 players or other devices that only stream data from SD cards, this is more than just fine for that purpose. My Treo 650 was able to use this card to launch Palm applications and stream MP3, videos, and photos without a problem.
So is paying extra for fast SD cards really worth it when standard speed SD cards are getting faster as flash memory improve? For most applications, not really. You'll probably do fine with just a standard-speed SD card and save some dough while you're at it.
