SD Memory card I should get..

[BillTheCat]

.. should it be the Sandisk, Kingston, or Lexar?

Thinking about a couple of 256MB cards for the families two SX56's. I notice that Dreampage's prices are fairly close in all three brands.

so, based on happiness with product, which should I get?

Thanks. I am beginning to really see that this SX is really a handheld PC, not a palm pilot! :devilboy:

[Jeff Rutledge]

.. should it be the Sandisk, Kingston, or Lexar?

Thinking about a couple of 256MB cards for the families two SX56's. I notice that Dreampage's prices are fairly close in all three brands.

so, based on happiness with product, which should I get?

Thanks. I am beginning to really see that this SX is really a handheld PC, not a palm pilot! :devilboy:

I've heard a fair bit of negative feedback on the Sandisk cards. I've not had any issues personally with mine, but the buzz on them has been less than encouraging.

[bdegroodt]

I'll second JR's comments. I've had no issues with a half dozen of them. I will say that I see in the photography forums that I frequent that everyone suggests Lexar and I've yet to see a complaint about them.

[rdef]

http://pdaphonehome.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1480&highlight=sd+card+sandisk

[BillTheCat]

Thanks. Based on this and other posts like it I bought two Lexar 256MB SD cards.
!!!

:D

[shawnc]

Probably a good choice. I have a sandisk 1G CF and 256MB SD cards. No problem with the SD but I don't use it very much. My MP3's are on the CF and I have noticed that my Axim seems to have trouble reading the files more and more lately. Often I have to do a soft reset to get my music to play. Never had this issue with the Microdrive.

[zeno]

The tough part is that one manuf. card may work well in one PDA & not another--if you review some of the storage cards benchmarks on the digital photography sites, you will see that they will run different cards with different cameras and get very different results.

Sandisk SD's do not work with some manuf. PDA's--I own an Audiovox (Toshiba) Maestro, and there are supposed some compatibility issues. Without knowing that, my wife purchased me a Sandisk SD. I ran some benchmarks and it was many times slower than my regular CF card. My basic 'benchmark' was copying my Avantgo directory (1.25mb w/ 813 files) from my PDA mem to the storage card. It took 3 minutes to copy the directory to the CF card and 11-13 min. to the Sandisk SD.

I ran VO Benchmarks, which runs a variety of tests: reads/writes, sequential/random accesses and short/long data. There was only one test in which the Sandisk SD was faster (long random reads--it was nearly 2X as fast). For the remainder of the tests, the CF was slower by 2-4X. There was no real pattern either.

I returned the Sandisk, and purchased a Lexar SD (luckily, my wife was understanding ;-) Anyway, I ran the VO Benchmarks against the Lexar, and was very happy with the results. In 5 of the tests, it was 2-4X the speed of my CF card (2-5X the Sandisk), in 2 tests it was similar to the CF and in one test (short, sequential, writes), the SD 3x slower. Anyway, in everyday use SD is faster, and I have removed the CF card from my PDA (except when I need the additional space for music or audio books).

Also, since I am really anal about this stuff, I reformatted each of the cards changing the file system type (FAT 16 or 32) and the cluster size, and ran the VO Benchmark's with each combination. I selected the file system type and cluster size that had the best overall times 8)

[BillTheCat]

yep! bought two on the 17th, almost a month ago and am very pleased with the 'no issue' way things have gone.

works and does it without fanfare. cool.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

I'm one of those who typically recommend staying away from SanDisk because of QA issues. Regardless of whether those QA issues are due to marketshare of manufacturing quality, for sure SanDisk cards have been known to be slow performers compared to much of the competition (Lexar, PNY, Viking, Ridata/Ritek, Transcend, etc.).