Which SD card to buy?

[humayunl]

First of all, I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to be posting this... I didnt find a "hardware" section that was open to all.

I'm thinking about buying a 1 gig SD card for my Imate. I have heard that the speed and quality of the different brands is different. Which brands are good for speed and reliability? of course price is also important.

I'm gonna be installing some programs on the SD card as well as have all my data + DBs on there. So any suggestions?

Also, is buying online cheaper than just walking into BestBuy or CompUSA and picking it up?

[ipaqczar]

I have a 1 gig SD card from Lexar which I got for Christmas which has worked well.

I don't know how it compares speed/reliability wise to other cards - so I can't answer that question.

As for pricing - mine was around $71 from Sam's Club - I am not a member but my girlfriend is.

Here is a tool that will help find the lowest price (including shipping):

http://dealram.com/prices/30/1GB.html

[humayunl]

Thanks ipaqczar.

Do you know what the new "faster" SD cards do? I was checkng online and saw Lexar has these new Ultra II SD cards and Sandisk has these 32X SD cards (or vice versa).

Any idea what these new standards actually translate into? and does my device (Imate aka XDA II) support them?

[WyattEarp]

Here some fast SD Cards to complicate your decison making process :) :

Lexar Media 32X SD Card (http://store.lexar.com/index.cfm?category=21&subcategory=6&productid=SD1GB-32-231&bhcp=1)

Sandisk Ultra, Ultra II (66X) & Ultra III (133X) SD Cards (http://www.sandisk.com/retail/ext3-sd.asp)

That 133X card looks sweet. It also comes with data recovery software so you can feel better about the amount of money you blew on the card. :) :) :)

Any of these will should work fine but it isn't really necessary unless you are going to play games, watch movies or do backups. These things tend to run better due to the faster read/write speeds.

[Menneisyys]

Any of these will should work fine but it isn't really necessary unless you are going to play games, watch movies or do backups. These things tend to run better due to the faster read/write speeds.

Not necessarily. See e.g. http://www.firstloox.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=224 :

1. the Belkin eFilm Pro card, while having excellent reading speed, certainly sucks at writing to in a PDA - in almost every respect

2. SanDisk Ultra II is equally fast than its cheaper and (outside PDA's) slower brother.

See also http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36376 - that's a collection of some benchmarks; you may want to read the cache speed-related posts.

[WyattEarp]

Any of these will should work fine but it isn't really necessary unless you are going to play games, watch movies or do backups. These things tend to run better due to the faster read/write speeds.

Not necessarily. See e.g. http://www.firstloox.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=224 :

1. the Belkin eFilm Pro card, while having excellent reading speed, certainly sucks at writing to in a PDA - in almost every respect

2. SanDisk Ultra II is equally fast than its cheaper and (outside PDA's) slower brother.

See also http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36376 - that's a collection of some benchmarks; you may want to read the cache speed-related posts.

That's why I only listed the ones I recommend. Therfore my suggestions remain true. The device being used must also be placed into consideration as they all are not created equal. I personally don't like raw data on read/write speeds since no one will test it on every machine available.

[Menneisyys]

That's why I only listed the ones I recommend. Therfore my suggestions remain true.

Yeah, the Lexar SD card are indeed much better in a PDA than SanDisk cards, file creation time-wise. The SanDisk Ultra II, on the other hand, didn't fare better in some tests on given PDA's than the basic SanDisk.

The device being used must also be placed into consideration as they all are not created equal. I personally don't like raw data on read/write speeds since no one will test it on every machine available.

That's also right. PDA's, just like digicams, are different - some are considerably faster with fast cards, while others may even become unbearably slow if you use fast cards with them. So, the best way to get a card is trying before buying it - this is what I'm always recommending.