Memory Cards & You (understanding types, speeds, and capacity)
Out of the frying pan and into the fire. The digital equivalent to the film rolls of the analog days can offer more confusion than simplicity. What was a simple ISO, ASA, or DIN rating on the film to tell you what the limitations were of the film, are now rife with so many symbols and numbers. It’s enough to just pick one at random and see if it fits your workflow. Let’s take the guesswork out and make some sense of all these symbols and hieroglyphics.
Types
The first thing we need to establish is what type of memory card your device needs. This is understood in the product description of the device on the website, or the owners manual. Worst case scenario leave you to ask a sales associate or a simple Google search on what your device requires. Save that info as we will go back to it towards the end of this. The more common memory cards as of late are micro SD and SD cards. SD stands for Secure Digital, and the obvious difference is the micro is much smaller SD card, but it does usually come with an SD adapter. Slip the micro SD card into the adapter and now you can use this in a device that only accepts SD cards. Though it can be done I consider the vessel approach to only be used as a bridge from a device that only accepts micro SD to a laptop or PC that only take an SD card and not to be used as a memory card soley. In addition to micro SD and SD cards there’s a less common card called the CF or Compact Flash cards. Up to and including 2012 CF cards had the speed and capacity people needed for photos and videos. Now that SD card technology has grown so quickly, CF card hold no advantage and are being phased out slowly from dSLRs and video cameras.
Mirco SD card (right) and SD adapter (left)
SD (Secure Digital) card
CF (compact Flash) card
The rise of SD cards and the advancement has brought out many different types of SD cards. There’s SDSC (Standard Capacity), SDHC (High Capacity), SDXC (eXtended Capacity), and the soon to be in the limelight SDUC (Ultra Capacity). Each one of these types were labeled for their specific generation’s limitation of capacity. SDSC defines a card that starts at 128MB and maxes out at 2GB. SDHC stands for cards’ capacity is from 2GB to 32GB. SDXC can go from 32GB to 2TB. Lastly SDUC will have a capacity from 2TB to a massive 128TB.
Speeds
A read/write speed is as important as having the correct generation of memory card and capacity. Obviously this is crucial in video capture with the standard of Full HD and 4K, but more so with the advent of 8K. In photography, moreso while shooting RAW, the writing speed was crucial to the CF cards’ specs as well as the SD. If you shot sports, wedding, fashion, or action in general the buffer between shots made or broke you. Much like the types the writing speed of the cards were “classed” to classify what to expect performance speaking.
Going from left to right (above) we have Class 2, Class 4, Class 6, Class 10, Class 1 UHS (Ultra High Speed), and Class 3 UHS (Ultra High Speed). Again the technology in writing speed scaled up with the numbers which represents the minimum sequential writing speed offered. Class 2 can do any SD video resolution, but can’t do Full HD video at minimum 2MB/s. Class 4 can do any Full HD resolution, but cannot do 4k at minimum 4MB/s. Class 6 can do 4K as can Class 10 and Class 1 UHS, however all three are unable to keep up with 8K’s writing speed needs. The minimum writing speeds of Class 6 is 6MB/s and 10MB/s for both Class 10 and Class 1 UHS respectively. Lastly there’s Class 3 UHS that can do it all 8K, 4K, Full HD, and SD with a minimum write speed of 30MB/s
If deciphering all that didn’t cross your eyes, then hold that dial. Recently it wasn’t confusing enough so companies started putting a video speed class on the SD cards. The symbol is a weird fancy ‘V’ (shown below) and range from V6, V10, V30, V60, and V90.
A quick summary is V6 and V10 cannot do 8K, but can do 4K on down in resolution. V30, V60, and V90 can do 8K video and every resolution under that as well with ease. Lastly, and this is more brand specific, there may be a rating of speed like 667x or 1066x. This is speed rating, from brands like Lexar, Kingston, PNY, and Transcend, is superfluous and really unnecessary since the above “classed” classification of cards. That #x speed was to inform you that it was “x” times faster than a traditional CD-Rom’s speed for writing. Again 667X 90210x 420x for all I care is obsolete, and frankly needs to be removed from memory cards label as it just adds more confusion.
Capacity
Lastly, there’s capacity. Largest capacity can hold the most media (like Hard Drive technology). Your typical low end SD cards are about 1-2GB and go up to 512GB currently with capacity doubling in advancement (1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB). CF cards were and are no different in capacity, and following the same technological leaps by doubling in capacity.
Suggestions
I’ll make this short and sweet; memory cards will fail on you, get multiples. As far as brand goes, while they don’t pay me to say this ….SanDisk is a brand that doesn’t do the 667x speed labeling (and if they ever did, they dropped it when the classing of the different cards were introduced) and hasn’t failed on me majorly….yet. Their branding scales in word salad like Lexar is riddled with unnecessary numbers and symbols. SanDisk started with Ultra, then Ultra Plus, then Extreme, Extreme Plus, and lastly the current line of “Extreme Pro” cards. I seldomly stray away from a brand that gives me constant and stable products, so if you are looking for a nod I’ll give it towards SanDisk (how so ever results may vary so if you have nothing but trouble with your SanDisk cards, don’t blame me).
Conclusion
In summation, I hope this crash course in memory cards help and while there is Sony’s Memory Stick format xD Picture Cards, and MMC (MultiMediaCard)…they are all dead or dying formats of memory cards that nobody is or will be using. I could go more into this, but my head is spinning with all this info (as I’m sure yours is) and after having to write this a second time I’m gonna quit while I’m ahead. Thank you all for stopping by again, and I’ll see you all tomorrow for the first upload of Project 116*3….for real this time.
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