1GB Secure Digital (SD) Memory Card Offers

savings4me

I think most people would say go for a faster card.

Have looked on 7dayshop but I think their cheapest works out at almost £15 delivered (3.95 postage) - imagine just a few months ago it was 50 quid and now we'd quibble over the difference between 11.27 and 15 quid - but we are Moneysavers and thats what we do!!

speedyjoe

Does anyone know of a tool to benchmark the speed of SD cards or can suggest a practical test?

I just received two 1G "high speed" cards from mymemory, they are supposed to be 133x but seem way slower than my 40x Corsair card and I am very suspicious that they are not what they say they are.

TIA

speedyjoe

Right I have just done an arbitary test with a stopwatch and transferred approx 16MB of images to first one of the the MyMemory cards, which took 17 seconds and then the Corsair card which did it in 10 seconds. So it looks like Mymemory are very much mis-describing the cards they are selling. I will ask for a refund I think.

talkshop

I have never found any difference in speed between any cards.

It's just a marketing scam when they tell you about 100x speed etc.

And people with so called benchmark tools don't know what the tools are actually measuring, so are usually talking bollox.

speedyjoe

Well there's a hell of a difference between my Corsair 40x and the mymemory 133x - they are a damn sight slower. I twigged when the burst mode on my Lumix camera started stalling to catch up, it never does with the Corsair.

talkshop

speedyjoe wrote:

Well there's a hell of a difference between my Corsair 40x and the mymemory 133x - they are a damn sight slower.

This is exactly what I am talking about.

Dealers sell cards based on statistics, but what do they really measure?


133x faster than a snail, and 40x faster than concorde..there is a difference!

jpe20

speedy joe .... sorry u have had a bad experience with the 133x mymemory cards as I did think they were good value. I think that the high speed cards only show their true "mettle" if the camera/device can make use of the extra speed. The issue u raise with the 40x card being quicker than the 133x concerns me. A true test would be a 133x Lexar/Sandisk sd card compared to a 133x mymemory card.

Just off the top of my head it could possibly mean that the 133x mymemory card has a high latency ie takes lots of clock cycles to read/write some data as compared to the corsair card which could have a low latency ie take less clock cycles to write/read a block of data. If this is the case then the whole speed rating system is USELESS. (I am thinking along the lines of DDR2 memory where CAS5 memory is almost as fast as CAS2 memory...... ????).

Maybe this is one for the techies......

Jules

speedyjoe

talkshop wrote:

Dealers sell cards based on statistics, but what do they really measure?


133x faster than a snail, and 40x faster than concorde..there is a difference!

It should apparently mean a multiple of 150kB/sec basic transfer speed.

I can appreciate there may be ways of skewing the performance rating but a card that should be over three times faster but is actually only just over half as fast as another card, well I'm afraid someone has made a big mistake somewhere.

jpe20

speedy joe ..... have u tried the data transfer the other way round ..... ie eliminating the effects of caching???? Is burst mode just related to the camera itself???? I assume that caching could effect the results. I cannot test mine as my brother is using it on his camera and he seems happy with it though he probably would not notice the speed difference or be as annoyed about it as myself. As far as he is concerned it takes pictures and works. Though I do think that mymemory should be tackled on this issue if it is true what you say. At the end of the day it is product mis-discription though being in the channel islands what law applies I dunno.......

Jules

Sid_Harper

jpe20 wrote:

speedy joe ..... have u tried the data transfer the other way round .....

Reading this has just reminded me that MOST card manufacturers quote, say, 133x as the speed when this is ONLY FOR READING, and the card is actually slower for writing.

I've stuck to Kingston recently, since they actually seem to write at the quoted speed, which is the important thing for use in cameras.

HTH