Quality SD Cards

[MrBrew]

I'd be interested to hear people's experiences with SD cards... The only brand I found that works 100% reliably (so far) is Lexar. I had huge trouble with Sandisk and Viking... the 32Mb MMC that can with my Orange Treo was none too reliable either.

Was I just unlucky or is there a technical reason? One of my digital camera enthusiast friends mentioned that the amount of juice a card slot supplies can have an effect on reliability?

[cferd]

I keep hearing horror stories about SanDisk, but I have yet to run into any kinds of problems with them. I use the brand (256mb) for my SD digital camera and have the 512mb in my Treo. Lucky I guess.

[MarkC]

I've been using an Expansys branded 256 MB card for several months without any problems (except that it's now full!)

[Slarti]

I've had a sandisk 256mb for a few months with no problems.

[Chris]

hmmm i've got the unbranded 32mb effort from Orange and it's never caused me any hassle. Just thinking of buying this  expansys 256Mb card. Is this the same as you have used MarkC? Looks good for the price, 2yr warranty as well.

[Hicks]

Chris,

I too have been using the Expansys 256MB SD card. The card is actually made by Toshiba according to Card Info. Seems ok although when I do a backup with backupman it takes about 10 minutes. With my old 64MB Sandisc card it took about 6 minutes. Overall I'd say the Expansys card is good value for money and around £40.00.

[lb505]

I have both a PNY512 and a Smart Media256.  The Smart Media card writes *slow* but it's like a speeding bullet compared to the PNY (made by Toshiba).  The only time this seems to matter is when I am using a voice or movie recording program and want to record to the card.  I backup at 2:00 am so no need for speed then.  All other aspects of both cards were pretty good when I measured them (reading, file creation, etc.)

[commander66]

I tried a SanDisk and a Kingston 256 MB card and both worked fine.

[stenro]

I've been using a 256mb Kingston for a couple of weeks now with no problem.  (I tink it is actually made by Toshiba- that's what's indicated by the Card Info utility.)

[aolumide]

I've been using an Ultra II Sandisk 512MB card for about 9 months now. It contains a subset of my Mapopolis GPS maps, some mp3's, and a couple of movies I encoded with VirtualDub for MMplayer (SWAT and Kill Bill).

Suffice it to say that it's pretty full. VFSMark scores for this SD card are the highest i've seen of all the SD's I've owned.

I'm sticking with the Ultra II line.  

[BritOverseas]

The "Inventor" of these SD cards is Panasonic and Sandisk, they hold the patents and licenses. Theoretically if you buy cards from them they should be the best.

The reason that some people see different speeds for their cards is that believe it or not they actually make them in different speeds. The fastest by far is the panasonic (the original designer) but their cards are very expensive, look for about 9-10Mbytes/Sec write speeds for these cards. Obvioulsy the cheaper you go the slower they are though.

I have a Panasonic SVAV100 Camcorder that only uses SD cards (no tape), this obvioulsy require very fast write times to record Mpeg2 video, the Sandisk and Panasonic cards work very well with these.

And like the previous post says use the Sandisk Ultra II, more expensive but much better, you can get a 512 Mbyte card in the States for $123, can't argue with that.

[zack]

Rule of thumb:
Keep away from Sandisk (if it works for you, you are lucky!)
Lexar, most of them are ok.  Those not made in Japan are known to have problems

The best so far for me has been panasonic.  I've used it with Zaurus, PocketPc, Zire and now with Treo. Works great everytime and quite fast too.

[Atreides]

No problem with SanDisk 256 so far...

[nzmoko]

Panasonic. Got two 128mb and one 256mb. Never a prob.

[Slarti]

Sandisk 256mb a little buggy, I've had to reformat it twice in 5 months.