[wlachan]

From what I have gathered over the years, some brands like Toshiba uses highest grade chips in their flash memory and any lesser grade chips (with errors remapped) would be sold to other brands at lower cost. Quality and speed are 2 different attributes and just because you pay more for the speed of brand A, doesn't mean it is more reliable than the slower brand B. Personally I prefer MIJ Toshiba/Panasonic flash memory over MIC/MIT products.

[slip]

so yesterday i was my local camera shop here in houston. i was listening to the sales rep. telling this woman the difference between SD cards a platinum card vs the regular SD card about how huge a difference it makes. make a long story short he persuaded her into buying the platinum 16g card for WWWAAAYYY too much! talk about price gauging! listening to his talk it make me think "are they really that serious?" does a platinum or gold SD card really make that much of a difference when it comes to snapping pics. as for me i have a SD card that takes a micro SD card because i happen to have both and been using it and swapping it in and out of my cameras.

I lost once in a lifetime memories from using a inexpensive card. Never again go cheap. I tried every rescue software I could think of and can't even get 1 photo from it.
Cheap cards and poring rain just don't mix.
So in the end it depends on how much the photos mean to you.

Randy

[Kerrowdown]

It's always been SanDisk Extremes for me.

Never had a failure, but I do replace them on a regular basis, just based on how long I've had 'em.

For me, these are the cheap bits of photography and I treat them as consumables.

[Mohican]

Can I use a micro SD with adapter of extreme class ( 80MBps/50 MBps) in K -5 II ?? As long as it has a adapter. What about Toshiba Exceria UHS-1 (95MB/s,60MB/s) ??

[Action Jackson]

Dpreview used to test burst mode and buffer write times with various SD cards on their camera tests. From those results, unless you are a pro or have a pro camera it's unlikely to make a huge difference for most of us.

Mohican any class 10 cards will be fine.

Flash memory is volatile so it is a good idea to replace them eventually.

[RGlasel]

I lost once in a lifetime memories from using a inexpensive card

Sometimes the little bit of program code resident on the card is corrupt, or the formatting of the card doesn't line up at the right byte boundaries. Companies that specialize in forensic analysis of hard drives and mobile devices might be able to help. It cost me $200 to recover my daughter's snapshots from a trip to Costa Rica with schoolmates, which was a pretty good return on investment in my opinion.

[cyclone3d]

That is the camera shop equivalent of an electronics store upselling overpriced HDMI cables. The camera's buffer is the bottle neck. The write speed of a class 10 card, even a 'base' one, will exceed the capability of the camera.

Not from my testing of multiple speeds of cards.

I have done testing with regular "class 10", Sandisk 30Mb/s, 45MB/s, and 95MB/s cards. I only shoot in RAW mode, so the speed of the card makes a difference

The 30MB/s ones are almost fast enough to keep up with the K10d buffer. The 45MB/s one is a bit faster at clearing the buffer. The 95MB/s one made no difference.

However, on the K-30, the 95MB/s card is faster than the 45MB/s card.

You can also save a bunch of time when transferring files from the SD card to your computer, especially when you have USB3 and a good USB3 card reader.

[ChopperCharles]

After a bunch of failed cards and lost pictures, only Sandisk Extreme cards go in my cameras now. They're more expensive, but I've never had one fail yet. I've had Transcend, Kingston, and AData cards fail on me. (And not even come close to the speeds of the Sandisk cards, even though they're all class 10).

I don't grab the big ones either. I like the 8GB, at most 16GB cards. That way when I shoot raw, I have to swap them out reasonably often, and thus I can never lose an entire day's photos.

Charles.

[Joojoo2010]

I use 32GB Transcend class10 cards, 20usd ordered from china. No problems...so far. No idea if fakes or not, speed is not important to me. I have also 100% sure originals, i could compare if i would want. Anyway when buy from china i get 3 cards, buy from here only one card, same money. I not recomend doing this to anybody anyway...if u have money get cards from proper place.

[ChopperCharles]

On Hacking MicroSD Cards

This is some interesting info about SD cards. Ignore the part about hacking, unless it really interests you. What is really interesting for us is this excerpt:

Flash memory is really cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it’s too good to be true. In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception. The illusion of a contiguous, reliable storage media is crafted through sophisticated error correction and bad block management functions. This is the result of a constant arms race between the engineers and mother nature; with every fabrication process shrink, memory becomes cheaper but more unreliable. Likewise, with every generation, the engineers come up with more sophisticated and complicated algorithms to compensate for mother nature’s propensity for entropy and randomness at the atomic scale.

These algorithms are too complicated and too device-specific to be run at the application or OS level, and so it turns out that every flash memory disk ships with a reasonably powerful microcontroller to run a custom set of disk abstraction algorithms. Even the diminutive microSD card contains not one, but at least two chips — a controller, and at least one flash chip (high density cards will stack multiple flash die). You can see some die shots of the inside of microSD cards at a microSD teardown I did a couple years ago.


In our experience, the quality of the flash chip(s) integrated into memory cards varies widely. It can be anything from high-grade factory-new silicon to material with over 80% bad sectors. Those concerned about e-waste may (or may not) be pleased to know that it’s also common for vendors to use recycled flash chips salvaged from discarded parts. Larger vendors will tend to offer more consistent quality, but even the largest players staunchly reserve the right to mix and match flash chips with different controllers, yet sell the assembly as the same part number — a nightmare if you’re dealing with implementation-specific bugs.

The embedded microcontroller is typically a heavily modified 8051 or ARM CPU. In modern implementations, the microcontroller will approach 100 MHz performance levels, and also have several hardware accelerators on-die. Amazingly, the cost of adding these controllers to the device is probably on the order of $0.15-$0.30, particularly for companies that can fab both the flash memory and the controllers within the same business unit. It’s probably cheaper to add these microcontrollers than to thoroughly test and characterize each flash memory chip, which explains why managed flash devices can be cheaper per bit than raw flash chips, despite the inclusion of a microcontroller.

Kinda scary to think about. I know I won't use cheap flash again...

Charles.

[RGlasel]

Kinda scary to think about

I found it interesting that the "real" high-end SD cards are visually indistinguishable from "fake" ones. The implication is that expensive SD cards use the same subcomponents as the cheap, insecure ones. Which makes sense, the way expensive flash is differentiated from cheap flash is the on-board software and marketing support (such as a lifetime warranty). The quality issue is easy to deal with, buy lots of SD cards, download and replace them frequently. Security with your camera isn't such a big deal, you can overwhelm spies with noise (boring pictures of your cat loaded on dozens of memory cards), but every smartphone uses microSD cards which are equally vulnerable. If you need an excuse to throw your Samsung Galaxy away, here it is.

[Pepe Le Pew]

I use a Dane-Elec 64 GB SDXC class 10 w35MB/s.......

Should I be worried?

[RGlasel]

I won't use cheap flash again...

Expensive flash memory can still fail, so the best solution might be to use the cheapest memory card you can get your hands on, download as frequently as possible, and throw away your oldest memory cards as soon as you can afford to. The expensive cards might use chips that have been tested in some manner, but flash memory is not very stable in the long term, so the fastest and most reliable cards are dependent on the on-board software (and possibly a bigger piece of silicon to allow for more storage intensive software enchancements) for their superior performance, not the quality of their silicon wafers. Let me rephrase my suggestion to "use the cheapest flash that, on average, meets your speed requirements." It might come down to a manufacturer using a 50 cent micro-controller instead of 20 cent one, along with a bigger, $2 piece of NAND memory instead of a $1 piece (or according to the link, recycled memory chips).

[ivanvernon]

I looked over my cards and found these ones:

Lexar Multi-use, 16 gb Made in Korea (2 cards)
SanDisk 16 mb Made in China with circled letter 4, maybe a class designation (4 cards)
PNY Premium Made in Taiwan 16 gb (4 cards)

Also found some older ones, still good, just low capacity:
Kingston 4 gb Made in Taiwan
X Digital Media, 512 mb
pq1 2 gb

Inspecting the cards, I find no indication of Class 10 or other. Must be this information appears only on the packaging, which I have already discarded. There does appear to be a circled numeral 4 on most of these cards, so perhaps that is the Class descriptor, do not know. One of the PNY cards is the only one that has gone bad--cannot be read, cannot be formatted in either camera or computer. Otherwise the cards have all performed well with no difficulty for my kind of use.

For future purchases, I will watch for Class designation and follow Adam's advice on brand.

[jatrax]

There does appear to be a circled numeral 4 on most of these cards,

That is indeed the class number. Class 4 would be rather slow for modern cameras, but no reason it would not work if you don't mind the wait.