[Discuss] SD Cards, cheap and here for a while?

[Robert Krawitz]

On Tue, 23 Aug 2016 23:10:40 -0400, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On 8/23/2016 8:27 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote:
>> So my music collection is larger than the drive on my laptop.
>> There's a USB 3 1TB drive connected but it feels cumbersome.
>> 
>> Poking around online I noticed sd cards are large and inexpensive.
>> This plus it's omnipresence seems compelling.  Slide one into the
>> side of my laptop and local storage triples.
>
> No, your storage doesn't triple. The capacity may be big, relative to
> tiny notebook SSDs, but the performance is generally crap. UHS vendors
> say "up to 104MB/s" but in practice you're capped at 20MB/s by the
> reader unless you have a newer, premium Skylake notebook with a reader
> that supports UHS, and UHS cards aren't cheap. And even then you're
> going to hit a practical limit of around 80MB/s with a fast card. But if
> you're just looking for some extra storage to carry around low
> performance media like music and movies then SD cards are perfectly fine
> for it. This is, in fact, precisely what the entire storage category was
> originally designed to do.

I've also found SD cards to be unreliable (sometimes but not always
DOA) compared to SSD.  I bought a new micro SD for my phone; I tested
it prior to entering it into service, and it locked up hard after
about 4 GB of testing, after which it went permanently catatonic.  The
card it replaced developed silent write errors after about 2 years.
And I had had another such that was *ahem* mismarked.
-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

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