SD Cards Explained! What do all of those symbols mean ? How to choose the right one for you.

hey everybody its lon Seidman and today we're going to be taking a look at the crazy world of SD cards specifically what all of these crazy numbers and symbols mean on your cards and we're going to hopefully give you some ideas to what kind of card you need based on the device that you're plugging the card into I think a lot of people often buy more card than they actually need and hopefully this guide will help you make a better buying decision now I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that everything you're going to see in the video I purchased with my own funds with the exception of this sony card here that came in free of charge through the Amazon vine program however all the opinions are about two here are my own nobody is paying for this review nor is anyone reviewing or approving what you're about to see before it was uploaded so let's get into it now and see what these SD cards are all about alright so let's take a look at the two physical sizes of SD cards that you might encounter you've got your micro SD card here and then your regular SD card both are pretty small but the micro cards are a lot smaller and depending on your device you might choose one size over the other the cool thing with the micro cards is that you can get an adapter in fact many of these cards come with an adapter and when you put the card in the adapter you suddenly have a full-sized card - they are completely interchangeable which is really really cool so let's have a closer look at what these cards are all about we've got the micro SD card on the right a Samsung as an example and then we've got our SanDisk card on the left which is a full sized card all of the symbols you're going to see on this larger card are the same as what you'll see on the smaller ones so this will be relevant to both and I wanted to first focus on the card type we have two main types right now we have SDXC cards and we also have SDHC cards and the difference primarily is capacity so SDHC can store up to 32 gigabytes maximum whereas an SDXC card can store up to 2 terabytes maximum and whether or not your device works with SDXC is something you're going to have to research on your own most current devices may be things made in the last 3 or 4 years or so should all work with SDXC cards but there are older cameras that don't and you'll have to take a look at your manual and see what types of SD cards it supports because SD XC and SDHC cards look physically the same but an XC card just won't work in an older device so be sure to take a look at your product manual or contact a manufacturer first but again if you bought your camera or other device in the last three or four years it should work with both formats and another emerging standard is the SD you see standard and those are going to allow for cards that can go up to a whopping 128 terabytes and these cards will also deliver better performance now it's a time I'm recording this video these cards aren't yet available but when they do come out I will certainly be reviewing them and giving you a better picture as to the differences between you see XC and HC so stay tuned in the future for that now there's one other difference between SD cards to be aware of and that involves these Roman numerals that you will see on most modern cards this is a symbol for a uhs-1 card and in my hand here I have one and it might be hard to see on camera but I've got one that's got a Roman numeral two on it and this is a UHS two card and now there are UHS three cards now what's interesting about this standard is that the UHS two cards are faster than UHS one cards but they're compatible with devices that don't support UHS two and let me show you the physical differences here between a faster UHS 2 & 3 card versus the UHS one so on the left here I have a UHS 2 card and you can see that it has additional pins here for data and this of course will result in faster reads and writes if I have a device that will support the UHS 2 standard but this top row of pins is in the exact same position as this UHS one card is so you could take this card because it's an SDXC card and put it in a device that doesn't actually support the faster standard and it's still going to work and what's cool about these UHS 2 cards that I could put this in my older Nikon DSLR for example and write to it at slower speeds but then put it in my superfast new HS 2 card reader and pull those images and videos off the card faster than I would with this UHS one card so even if you're a device that you're using the Shu pictures or video with doesn't support UHS 2 you can still gain some of that additional speed from your reader and that's something to take a look at now I have a reader here from SanDisk that I bought a little while back this is their pro reader and this is a UHS 2 reader and the only way you're going to know it is one is to check the specifications on the product listing so here you can see this one is listed as a UHS 2 reader and that will give me the greater speed and at the end of the video we're going to test a UHS 2 card so you can see how it performs when we're connecting it up with this reader all right so now the next thing we've got to take a look at our speed ratings and over the years they have developed a number of different speed ratings and now all of them are on the cards that you'll buy today so we're gonna look at three different logos on this card that all mean the same things and we've got a V rating there at the top we have a u rating here below it and then a 10 with a circle around it next to it what do all of those symbols mean well let's take a look at this chart that the SD card Association has put out and all of these speed ratings refer to write speed on the cards and write speed is important because if you have a video camera it's going to be sending data at a very constant rate to the card and you need to make sure that the card that you're buying can support the amount of data that your camera is going to be streaming to the card and that's why these write ratings are really important so if we go back to our last image here you can see that we've got a V 30 a 3 and a 10 and what does that mean well we're gonna start with the V 30 because these V ratings indicate how much the card is rated at for sustained writes in megabytes not megabits and we'll talk about that distinction in a second so this card here can sustain 30 megabytes per second in right speed and that also happens to be the same rating you would have for the UHS speed class of three so if you got a three and a B 30 it's 30 megabytes per second if you have a really fast card like this one up here at V 90 that means you can write to the card at 90 megabytes per second now the circle ratings apply to SDHC cards but again they're putting them on the XC cards as well sometimes in fact most of the time so the circle with the ten around it means that it can sustain a minimum of 10 megabytes per second writes and you can see the 6 the 4 and the 2 refer to how many megabytes per second you'll see on those cards and you might see like some of these 4 and 2 cards sometimes get bundled in with cheap electronics that need to use a memory card because if the device doesn't write at more than 4 megabytes per second it doesn't need a very fast card but if you were to take this card that's writing at 4 megabytes per second and stick it in your Super HD camcorder that needs 30 megabytes per second you won't get reliable video written out to the card and speaking of video you have to do a little bit of mathematics here to figure out exactly what your camera needs let me give you a good example of this so I have a sony 4k camera that requires a hundred megabits per second minimum to sustain the video that it's writing to the card but it's important to note that this is megabits per second not megabytes per second and remember our cards are being measured in megabytes per second so what we need to do is divide that megabit number by 8 and if we take 100 and divide it by 8 we get 12.5 megabytes per second which means a v10 card isn't going to work for us but a the 30 card provided that card performs to where they say it will be performing will deliver the performance we need to write 4k video out all the time and those sandesh cards that I've got with that V 30 work fine in that Sony 4k camcorder but again you're going to have to check your camera specifications to see what the bit rates are of that camera and then match it up with the v rating after you do that divided by eight hopefully that made sense if it didn't let me know we'll try to do a little bit more in the comments for you now you're also going to see a lot of marketing thrown at you by the companies that make these cards so the good thing is is that if you have a card that is complying with the standard you're going to see those symbols in common as you can see here across three different brands but every brand will use the other portions of the card that they have to put their own definitions out there so for example this Extreme Pro card says it's going to go at ninety five megabytes per second and that's probably the read speed because remember this one's a V 30 card and it can't write anywhere near ninety five megabytes per second so just keep that in mind make sure you look at that write speed rating before you buy because that is likely referring to reads this Lexar card says it's going at two hundred and fifty megabytes per second yet it's v rating is only sixty so that must also refer to the read speeds spoiler alert though when we took a look at this card it didn't quite hit that two hundred and fifty even when we were reading from it so there's often a little bit of embellishment on some of these ratings now one thing that Lexar does is they put in an X rating here and what this is is the speed comparison to an original single speed cd-rom drive from the late 80s that's how they measure these cards I guess for a while you know we had an overlap of cd-rom technology and SD cards and they were measuring the speed against CD ROMs kind of a pointless measurement at this point but they keep it on all of their cards here Sony actually gives you both the projected read and write numbers on their card and we're going to test this card in a minute to see how it stacks up to their claims but they're saying two hundred and seventy seven megabytes per second on reads and 150 on writes yet the card here is only rated as a v60 so it may not get to that full extent and sony also adds another symbol this one has an M symbol and they have a higher end card that's a G but you won't find em er G on any of the other brands and SanDisk for example here might have their extreme card and extreme pro and they've got the ultra which are a little bit lower performing so again keep an eye on those symbols because that's really going to give you an idea as to what the right speed is going to be which is the most important part of what you're doing with your camera all right so let's take a look now at the performance of this sony card now remember the speed ratings that they are putting on their card are that it can handle two hundred and seventy seven megabytes per second reading and one hundred and fifty megabytes per second writing but remember it's only rated at the 60 so sustained writes should be about 60 megabytes per second so we're going to put it into my card reader here again this is that UHS 2 reader that we're using from SanDisk and once the card gets mounted we're gonna take a look at the black magic disk speed test which measures sustained writes and reads for the purposes of shooting videos let's have a look at that alright so we've had the test now running for a few minutes here and the card is actually performing better than its v rating but less than its marketing ratings so remember the card was rated by Sony at 277 megabytes per second on reads and 150 on writes in our testing here we're getting reads at around 240 megabytes per second or so which is very good for an SD card and about 120 megabytes per second in write so it's actually not doing too badly here and it's performing well within the v rating that sony assigned to it so i think you should get some decent performance out of it now again remember we're using a UHS to reader here which can of course write at those UHS 2 speeds as well if you have an older reader writer it's going to go slower so you'll definitely want to upgrade your reader if it doesn't yet support the UHS 2 standard now you might want to consider a high endurance SD card when you're using a dashboard camera in your car or perhaps a security camera anything that's going to be writing out to the card constantly will benefit from the longer lifespan of a high endurance card and that's what I would recommend for those applications hopefully this guide helped you understand all of the different symbols on these cards and this might actually help you save money because you don't always need the highest-performing card because your camera may not require the highest-performing card but i would suggest that you go with some name brands and the two brands i've been using the most over the years are sand discs and sony I've had good luck with samsung cards also and the reason why I like name-brand cards is because they are more reliable first of all they often have better warranties as we saw with both of these cards they far exceeded their V ratings for writes which is very important to me as well and I think those factors make the sometimes additional cost involved with the name-brand worth it especially if you're doing mission-critical applications like doing video for a client or storing data for a project that may not have a good backup while you're out in the field those things are important and having very reliable cards are also important and the name brands tend to give you a better warranty as well it should something go wrong a year or two into ownership in fact the sony card here has a five-year warranty and the SanDisk warranty I believe is pretty long as well so definitely look at the name brand even it's gonna cost you an extra five or ten bucks I think it's worth it and I've been using these SanDisk cards for the better part of twenty years and over that entire length of time I've only had one bad card and that's a pretty good track record especially given how much I am using flash memory from one day to the next that's gonna do it for now let me know what you thought down in the comments below and until next time this is Lian Simon thanks for watching this channel was brought to you by the lime tv supporters including gold-level supporters the four guys with quarters podcasts Tom Albrecht Rick astute Oh Chris alligretto Kellyanne Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month 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Channel: Lon.TV

Views: 101,797

Keywords: SD Cards, SD, Card, camera, which one, how to buy, how to choose, microsd, Micro SD, memory cards, camera card, Lon Seidman, Lon Reviews Tech, Lon.TV

Id: 4_RDH2DdWtg

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 21 2020