Quote:
Originally Posted by RickyMaveety
So ... SDHC will work, but if the SD only card is cheaper, then go with plain SD. You won't get the benefits of having it be HC, so no point in paying more for it. If the better deal is SDHC, then go for it.
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One caveat: 4GB is the largest available size for non-SDHC cards. If you want larger than that, SDHC is your only option.
SDHC doesn't necessarily provide higher speed. All cards are based on flash memory, and thre are four supopliers I know of that actually make it: Hitachi, Panasonic, Sandisk, and Toshiba. The other manufacturers buy flash memory from them on an OEM basis and put it in their own packaging.
I have cards from Lexar Media, Patriot, PNY and Sandisk for my PDA. Speeds are roughly comparable. The fastest benchmarks are turned in by the LExar Media card, which uses Panasonic media. The odd man out is the PNY card, which has Toshiba media. Most speeds are comparable to the other cards, but
write speeds are an order of magnitude slower. One benchmark I ran on the PNY card took so long I thought the device had hung and was about to reset it. The test wrote a 1MB file to the card, and measured how long it took.
That wasn't a deal breaker for me, since I put data on the SD cards with a USB reader, and the card would hold data that would be read from but not written to on the device. But I wondered about folks with digital cameras who needed fast cycle times, and resolved to avoid cards with Toshiba media if possible. (The manufacturer probably won't state whose media they use.) There
are faster cards, intended for applications like cameras where speed is necessary, but the speed isn't a function of the fact the card is SDHC.
I have two 2GB cards in my PDA (which has two SD slots). I also have 3,500 ebooks, occupying not quite 2GB, spread between the two cards, so I'm looking at non-SDHC 4GB cards as an upgrade.
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Dennis