Memory Cards read and write speeds

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To get the best performance out of your digital camera it is essential that you use the correct type of card – sometimes the cheapest card available may not be the best deal for you.


Try to match your camera to the appropriate card Cards which are best suited for cameras:

•       Normal Sandisk (blue card) 3MB/s– Low end compact cameras
•       Ultra II 15mb/s (soon to be know as Ultra) – High end compact cameras
•       Extreme III 30mb/s(soon to be know as Extreme) – D-SLRs
•       ExtremeIV 45mb/s(soon to be know as Extreme Pro) – Pro D-SLRS

In the extreme Sandisk memory cards, they have a little something called UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) which allows for incredibly quick memory reading and writing. Imagine a dual carriageway, where data can be written going one way, and read at the same time coming the other way, this means they are capable of reading and writing data to memory very quickly.

Sandisk USB 2.0 card readers can currently only read data at 30MB/s and 35MB/S, so to get the best reading rate from the Extreme IV cards you must use a Sandisk firewire 800 reader, however compatibility with Apple Macs. With USB 3.0 on the horizon it is likely Sandisk will be releasing a much faster reader in the near future.

Speed classes are used to describe how well the card will handle video recording – this means the minimum sustained write speed the card can handle. Speed class means it will record at a minimum of 2MB/s, speed class 4 means 4MB/s and speed class 6 means 6MB/s. For regular camcorders a speed class of 4 is fine for recording, for HD camcorders it is recommended to opt for a speed class 6.
Video camcorder memory cards have a different controller chip in them to the regular memory cards, this means they have been specifically designed for video and the continuous write speeds required for it.

To get the best performance out of your digital camera it is essential that you use the correct type of card – sometimes the cheapest card available may not be the best deal for you.