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What you need to know about SD cards, their capacities and speeds

What you need to know about SD cards, their capacities and speeds

You will find memory cards being used in mobile phones, digital cameras, music players and tablets. Memory cards have different classes of speed, capacities and sizes with different devices requiring separate memory cards. In the following sections let us look at various aspects you need to keep in mind while selecting a SD card.

 how to insert Sd card

Features of Memory Cards

  1. Speed Class
  2. Physical Size
  3. Capacity

 insert SD card

Speed Class:

If you do professional photography and save photos in RAW format or want to take high-resolution videos and save them on the SD card then you will require a fast memory card. However, if your requirement includes taking simple photographs and saving media file on a phone then you need not bother about the speed.

There are four speed classes available, starting from 2 up to 10. Classes 4 to 6 are good for HD video recording while Class 10 SD cards are excellent for full HD recording. There are 2 classes for ultra high speed as well but these can be used in devices which support such cards. However, if there is no symbol on the card for its speed then it is likely that it was designed before the rating system started and is probably a class 0 card with speed even slower than a class 2 memory card.

 size of SD card

Physical Size:

Memory cards are available in various sizes for use in different types of devices. There are micro and mini SD cards as well as standard sized ones available in the market.

Standard SD: Out of these three types, standard one is the largest and used in most of the present digital cameras. This type of card weighs about 2 grams and has a 32x24x2.1 mm size.

miniSD: miniSD cards were normally used in mobile phones but its use is depleting since a smaller size memory card is now available. miniSD cards weigh around 0.8 grams and have a dimension of 21.5x20x1.4 mm.

microSD: Nowadays in most of the smart phones as well as in tablets you will find the microSD cards. These are lightest of the three cards and weigh 0.25 grams, and have a size of 15x11x1 mm.

 mini SD card

Capacity:

Similar to other storage mediums, memory cards also have different storage capacities. Cards of SDSC standard have maximum 2 GB storage capacity while memory cards of SDHC standard have capacity of up to 32 GB. The recent SDXC standard cards have maximum capacity of as much as 2 TB. At present, bulk of devices have SDHC cards and SDXC cards are still not very common.

Summary

There are different types of SD cards available in the market of various capacities and speeds. You need to check which card will work with your device and accordingly purchase the right SD card.

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