Regular SD, seems a bit slow
Pros:
Lots of room (for now), compatible with most SD devices from last 2 years
Cons:
Kind of slow, reliability unknown (not Sandisk's forte)
The Bottom Line:
Affordable, value-oriented large-capacity card that will work with most devices.
|
|
Overall Rating:
|
 |
|
Author's Review
This is a regular-format Secure Digital (SD) card, regular in the sense that it's not of the latest SDHC (SD High Capacity) format. This is a good thing because it means this 2GB card is compatible with most SD devices like digital cameras, digital camcorders, GPS units, Pocket PCs, etc.
Unfortunately, most USB media card readers (including Sandisk's own as well as Belkin ones) cannot deal with capacity larger than 1GB yet. So be *VERY* careful if you plan to use this 2GB SD card with a USB card reader: if you do want to do it, make sure you only read from it, not write to it, or you would risk corrupting the entire memory which would require reformatting. (Unfortunately, because most OS's write some extra system information to disks all the time, it's extremely unlikely you can avoid any writes when you insert this SD card into a USB card reader.)
While compatibility with my devices seems good so far, what I don't like is the card's speed. It's actually quite slow. Sure, this is a standard-speed card, the cheapest model in Sandisk's SD lineup. Still, it feels slower than my xD-Picture card, which itself is not a speed demon by any measure. So even though you get a lot of capacity (2GB formatted in FAT32), filling it up could take a painfully long time, even over USB 2.0 high-speed.
In the end, I think this is a good value simply because it's cheap. I've filled mine with MP3s and JPEGs and nowadays use it with my portable GPS. For MP3 playback, the speed is not a big issue, but when viewing large JPEG files, it can be a little trying to my patience.
