Friday, 20 July 2012

SanDisk Extreme Pro 16GB MicroSD Card


SanDisk's Extreme Pro 16GB MicroSD card ($99.99 direct) is the fastest mobile memory card you can get for your smartphone, but I'm not convinced it matters. While the speed boost here will help if you frequently transfer large video files over from your PC, today's smartphones just aren't equipped to take the best possible advantage of this card's blazing speeds.

Like all MicroSD cards, the Extreme Pro MicroSD (which comes in an 8GB model for $59.99 and a 16GB model for $99.99) is a little chip about the size of your thumbnail. This one has a red top and gold bottom, helping to differentiate it from our current Editors' Choice, the red and gray SanDisk Mobile Ultra line (4 stars, prices vary by size) and all the generic black MicroSD cards.

The Extreme Pro is broadly compatible; I tried it in a range of Android phones, PCs, and Macs, and none of them had trouble reading the card. Since it only comes in 8GB and 16GB capacities, it doesn't hit the SDHC/SDXC compatibility barrier you see with cards greater than 32GB.

Fastest SD Card Ever?
Used with a PC, the Extreme Pro is definitely faster than SanDisk's Mobile Ultra and standard memory lines. All three cards read a 2.2GB file in about 2 minutes, for a transfer rate of about 19.8MBps. But write speeds were dramatically different. Both a MacBook Pro ($1,799, 4 stars) and a Samsung Series 5 ($899.99, 3.5 stars) laptop wrote the 2.2GB file to the Extreme Pro card in about 2 minutes, 11 seconds (18.2MBps), while the Mobile Ultra card took 5 minutes, 24 seconds (7.3MBps), and the standard card took 9 minutes, 32 seconds (4.2MBps). That's a lot of time saved if you're transferring large files.

I used the Xbench benchmarking app on the Mac to check the cards' performance with sequential and random writes of many small files, and saw a similarly dramatic difference with sequential, uncached writes of 4K blocks. The Extreme Pro wrote at 18.49MBps, while the Mobile Ultra recorded 7.09MBps, and the standard card 4.05MBps. Sequential reads came in at 3.9MBps for the Extreme Pro, 3.14MBps for the Mobile Ultra, and 2.66MBps for the standard card.

Random reads and writes, the kind you'd be doing if you're running an OS off your card, showed a difference but not as grand of a change. The Extreme Pro measured 2.73MBps for reads and 2.41MBps for writes of random 4K blocks. The Mobile Ultra recorded 2.24MBps for reads and 1.48MBps for writes, and the standard card recorded 2.13MBps for reads and 1.17MBps for writes.

Performance In Phones
I popped all three cards into a Verizon Wireless Samsung Galaxy S III ($199.99, 4.5 stars) and ran the Antutu SD card speed benchmark. All three cards gave roughly a 20MBps read speed, although the write speeds varied quite a lot: the 29.6MBps of the Extreme Pro easily bested the 15.2MBps average write speed of the other two cards.

Here's the thing, though. None of that seems to matter in actual use. I've played and recorded plenty of 1080p video from the Mobile Ultra card on various phones; the new speeds aren't needed for that application. SanDisk promises faster app performance, but the major difference the Galaxy S III saw was on writes, not reads. I couldn't find a measurable difference in application load times with each card on board, and I suspect most people keep their oft-used apps in internal memory, anyway.

I loaded all three cards into a Nokia 808 PureView ($699, 2 stars) to see if they'd make a difference while shooting sequentially or in shot-to-shot times with the 41-megapixel camera. Nope. All three cards saved a 38-megapixel image in 3.7 seconds and recorded 17-18 5-megapixel sequential shots in 20 seconds.

SanDisk's storage technology is currently ahead of the devices it's being used in. If you regularly use your MicroSD card as PC storage, you'll definitely see speed improvements with the Extreme Pro card line. On the other hand, I'd also recommend buying the full-sized SD card version if you do that; it's harder to lose.

For now, the best balance of price and performance comes from Class 10 cards like SanDisk's Mobile Ultra line and Kingston's competing Class 10 MicroSD cards, which you can get for as little as $17 for a 16GB card on Amazon (at the time of this writing). That's a huge savings over the $100 SanDisk is charging for this card.

More Storage Reviews:
??? Western Digital My Passport (2TB)
??? Seagate Backup Plus
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??? G-Technology G-Connect (500GB)
??? Western Digital My Passport Studio (2TB)
?? more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/TzcQViIjoQE/0,2817,2407326,00.asp

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