NZtechfreak
Android Expert
OK, so I see a lot of rubbish about what the Class rating of microSD cards actually means in terms of in-phone performance, and a lot of advice based on that rubbish which tells people they should buy the highest Class card available.
Guess what? My 32GB Class 2 Sandisk card benchmarks with write speeds of ~5.5MB/s - this is more than enough for any in-phone use-case scenario. The most demanding thing you can currently do on a cellphone, in terms of SD card read/write demands, is encoding or decoding 1080p video - my Class 2 card is sufficient to do this. I tested it out today and videos recorded to the internal SD look no different than those written to the external SD. This doesn't surprise me, since 1080p video is recording at ~2-3MB/s, in other words well within what a Class 2 Sandisk card is capable of (other manufacturers tend to exceed minimum spec less than Sandisk does). Watching 1080p from the external card is no problem whatsoever either.
The only advantage a higher Class card confers is in the speeds you get writing to the card from the PC, and probably even then only in a card reader. After the initial load of a new card, which for most people is loading their music collection, higher Class cards have really very little advantage over lower Class cards. If you regularly write a lot of data to your external card, then a higher Class card may still benefit you enough to make the additional cost worth it. For most I doubt this is the case.
Please lets stop perpetuating bad information about lower Class cards, OK?
Guess what? My 32GB Class 2 Sandisk card benchmarks with write speeds of ~5.5MB/s - this is more than enough for any in-phone use-case scenario. The most demanding thing you can currently do on a cellphone, in terms of SD card read/write demands, is encoding or decoding 1080p video - my Class 2 card is sufficient to do this. I tested it out today and videos recorded to the internal SD look no different than those written to the external SD. This doesn't surprise me, since 1080p video is recording at ~2-3MB/s, in other words well within what a Class 2 Sandisk card is capable of (other manufacturers tend to exceed minimum spec less than Sandisk does). Watching 1080p from the external card is no problem whatsoever either.
The only advantage a higher Class card confers is in the speeds you get writing to the card from the PC, and probably even then only in a card reader. After the initial load of a new card, which for most people is loading their music collection, higher Class cards have really very little advantage over lower Class cards. If you regularly write a lot of data to your external card, then a higher Class card may still benefit you enough to make the additional cost worth it. For most I doubt this is the case.
Please lets stop perpetuating bad information about lower Class cards, OK?
