[Discuss] SD Cards, cheap and here for a while?

[Rich Pieri]

On 8/23/2016 8:27 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote:
> So my music collection is larger than the drive on my laptop.
> There's a USB 3 1TB drive connected but it feels cumbersome.
> 
> Poking around online I noticed sd cards are large and inexpensive.
> This plus it's omnipresence seems compelling.  Slide one into the
> side of my laptop and local storage triples.

No, your storage doesn't triple. The capacity may be big, relative to
tiny notebook SSDs, but the performance is generally crap. UHS vendors
say "up to 104MB/s" but in practice you're capped at 20MB/s by the
reader unless you have a newer, premium Skylake notebook with a reader
that supports UHS, and UHS cards aren't cheap. And even then you're
going to hit a practical limit of around 80MB/s with a fast card. But if
you're just looking for some extra storage to carry around low
performance media like music and movies then SD cards are perfectly fine
for it. This is, in fact, precisely what the entire storage category was
originally designed to do.

-- 
Rich P.