In this modern-day where a mobile phone does almost everything, from business stuff to entertainment, you will definitely require a lot of space. Depending on the type of phone that you purchase, it may have all the features that you may need but fail to have the memory capacity that you may need. This is where an SD card comes in.
What is an SD card? An SD card is an ultra-small memory card that is designed to provide high memory capacity in a small size. The use of an SD card is arguably the only way to acquire an extra storage space on your phone. The choice of SD capacity will depend on your needs. It can be as low as 2GB to as high as 256GB. Below are some of the things that you need to know about SD cards before buying one
Speed
When buying an SD card, one of the major considerations that you will make is its speed. Of course, different SD cards have different spaces but unless it is fast enough on your phone, it won’t matter the size of the SD card that you bought.
When shopping for a new SD card, there will be so many claims on the packaging but all this may be untrue and it could be the manufacturers are just targeting the uninformed people. Despite all these claims, your phone may never write and read data as fast as the packaging claims/ therefore, when buying an SD card, you should not really bear in mind the high speeds written on the package.
Generally, the SD card speed is measured in classes. Each class has its own number that indicates the writing speed. An SD card with classes 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 is very different from each other. For instance, a class 2 SD card can only record a video while a class 10 SD card has the capability of broadcasting large video files in a full High-Definition.
Over the last few years, there have been changes in the standards this class 10 SD cards have been transformed into Ultra-High-Speed class, U1 (UHS). The UHS Class 3 has the highest writing speed that has the capability of broadcasting 4k video with a speed of over 30 Mb/sec
The SD card dimensions
SD cards differ in size and the two most common types are the SD and Micro SD. The SD is commonly used in cameras while micro SD is used on phones or tablets. In the modern world, you can switch from one device to another using the same card with a special adapter. However, it is worth noting that the SD adapter will not enhance the Micro SD speed.
The SD card generations
There are mainly four SD card generations and each has a different storage capacity. The bigger the storage capacity, the faster it is in order to cope with it. Below are some of the SD cards generations
- SD 1.0 – it has the capacity of 8mb to 2 GB
- SD 1.1 – it has up to 4 GB storage capacity
- SDHC – up to 32 GB
- SDXC – it can hold up to 2 TB.
While the SD cards use fat32, the SDHC and SDXC operate on exFAT
Conclusion
When buying an SD card, you may be overwhelmed by the high availability as well as affordability of SD cards based on speed, storage capacity as well as generations that fit your needs. It is therefore recommended that you should bear the above points in mind so that to acquire something that will not only meet your needs but it will serve you for long.
