When I told Darla Mack I was buying an 8GB microSD card to use with my N95-3, she suggested that I not. She told me that hers slowed the phone down dramatically, and that it wasn’t worth the extra 2GB I would be getting over my current 6GB microSD card. Poppycock, I said! They’re both Class 4 Sandisk MicroSDHCs, and thus there shouldn’t be any significant difference, just on account of an extra 2GB of storage space.
Boy, was I wrong. The speed difference of my N95-3 with the 8GB card was noticably slower when accessing the card, such as refreshing my music library, saving photos/videos, and viewing my gallery. Switching back to the 6GB card, I was able to instantly see a speed increase, without changing any other settings.
I found this disturbing, so I got in touch with Sandisk about it. While they did not acknowledge any issues with the 8GB microSDHC, they did let me know that they have since released their Ultra 8GB microSDHC, which is Class 8, rather than Class 4. They offered to send me a review unit of this new Ultra edition, so that I could do some testing.
The Sandisk Ultra 8GB MicroSDHC comes with a really handy little USB adapter, small and sturdy enough to easily hook onto your keyring, and something I’m a huge fan of. To see if this new Ultra microSD is indeed faster, I decided to perform three tests. I used a single movie file, transferring it to the 2 different 8GB microSDs using 2 methods: USB card reader and built-in card reader. I kept an eye on the transfer speed, according to Windows Vista, and here’s what I came up with:
USB Card Reader:
Class 4 card: 13-15MB/s
Class 8 card: 14.5-15.5MB/s
Built-in Card Reader:
Class 4 card: 650-850kb/s
Class 8 card: 850-900kb/s
As you can see, while there is a slight speed difference, moving a file from my laptop to the memory card does not show a significant difference in speed. However, what about simply using the different cards in my N95-3, for listening to MP3s, taking photos, and the like? Indeed, using the new Ultra microSDHC, I was able to see a noticable difference, bringing my phone back to the speeds I was used to with the 6GB card.
Using the exact same files on both the regular Class 4 8GB microSDHC and the Ultra Class 8 8GB microSD, I was surprised to see that the Class 8, while performing roughly similar in my PC-based tests, blew the Class 4 card out of the water when used in my N95-3, with the latest firmware.
To verify, I performed the same test, this time using the black Nokia N82 instead of my Nokia N95-3. While the speed differences were not as drastic as with the N95-3, there was a detectable speed boost when using the faster card, as compared to the regular Class 4 8GB microSD.
From my non-technical assessment, this leads me to believe that not only does the capacity of the card affect speeds, but also the Class. The 6GB class 4 microSDHC card performs nearly identically to the 8GB class 8 microSDHC in my Nokia N95-3, while the 8GB class 4 microSDHC card completely brings everything to a slow crawl.
What size/class microSDHC card are you using, and do you notice a significant speed difference? Do you think the larger cards coming down the line (16GB+) are going to cut it, in terms of speed? More importantly, I hope that my next phone (the N85, recall) is able to handle the card better than my N95-3 did, that’s for sure.
