Choosing the "right" miniSD storage card for your MDA Vario or like device is actually quite easy nowadays.
There are basically two categories of chips: one is the "standard" and the other is the "ultra/fast/whateverelsemarketingtermisgiven".
The standard chips are usually around 40x read/write (these numbers will vary depending on action and between manufacturers) whereas the faster versions will usually be twice that.
Just remember this: 1x = 150KB/s (rate of data transfer)
So if a card is labeled 80x it means 80*150KB/s = 12,000KB/s = 12 MB/s
But should we really care all that much about specs? In today's pricing environment we say YES! Here's why... In the earlier days of memory or even in situations where new chips are coming out to market (and that's a neverending process), it made sense to really evaluate whether paying that extra 100% difference for that super-fast model was worth what the application called for.
However, we've seen as of late that with chips so cheap nowadays, that differential could at times be negligable to your pocketbook.
Case in point, evaluating a 2GB miniSD cards (4GB are coming out shortly) from makers such as SanDisk and TransendUSA show us that while a 2GB version of the SanDisk (SDSDM-2048-A10M) at Buy.com is $78.99, the UltraII version of the SanDisk chip (SDSDMU-2048-A10M - note the "U") is $92.99 making the price differential $14 or just around an 18% increase over the price of the standard chip. That's such a marginal amount for what you get that it almost makes little sense think twice about finding the fastest chip you can get.
This differential is even less when you compare 1GB chips and less, say 512MB, 256MB and so on.
Just keep in mind that we're not advocating always buying things like memory cards based on spec alone. You know the saying about "the weakest link"? Well, if your memory chip is capable of throughput of 12MB/s (in the case of the TranscendUSA 80x TS2GSDM80 miniSD card), but your MDA Vario's memory throughput is only 5MB/s, then it makes no difference to the MDA between either the standard or ultrafast chips. But like we said, with prices the way they are, the issue may seem moot.
Happy shopping! We'll post reviews of the chips in the near future...
Posted 05/21/2006 by Administrator | Filed under: Accessories
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