The development of SD cards: as the recording speed increased from 2 to 30 megabytes per second
Hi, Giktayms! Currently, many gadgets are available with built-in flash drives, but memory cards are not collected at all. They are becoming faster and more capacious, and their dimensions are close to microscopic - and look, soon you will need to insert a card into your smartphone or camera with tweezers. Does it make sense to overpay for a high-speed drive or for everyday tasks there is enough simpler option, what the numbers in the circle mean, and what card is needed to record video in 4K resolution - read under the cut.
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SD, also known as Secure Digital , is the main format of flash cards used in most smartphones and cameras. It appeared at dusk of the twentieth century - in 1999, Panasonic, Toshiba and SanDisk created a new type of memory card based on the then still young MultiMedia Card format. The standard turned out to be better than the usual MMC in everything, and also brought an important innovation - information protection, for this purpose a special data recording protocol is used. Separately, the drive has a physical locking slider on the left. It is necessary to move it down, and the contents of the media can not be removed, as well as write something over the existing files.
Gradually, the developers of the standard presented more compact options: microSD and miniSD. For the sake of convenience, usually a plastic adapter is included, which gives the card a classic SD shape and allows it to be used in devices with connectors for a standard card size. But in general between the microSD and miniSD for some time there was a real war, we will tell about it in the next publication.
Like any standard, Secure Digital is constantly evolving and modernizing. Four generations have now been released, they differ in the maximum possible volumes: SD 1.0 - up to 2 GB, SD 1.1 - up to 4 GB, SDHC - up to 32 GB and SDXC - up to 2 TB. With the advent of the SDHC format in 2006, the cards completely switched to the FAT32 file system, while the FAT 16/32 was previously used. Owners of old devices were in for an unpleasant surprise: their smartphones and cameras did not support the updated standard. This is due to the transition in SDHC to sector-by-sector addressing instead of byte-by-byte — from now on, the space was calculated just like on hard drives, which made it possible to increase the capacity bar to 32 GB. However, a number of gadgets have updated firmware, which opened SDHC support for smartphones, in which it was originally provided at the hardware level.
Three years later, the SDXC standard was introduced to the world, which has been relevant for seven years now. Cards switched to the exFAT file system. It was developed by Microsoft and is the same as FAT32, but without the 4 GB limit on the size of a single file. The format is relatively new, and it works mainly with modern versions of the OS. Windows supports exFAT starting with updates for XP SP2, OS X - with updates 10.6.5, Linux is also able to recognize this standard. Devices that work with new standards can interact with older formats, but not vice versa. That is, an SDHC-compatible camcorder will work with SD and SDHC, but not SDXC.
In parallel with the new formats and the growth of the volumes of SD-cards, the speed of data recording and transmission increased. Growth speed is a familiar feature that manufacturers always work on. It is not only really useful, but also has a great effect on the consciousness of the consumer. Look at the reviews of smartphones and tablets - sometimes the difference in real use is hardly possible, and synthetic tests convince us that it’s time to pay out forty thousand rubles for a gadget with a new generation processor right now. But back to the flash cards: in some cases, the speed indicator becomes really significant, because file sizes are constantly growing, and the trend is unlikely to change. Copying, say, a pair of music albums on the phone in any case does not take much time. That is ten, that thirty seconds is not particularly critical. But when it comes to recording HD-video, then the speed becomes really important. After all, you simply can’t record a video on a “slow” card — it’s a trite drive that doesn’t have time to quickly bring the entire data stream into sectors.
In short, speed is one of the most important characteristics that you should pay attention to when buying a flash drive, in addition to volume. The SD Card Association, a non-profit organization that defines standards for SD cards, streamlined speed classes. There are six of them: four belong to ordinary cards and are called Class 2, 4, 6, 10 - the number indicates the minimum write speed in MB / s. The remaining two classes are assigned to cards with the UHS standard - Ultra High Speed. Notice, in the IT industry, unhealthy craving to call everything with consoles over / ultra / hyper. This format includes speed categories U1 (10 MB / s) and U3 (30 MB / s). For example: in one minute you will record 120, 240, 360, 1200 and 1800 MB on a C2, C4, C6, C10, U3 card, respectively. At the same time, despite the sort of like the same write speed in C10 and U1, the last card will be faster, but how much it depends on the specific model. As the comparison showed, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7IL_tH5wx8) for 15 seconds the camera with the U1 drive takes 62 shots, and with the C10 flash drive - only 40.
The actual recording speed may turn out to be higher than the specified one, but lower - no, otherwise there will be a violation of certification. It is easy to determine the class of an SD card: it is often indicated directly on the card itself - the number in the letter C or U. Manufacturers can also write speed in more detail as a multiplier, where 1x equals 150 KB / s. In practice, this means that 40x corresponds to the sixth class, and, for example, 100x - to the fifteenth. But sometimes companies can cheat and indicate in this way the speed of reading, which is sometimes more than two times higher than the records. Interfaces of versions 1.01 and 2.0 give out 12.5 MB / s and 25 MB / s, but now such cards are rare. They were replaced by much faster UHS-I (up to 104 MB / s) and UHS-II - the data exchange rate of the latter can reach an incredible 312 MB / s.
What do these classes really mean? The initial Class 2 allows you to create video in normal, not HD quality through the camera. You can record in HD at a speed of 4 MB / s, and Class 6 is better suited for Full HD. If the card meets the Class 10 or U1 standard, the operator will also be able to take still pictures when recording video in 1080p. Finally, with the fastest U3 class, access to shooting is available in the desired 4K resolution.
Thus, a three-gigabyte file will be written onto a card with a Class 10 index in about five minutes, while a drive with a Class 2 parameter will take about 25 minutes. The map of the fastest currently class U3 will spend on a similar procedure a little more than one and a half minutes. In the case of volume - is another matter. A 32 GB flash drive is enough for almost an hour of recording in 4K mode, and when you have an SD with 512 GB of space, this will be enough for as much as fifteen hours of continuous shooting. If you do not think about shooting in 4K and you can wait a couple of extra minutes while the volume file is written to the drive, there is not much to pay for a U3 class card.
File volumes are growing, and manufacturers are forced not only to respond to consumer demands, but also to work ahead of the curve for those who are always short. The emergence of even faster SD cards is just a matter of time. At the moment, 4K resolution video is only preparing to become massive, but there is no doubt that this will happen in a few years. Given the volume of such files, the recording speed will grow even faster. Are there any prerequisites for the fact that the SD format will lose its current popularity and give way to something new? Of course have! We drew attention to the comments to the previous article - The history of flash memory development - and dwell on interesting topics in the following material.
Thank you for your attention and stay with Kingston on Hiktatimes!
For more information about Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . In choosing your kit HyperX help page with visual aids .
')
SD, also known as Secure Digital , is the main format of flash cards used in most smartphones and cameras. It appeared at dusk of the twentieth century - in 1999, Panasonic, Toshiba and SanDisk created a new type of memory card based on the then still young MultiMedia Card format. The standard turned out to be better than the usual MMC in everything, and also brought an important innovation - information protection, for this purpose a special data recording protocol is used. Separately, the drive has a physical locking slider on the left. It is necessary to move it down, and the contents of the media can not be removed, as well as write something over the existing files.
Gradually, the developers of the standard presented more compact options: microSD and miniSD. For the sake of convenience, usually a plastic adapter is included, which gives the card a classic SD shape and allows it to be used in devices with connectors for a standard card size. But in general between the microSD and miniSD for some time there was a real war, we will tell about it in the next publication.
House of cards
Like any standard, Secure Digital is constantly evolving and modernizing. Four generations have now been released, they differ in the maximum possible volumes: SD 1.0 - up to 2 GB, SD 1.1 - up to 4 GB, SDHC - up to 32 GB and SDXC - up to 2 TB. With the advent of the SDHC format in 2006, the cards completely switched to the FAT32 file system, while the FAT 16/32 was previously used. Owners of old devices were in for an unpleasant surprise: their smartphones and cameras did not support the updated standard. This is due to the transition in SDHC to sector-by-sector addressing instead of byte-by-byte — from now on, the space was calculated just like on hard drives, which made it possible to increase the capacity bar to 32 GB. However, a number of gadgets have updated firmware, which opened SDHC support for smartphones, in which it was originally provided at the hardware level.
Three years later, the SDXC standard was introduced to the world, which has been relevant for seven years now. Cards switched to the exFAT file system. It was developed by Microsoft and is the same as FAT32, but without the 4 GB limit on the size of a single file. The format is relatively new, and it works mainly with modern versions of the OS. Windows supports exFAT starting with updates for XP SP2, OS X - with updates 10.6.5, Linux is also able to recognize this standard. Devices that work with new standards can interact with older formats, but not vice versa. That is, an SDHC-compatible camcorder will work with SD and SDHC, but not SDXC.
On your marks
In parallel with the new formats and the growth of the volumes of SD-cards, the speed of data recording and transmission increased. Growth speed is a familiar feature that manufacturers always work on. It is not only really useful, but also has a great effect on the consciousness of the consumer. Look at the reviews of smartphones and tablets - sometimes the difference in real use is hardly possible, and synthetic tests convince us that it’s time to pay out forty thousand rubles for a gadget with a new generation processor right now. But back to the flash cards: in some cases, the speed indicator becomes really significant, because file sizes are constantly growing, and the trend is unlikely to change. Copying, say, a pair of music albums on the phone in any case does not take much time. That is ten, that thirty seconds is not particularly critical. But when it comes to recording HD-video, then the speed becomes really important. After all, you simply can’t record a video on a “slow” card — it’s a trite drive that doesn’t have time to quickly bring the entire data stream into sectors.
In short, speed is one of the most important characteristics that you should pay attention to when buying a flash drive, in addition to volume. The SD Card Association, a non-profit organization that defines standards for SD cards, streamlined speed classes. There are six of them: four belong to ordinary cards and are called Class 2, 4, 6, 10 - the number indicates the minimum write speed in MB / s. The remaining two classes are assigned to cards with the UHS standard - Ultra High Speed. Notice, in the IT industry, unhealthy craving to call everything with consoles over / ultra / hyper. This format includes speed categories U1 (10 MB / s) and U3 (30 MB / s). For example: in one minute you will record 120, 240, 360, 1200 and 1800 MB on a C2, C4, C6, C10, U3 card, respectively. At the same time, despite the sort of like the same write speed in C10 and U1, the last card will be faster, but how much it depends on the specific model. As the comparison showed, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7IL_tH5wx8) for 15 seconds the camera with the U1 drive takes 62 shots, and with the C10 flash drive - only 40.
The actual recording speed may turn out to be higher than the specified one, but lower - no, otherwise there will be a violation of certification. It is easy to determine the class of an SD card: it is often indicated directly on the card itself - the number in the letter C or U. Manufacturers can also write speed in more detail as a multiplier, where 1x equals 150 KB / s. In practice, this means that 40x corresponds to the sixth class, and, for example, 100x - to the fifteenth. But sometimes companies can cheat and indicate in this way the speed of reading, which is sometimes more than two times higher than the records. Interfaces of versions 1.01 and 2.0 give out 12.5 MB / s and 25 MB / s, but now such cards are rare. They were replaced by much faster UHS-I (up to 104 MB / s) and UHS-II - the data exchange rate of the latter can reach an incredible 312 MB / s.
What do these classes really mean? The initial Class 2 allows you to create video in normal, not HD quality through the camera. You can record in HD at a speed of 4 MB / s, and Class 6 is better suited for Full HD. If the card meets the Class 10 or U1 standard, the operator will also be able to take still pictures when recording video in 1080p. Finally, with the fastest U3 class, access to shooting is available in the desired 4K resolution.
Thus, a three-gigabyte file will be written onto a card with a Class 10 index in about five minutes, while a drive with a Class 2 parameter will take about 25 minutes. The map of the fastest currently class U3 will spend on a similar procedure a little more than one and a half minutes. In the case of volume - is another matter. A 32 GB flash drive is enough for almost an hour of recording in 4K mode, and when you have an SD with 512 GB of space, this will be enough for as much as fifteen hours of continuous shooting. If you do not think about shooting in 4K and you can wait a couple of extra minutes while the volume file is written to the drive, there is not much to pay for a U3 class card.
* * *
File volumes are growing, and manufacturers are forced not only to respond to consumer demands, but also to work ahead of the curve for those who are always short. The emergence of even faster SD cards is just a matter of time. At the moment, 4K resolution video is only preparing to become massive, but there is no doubt that this will happen in a few years. Given the volume of such files, the recording speed will grow even faster. Are there any prerequisites for the fact that the SD format will lose its current popularity and give way to something new? Of course have! We drew attention to the comments to the previous article - The history of flash memory development - and dwell on interesting topics in the following material.
Thank you for your attention and stay with Kingston on Hiktatimes!
For more information about Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . In choosing your kit HyperX help page with visual aids .
Our previous posts:
- HyperX Impact memory lines - mobile - does not mean slow
- HyperX DDR3 memory rulers - what is what in the model range?
- HyperX DDR4 memory rulers - what to choose for your computer?
- USB drive HyperX Savage USB 3.1 Gen 1 with a capacity of 128 gigabytes
- Interesting facts from the history of solid-state drives
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/368457/
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