Is it worth to buy a UHS-1 card


asimov-solensan

Very Active Member
Joined
Jan 8, 2010
Messages
733
I was looking for a new SD card and found those new UHS-1 cards from sandisk, I can afford a 16GB one but was wondering if the reader on the pandora can really make use of the extra speed. Or it's just better to buy a class 10 for half the price?


Thanks for the help.
 
The class on SD cards is based on write speed. Write speed is good on a Pandora. Read speed is even better - to a point.


The slots seem to max out at 16MB/sec read/write.


A class 10 card means that it will write at 10MB/sec (or more). Many of these will read at >= 16MB/sec.


So - unless you're really worried about maxing out write speeds, the right class 10 card will already max out the slot's read capabilities.


Make sense?


I'm using Patriot LX 32GB Class 10 SDHC cards in both slots. I'm booting from an ext2 partition on the left one - and have a swap partition on it. I have had -no- issues. I'm happy with them - bonus is that they're cased in black and match/blend into the Pandora.


Your mileage may vary.
 
I have a UHS-1 Card and it is fast. Faster than the nand to boot from.
 
My Trancend 16gb class 10's that cost me £18 each are quite a bit faster than my 8gb Sandisk Extreme 30mb/s class 10 (which cost £35). Right now I have 2 class 10 32gb cards from 7dayshop which cost about £25 each in my pandora, and I believe it's the best way to go. They are maybe 1 or 2 mb/s slower than the Trancends (the fastest of all the cards I have - the PNY cards were the poorest) but you can partition them, boot from them and store masses of data on them and they are more than fast enough that you would probably never notice a difference. The only thing I'd use my trancends for are an OS with swapspace - but they will slow down after hammering them like that anyway. The fastest I've managed to get OS wise was using one trancend card to boot the OS and the other as storage/swap space - it made a sprightly OS and was fun to try, but not entirely practical or useful for anything. I'm happy to just use my 32gb cards and keep the 16gb ones for the camera and for copying large media files onto quickly for watching on the netbook/pandora.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I have to say that I got a couple of cards from 7dayshop and they were terrible, blatantly fake flash memory, not recognised by either the Pandora or my D7000. So I would never buy from them again, and would advise people to be a little wary of buying memory from them.
 
Hmm I must have been lucky, the 2 I got are fine. They are fast, and are brimming with enough ROMS to make copyright fearing mortals mess their underwear. Who'd have believed it years ago if you'd told them you can store every C64 and Amiga game ever created, as well as a plethora of PSX and arcade games on something the size of a postage stamp? It's like one of those teenage fantasies I used to have that made me have a happy accident in my pants.
 
I know the feeling, I still have one of my original ProGate II hard drives for the ST, with a whopping 170 MB capacity.


It really boggles my mind when I think about how quickly this has all happened.
 
I agree with TitanUranus, transcend cards has the best price/speed/capacity ratio. On the pandora I use a class 10 32GB one that I bough last year and I would recommend to anyone.


I must point that the argue wasn't about worse or better shops and brands. My idea was to hear from people who has tested cards that accomplished the UHS-1 standard.
 
That's interesting but it says that test was done with a USB3 reader. If I'm not wrong the pandora card reader is connected through an USB2 bus wich means in the best case that it could achieve around 40MB/s
 
^ It's likely to be the issue where the manufacturers are using whatever parts they buy in, again, meaning that some users will have issues whilst others won't.
 
The wiki has other issues too - some of the cards have the speeds listed as done in a Pandora - others have the manufacturer's claimed maximum


The test at the top of the SD wiki though is pretty good. Inferring from that and the notes on the cards and test results from the forums I was under the impression that the SD slots on the Pandora maxed out at 16MB/sec read.


16MB/sec read on my Pandora gives me a boot from SD of about 45 seconds - which is about 1.5 times booting from NAND.


Booting from an ext2 partition on a Patriot LX 32GB SDHC class 10 card.


Above - a user has claimed that the UHS cards are able to shorten that boot time under the NAND rate - which would throw my theory of 16MB/sec max out the window. That would be fine - but I would like to see the specifics.


If someone has one of these new cards - please run the read test from the top of the SD FAQ page and post back to this thread what one of these cards shows for read rates in one of the SD slots in a Pandora please?


For the purposes here - it's rate on any other system or via a USB adapter isn't as relevant.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Just bough a SanDisk 45MB/s 8G in a big shop.


Read varies between 15.7 and 17.2. 17.2 is rarely reached, can't explain why.


Writes at 12.5, stable value.


I rebooted between every tries, about 10.


Results posted on the wiki :


http://pandorawiki.org/SD_compatibility_list


Oh, and the color is black. It's very important for accurate testing.
 
I'm using a 64gb Transcend SDXC, works fine. I've also used a 16gb SDHC. Mine are always formatted as ext2 though, don't know if that makes a difference.

I have a 64gb Transcend card too, works fine for me with ext2.
 
I just picked up a 64GB SDXC from Pretec, its class 16. How do you think this will arrive formatted and what would be recommended for formatting this card for use in both the Pandora & a MAC?
 
Just bough a SanDisk 45MB/s 8G in a big shop.


Read varies between 15.7 and 17.2. 17.2 is rarely reached, can't explain why.


Writes at 12.5, stable value.


I rebooted between every tries, about 10.


Results posted on the wiki :


http://pandorawiki.o...patibility_list


Oh, and the color is black. It's very important for accurate testing.

Were you clocked at 600Mhz or overclocked during those readings?

I have a UHS-1 Card and it is fast. Faster than the nand to boot from.
Can you run the read test on the Wiki? I'm sure we'd all like to know how fast these are on the Pandora itself.


Thank you.
 
Back
Top