Difference bet. speed of 256MB and 512MB SD Card?

[pjfuerte]

Hi all,

I need your opinion. I'm planning to buy a Sandisk 512MB SD Card. How much does it compare with the 256SD Card with regards to speed? Is reading/writing much slower because of its bigger size? BTW my device is XDA. Thanks

[kdorff]

I don't think 256 vs 512 will make speed differences. The speed differences come between specific cards. My brief research yesterday suggested to me that SanDisk are kinda slow, even the Ultra II cards. It seems the fastest card, consistently, is the Panasonic. I have a plain 256MB sandisk card it PocketMechanic benchmarks it at 0.7x. I will test my new Panasonic card when it arrives later today (hopefully!).

Just for comparison, Lexar 32x cards are rated at 4.8MB/s, the Panasonic is supposedly rated at 10MB/s.

Another data point, I saw a discussion on Amazon.com reviews about the SanDisk 512 and somebody stating it was faster than the 256.

All this leads to: you really need to benchmark the specific cards you are interested in to see if they meet your speed needs. Speed is really variable, people talking about a single process that takes 45 minutes on one card and just like 1 minute on another card (brand).

[kdorff]

I got the panasonic card. It writes at "2.9x" as opposed to "0.7x" I got with the stock sandisk. That is better than 4 times the speed. Benchmarked using Pocket Mechanic on an XDA.