A-DATA 16GB Class 10

[daedric]

It seems that it's true. Not for the write speed, but using 64k clusters (why test 32k when there is bigger option available ), I'm constantly reaching 100+ MB/s read speeds on SD Tools. I don't know if it's true though (is the interface capable of 100+ Mb/s ). Anyway, I think that the only need for a faster card is the video recording/transfer, so larger files are presumed to have a priority in choosing the format of your card. From what I remember from the good old days (10 MB HDDs, 4.77 MHz processors, 5.25" floppies, etc.) the downside in bigger clusters was that smaller files took a whole cluster and there was much space wasted (when you had 10 MB HDD every kB counted). With a 16 GB card, it's needles to say that I don't care if a few hundred MB get wasted (and for that you need to have 32 000+ files), so I think with the clusters it's the bigger - the better.

Well:

USB 2.0: Released in April 2000.
Added higher maximum bandwidth of 480 Mbit/s [60 MB/s] (now called "Hi-Speed"). Further modifications to the USB specification have been done via Engineering Change Notices (ECN).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#USB_2.0

On the cluster size issue, true enough the "loosing 60 kbytes due to a 4kbytes spending a whole 64kbyte cluster" situation is no longer a problem.
Yet... let us remind we're talking about FAT32. I used to defrag FAT32 back on win98, and android splashes alot of files on the SD card. It's also true that fragmentation used to increase reading due to hdd access time, and sdcards don't suffer so much from that... but if your sd card gets fragmentaded, and you're trying to record a hd movie that will be split on several fragments, you might get a problem. IMHO of course...

 

[ghostofcain]

Well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#USB_2.0

On the cluster size issue, true enough the "loosing 60 kbytes due to a 4kbytes spending a whole 64kbyte cluster" situation is no longer a problem.
Yet... let us remind we're talking about FAT32. I used to defrag FAT32 back on win98, and android splashes alot of files on the SD card. It's also true that fragmentation used to increase reading due to hdd access time, and sdcards don't suffer so much from that... but if your sd card gets fragmentaded, and you're trying to record a hd movie that will be split on several fragments, you might get a problem. IMHO of course...

Wear leveling...... SD cards, and other flash memories, employ it to spread the data out to reduce the usage of any individual sector. Therefore defragging memory cards is a waste of time and will decrease the life expectancy of your card.