Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe the android guy today's topic isn't really android related at all it's something that you can apply to virtually any kind of modern technology its storage SD storage to be precise those removable cards that give you more space on your phone or your tablet or your laptop pc camcorder or even camera what do you need to know about it what different technologies are available out there and what are some things that you need to look out for that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode of the android guy weekly ok to lay the foundation we're talking about removable storage and removable storage comes in all kinds of different formats and flavors and specifications and there's just lots of them today we're going to limit our discussion to the SD card format but we are going to talk about one other format because it's kind of interchangeable with SD so let's get right to that first so before we had SD cards we had these guys this is an MMC card or a multimedia card this one is 128 megabytes no not gigabytes megabytes now MMC is kind of like a naked SD card it's thinner it has the same contacts on it and it doesn't have that little write-protect switch on the side that's about it as far as external stuff goes an MMC card is going to work in almost any SD card device the slots the same what's different is where you get into something that you need to have the SD or the encryption the secure part which ironically we hardly ever use kind of funny huh now today these guys get all the way up to 128 gigabytes in capacity there's lots of different formats that you can get in an MMC card that are different than the evolutionary track that the SD cards took so let's switch gears and talk about that so let's talk SD cards this one is a 512 megabyte or a half a gigabyte card from Kingston it's one of my original ones and you know it does its job and that's about it it's got this nice little right protect tab on the side it's got the same pin out and it's a little bit chunkier it's thicker it's like an MMC card that has a plastic shell around it instead of just kind of a covering so SD comes in various different sizes we have the original SD card that we talked about already and then we've got this nice little mini SD card now there are different sizes obviously but they have the same pins on them not the same pin out but the same pins in fact they're so similar you can even get these little adapter trays plug them in just like that and now I've just turned this mini SD card into a standard SD card just by doing that now that means that you've got to have all these little interconnections that are working properly there's one extra point of potential failure so after mini SD came micro SD to compare them right there you can see very very small pin outs are a little bit different but they have essentially the same contacts on there you can even take your microsd and get a little carrier there and plug it in and now I've got a standard size SD card using just that micro SD chip now I don't have the the lock tab on the micro but i do on the the full-size so just something interesting to note it's also kind of a naked chip where it doesn't have that hard plastic outer shell to it it just has kind of the covering to it in fact you can see that just a little bit if we can get the camp court focus can see how it's just kind of laminated is all it's not really encased but that's what it is so we've talked about our full size our mini size and our micro size SD cards now let's talk about capacities and different formats whether it's mini micro or standard they all have the same type of capacity limitations as any of the others they're essentially just the same type of card in a different package so when I talk about SD and SDHC and SDXC know that they apply to any one of the flavors whether that's the standard the mini or the micro cards so if we take a look at this guy this is a sandisk one gig micro SD card and I know it's not focusing on that too well but there's no speed indicator on that it's just kind of a generic card or what's called a class zero doesn't really have any class some people call that a class one as it was the first one out there next up we have of course class two then class for don't know why we didn't have a three then we went up to six then aight aight you didn't see any eights and then ten so here's what it looks like and they've got this neat little symbol it's a sea with a number inside it so this is a class 6 card will switch back over here to this guy this is a micro SD HC and right above my fingernail don't know if you can see that it's a little ten inside that so that's a class 10 now that's as fast as you can get in the class denominations for a micro SD card or really any kind of SD card so what about them why do we have the different classes different things that you might do with your device may require different amounts of speed for example listening to an mp3 doesn't take that much speed it's a relatively low bit rate however shooting full HD video that gobbles up an awful lot of space and you've got to be able to write that very very quickly otherwise you're going to start losing frames that's never a good thing so they came up with this class measurement so that different cards could be rated according to how fast they were if you were just using basic storage go ahead a class nothing or a class two would be just fine class for you might want if you take a lot of pictures and do it relatively quickly whether that's on your smartphone your tablet or even your dedicated camera a class 6 well class 6 was getting into the more professional level if you are going to be shooting a lot of camera shots and fast succession or if you are going to be doing basic HD video recording you know basic HD being 720p you'd probably want to jump up to a class 6 if you were doing full HD however you wanted to go all the way to a class 10 card now that was going to help you so that you didn't have the dropped frames so the card itself wouldn't be the bottleneck and you'd be able to write the data out as quickly as you needed to to match the incoming source now of course that meant that your device had to be able to take advantage of that too right at that full speed but the nice thing was my class 10 card works just fine in a much much slower much much older device that wasn't wasn't built when they had classes defined there is another class of speed out there it's called UHS or ultra high speed instead of a little see with a number in it it's a you sometimes with the number in it now why do I say sometimes it's so new that they don't have anything beyond one so you might see that you with the number one in it and they're usually just for these new SDXC cards SDXC you're going to see in slrs you're going to see in higher level video cameras you know more prosumer I don't even know if they've made it down to the prosumer level or if they're still in the pro level that's how new and how high-end they are you probably don't need them but you need to know about them and know what they are and what they do so wrapping things up what card do you need so how do you decide what you need now there's a difference there between want and need because of course you want a two terabyte SDXC with the UHS 12 doesn't exist but you want it trust me you do I do but then there's what you actually need ok so if I've got a camcorder that accepts SD X C cards but my laptop doesn't I may go with an SD HC because I can still get up to 32 gig capaz on it and I can still get class 10 if I'm shooting full HD so that I'll do what I need it to do even though I may want to do something better than that if I've got an old device that only reads standard SD all I might want to take that into consideration as well but it's a safe bet sdh can't even say it there's too many acronyms sdhc high-capacity that's the one that's your safe bet that's the one that you want to get now get it in as bigger sizes you can get keeping something in mind the faster you go the more expensive it's going to be so if you only need an eight gig card but you want a 16 gig card or you may one a 32 gig card but you need say a class 6 or your camcorder is not going to be able to record at full HD you may want to scale back the size from 32 to 16 or maybe even 28 so that you can go from a class four to a classics or a class 10 card just look at your options in way out which one is going to give you the best bang for your buck and then see how much of the next step up from that's going to be so for example if you are looking at say it a 16 gig card you want a 32 but you want class 10 class 10 if it weighs out you may settle for the 16 gig and save that money if it's only 20 bucks to upgrade to a 32 gig in a class 10 by all means go for it if it's you know about twice the cost of the card you may want to consider getting to 16 gig class tens again it's up to you and your use for me I'll spend the extra money I'll get the biggest capacity that I can and the fastest speed that I can but I'm different from you you might have different needs so save money where you can invest money wisely where you need to that's all I've got for today now i'm sure there was a lot of stuff in there that brought out even more questions so please head over to the article at pocketnow.com i will have a hyperlink to that down underneath where you can just click it'll be easy to get over there and we'll kind of keep the conversation over at pocketnow.com so we can aggregate everything there too that's where I'm going to be answering the questions I know I've answered a lot before on the YouTube comments but I'm going to be heading over there so much easier because it puts us all in one place so go ahead and do that if you don't mind if you like learning cool stuff not just about Android but about technology give the video a big thumbs up of course subscribe to our video channel if you haven't done so already so you don't miss out on future episodes not only of this episode but also some other stuff there's a really cool new one that I think you're going to like called after the buzz Michael Fisher it's really awesome so subscribe so we make sure that you don't miss out on that 4-pocket now showing off SD its technologies and speeds i'm jody android guy