Confusing Symbols on SD Cards

What do all those weird symbols and icons on SD cards mean?

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[techquickie]

It's good to be back! Thanks for watching, everyone, and for your continued support. <3
--Jon

[Killertamagotchi]

You forgot A1 and A2, which indicates the speed of random access, like what happens when you use it as memory in a smartphone for an app or, for example, in the switch

[ChannelS]

Really reminds me a lot of USB where they created an overcomplicated and cryptic series of names, abbreviations, and numbers that mean nothing to most of their customers. I've never paid any mind to these markings at all when shopping for cards, instead I just look for a spec sheet that gives actual values for transfer speeds.

[stevenjlovelace]

Fun fact: the SD logo was originally designed for an optical disc format that never took off. That's why the "D" looks like a CD or DVD.

[UnfaehigerKanal]

Funfact: The write protect switch on SD cards actually isn't electrical. It's like on old audio/video cassettes where a mechanical sensor inside the card reader detects whether the write protect is at place, so if that tiny "switch" falls out, you can just put tape over the hole, and it should be writable.

[noahluppe]

What is also important to mention, the UHS-II and UHS-III have a new row of pins for the new bus, they aren't like PCIe that keeps the same mechanical contacts, but actually changed the amount of pins. They still are backwards compatible on both ends, so if one device does not have the new pins (thus not support UHS-II) they just communicate vie UHS-I or the old SD bus.

[ZinZalo]

An interesting thing about some cheaper standard SD cards is that they are actually micro SD cards in a standard SD adapter. I found this out when one of my SD cards split open and I was both relieved and surprised to find a micro SD inside!

[Valeryp]

The level of miniaturization flash memory has reached is incredible. My uncle had old 128MB cards back at his office. When I had my first feature phone 8GB were all that you could ask for. By the time the 3DS came around 32GB were starting to feel tight.
And then we went from hundred gigs cards to 1TB becoming affordable in a couple of years.
My phone has a card as big as some SSDs now.
What a time to be alive.

[conza]

What's kinda of amazing is, if a regular viewer was just off social media for a couple of days, they'd just think this was a normal Techquickie video, and that nothing ever happened.

[jesse]

I said an audible “What?” A few times hearing the speed for SDUC EX, so I googled the specs to see the wiki page saying it’s just under 1GB/s, not 1TB/s. I was legit freaking out when I heard it😂.

[CalcProgrammer]

How did you manage to miss A1 and A2? These are arguably THE most important specs for cards used for operating systems or gaming. If you're buying a card to use in a Raspberry Pi or other SBC, booting a Linux smartphone, or using to store your game library on your Steam Deck or Switch, the Ax (or Application) mark is important. I don't exactly know what numerical values A1 and A2 refer to but it has to do with random access performance, which is not important when sequentially dumping or reading large video files but is super important when reading a bunch of tiny files from all over the place when you're booting an OS or loading a large game.

[nathanfife]

I actually think they differ in one other way, that would be endurance.

If you buy a regular SD card for your camera or something there's a good chance you'll wear it out really quickly.

A high endurance SD card will last much longer

[antonschernus]

Would love to see another quickie that also touches on durability on the write cycles. How it affects performance or leads to data corruption, and how to know when to toss a card. Glad the channels are back up relatively quickly.

[extremefalcon]

Now that I'm thinking about it, I've always looked at the back of the box when getting an SD or micro SD card to get all of the necessary info and have been doing this for years. It's saved me a lot of time in the long run since I do a lot of photography as well as having dash cams in my car.

[TaylorPassofaro]

Video guy chiming in here:
If you're looking for an SD card that will work with your camera, you need to check what the *max bitrate* of your camera is and match that to your SD card. For example, my A7iii shoots 4K at up to 100Mb/s which corresponds to 12MB/s (divide by 8 to go from bits to bytes) and that means I can easily get away with a v30 card since that supports up to 30MB/s. Plenty of headroom. However, if I was shooting on an a7siii, that can shoot up to 600 Mb/s in it's All-I codec, which means I need at least a card that supports 600/8=75MB/s, which would be a V90 card.

For all the symbols on the SD card, it's actually not terribly complicated for video, I wish they would just make the "V" number a lot bigger since that's the important one.

[ZipplyZane]

And if you do see one that's above 1TB for any remotely reasonable sounding price, it's probably fake.

[ilovefunnyamvnd]

one of the few times I came away more confused after a tech quickie, not Riley's fault. this really needs a table for all the information

[gblargg]

4:18 Imagine explaining to someone in the late 1990s that memory cards will eventually be in the terabyte size and use the same bus protocol as plug-in expansion cards, all the size of a thumbnail.

[offaperry]

4:15 1TB/s??? Something seems off by a magnitude of 1000x lol

[Vojoor]

00:04:18 1 TB/s? I assume it’s GB/s, maybe in 15 years it’s TB/s