Review of Sandisk 8GB Micro SDHC Ultra card

4 Comments


Approximate reading time is

A while ago I decided that 2GB of storage on my smartphone just wasn’t cutting it, so an upgrade was in order. Queue Sandisk’s 8GB Class 6 “Ultra” Micro SDHC card. The “Ultra” part does indeed sound like silly marketing talk, although I’ll explain I think it is warranted. SDHC classes exist to give you a guarantee of the lowest write speed of your device. For example, you are guaranteed a minimum write speed of 6 megabytes per second if you have a class 6 card.

I have been testing my class 6 Micro SDHC card with a file-copying application called “TeraCopy“, and I have always had a consistent and sustained write speed of 15 megabytes per second. That’s two and a half times faster than it is guaranteed to run. Just to give you an idea of what this means in practice, I copied about 5GiB of music onto this card in less than 5 minutes.

Now for some pictures:

External packaging

This is the packaging the card came in. On the left is the card itself in a protective case. On the right you find the tiny USB adapter, and below is a lanyard attachment for the adapter. The USB adapter was the other attractive parts of the package. If you don’t have any SDHC capable equipment, this lets you make your Micro SDHC card into a tiny USB drive.

Size comparison

Here is a size comparison the adapter. Top to bottom order: Micro SDHC USB adapter, Logitech VX Revolution dongle, Sandisk 4GB Cruzer.

Plugged in

Here’s how the USB adapter looks plugged into my laptop. Again for size reference, you can see the mouse dongle plugged in beside it, and another SD card in my laptop’s SD slot.

EXTREME CLOSE UP ... WOAH

Finally, here’s an extreme close up of the card, just to try and show you how small these things really are..

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4 Comments (+add yours?)

  1. Treen_bean
    Feb 23, 2009 @ 15:33:55

    i recentley bought a 4gb micro sdhc card only to find that it doesn’t work in my phone!

    Reply

    • David
      Feb 23, 2009 @ 15:51:03

      Hi Treen,
      The most obvious cause that I can think of is that your phone does not support the SDHC (“Secure Digital High Capacity”) format. Normal SD cards (whether they be full size, mini or micro) go up 2GB. Then, once you have any SD media which is 4GB and above, it is the SDHC format.

      So that means anything designed to read/write the original SD format, won’t be able to talk to SDHC media.

      Your phone’s manual should say whether it is SDHC compliant or not.

      Hope this helps.

      Reply

  2. Simon Hayes
    Jun 27, 2010 @ 10:42:37

    A lucid and informative review – thanks ! After reading this I realised I’d simply “noise disposed” the “Ultra” part of the product name as being similar to “o-matic” in Wallace & Gromit inventions. Bonus points for actually testing & providing performance figures. I think I’ll treat my E72 to one of these :-)

    Reply

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