recommended micro sd card ?

[tkaiser]

I am using a Sandisk Ultra 32GB and it works great... $11-15 on Amazon

Me too, works perfect...

Nope, 'perfect' would mean maximum random I/O performance and there the normal SanDisk Ultra simply suck. Best buy at the moment for Pine64 (which is limited to 22/23 MB/s sequential transfer speeds anyway) are Samsung EVO with 32GB or above (size does matter since parallelism jumps in and increases performance when more NAND dies can be accessed by the card's controller in parallel)

http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...rformance/

[androsch]

Me too, works perfect...

Nope, 'perfect' would mean maximum random I/O performance and there the normal SanDisk Ultra simply suck. Best buy at the moment for Pine64 (which is limited to 22/23 MB/s sequential transfer speeds anyway) are Samsung EVO with 32GB or above (size does matter since parallelism jumps in and increases performance when more NAND dies can be accessed by the card's controller in parallel)

http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...rformance/

Agreed, so i should add: works perfect for me, but can be improved by using a better card [emoji6]

Gesendet von meinem K00L mit Tapatalk

[xrez]

I Just tested a class 4 8gb card from transcend vs a kingston class 10 uhs1 16gb and for some odd reason the 8gb slower card runs things a LOT faster... is there any reason if the card is bigger it will be slower?

[Ghost]

I Just tested a class 4 8gb card from transcend vs a kingston class 10 uhs1 16gb and for some odd reason the 8gb slower card runs things a LOT faster... is there any reason if the card is bigger it will be slower?

Random I/O speeds might be better. Modern (micro) SD cards tend to focus just on read and write.

[tkaiser]

I Just tested a class 4 8gb card from transcend vs a kingston class 10 uhs1 16gb and for some odd reason the 8gb slower card runs things a LOT faster... is there any reason if the card is bigger it will be slower?

It's quite the opposite if you choose quality cards (see the link I posted in this very same thread). And also the so called 'speed class' is close to irrelevant since we're talking about computers and not digital cameras (sequential I/O is important for cameras, random I/O is important for computers). 

And then you shouldn't compare quality vendors (Transcend) with nonames (Kingston).

Only 4 vendors produce their own NAND dies, their own controllers and combine both to retail products: Samsung, SanDisk, Toshiba and Transcend. Buying anything else is simply a waste of money since you NEVER know what you get: The cards might show the irrelevant sequential transfer speeds they're rated for but fail providing high random I/O speeds.

[xrez]

I Just tested a class 4 8gb card from transcend vs a kingston class 10 uhs1 16gb and for some odd reason the 8gb slower card runs things a LOT faster... is there any reason if the card is bigger it will be slower?

It's quite the opposite if you choose quality cards (see the link I posted in this very same thread). And also the so called 'speed class' is close to irrelevant since we're talking about computers and not digital cameras (sequential I/O is important for cameras, random I/O is important for computers). 

And then you shouldn't compare quality vendors (Transcend) with nonames (Kingston).

Only 4 vendors produce their own NAND dies, their own controllers and combine both to retail products: Samsung, SanDisk, Toshiba and Transcend. Buying anything else is simply a waste of money since you NEVER know what you get: The cards might show the irrelevant sequential transfer speeds they're rated for but fail providing high random I/O speeds.

Gotcha. So mostly the numbers usually just help digital cameras and not really anything else. Also did not know that Kingston would be considered a noname since they have been in the memory business for a long long time. So if i got another transcend class 10 i would see a difference from my class 4 one?

[tkaiser]

So mostly the numbers usually just help digital cameras and not really anything else. Also did not know that Kingston would be considered a noname since they have been in the memory business for a long long time. So if i got another transcend class 10 i would see a difference from my class 4 one?

The 'speed class' is only about guaranteed (mostly irrelevant) sequential transfer speeds. And unfortunately there exists no such thing describing the random I/O performance.

The only Kingston products I would buy is server DRAM but never SD cards: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022

Regarding Transcend: No idea since you would have to test the card in question. We at Armbian spent some efforts on testing through different cards using identical conditions but there weren't that much Transcend results. If I would've to buy a new card for any Allwinner based SBC (like Pine64 for example) now  I would definitely again choose a simple Samsung EVO with 32GB or above (the smaller sizes show lower performance. And they're rated to give you 10 MB/s sequential write speed max but all tested EVOs with 32 or 64GB exceeded 21MB/s in reality). Again:

• http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/954-sd-card-performance/
  
• http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...rformance/
  

[xrez]

So mostly the numbers usually just help digital cameras and not really anything else. Also did not know that Kingston would be considered a noname since they have been in the memory business for a long long time. So if i got another transcend class 10 i would see a difference from my class 4 one?

The 'speed class' is only about guaranteed (mostly irrelevant) sequential transfer speeds. And unfortunately there exists no such thing describing the random I/O performance.

The only Kingston products I would buy is server DRAM but never SD cards: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022

Regarding Transcend: No idea since you would have to test the card in question. We at Armbian spent some efforts on testing through different cards using identical conditions but there weren't that much Transcend results. If I would've to buy a new card for any Allwinner based SBC (like Pine64 for example) now  I would definitely again choose a simple Samsung EVO with 32GB or above (the smaller sizes show lower performance. And they're rated to give you 10 MB/s sequential write speed max but all tested EVOs with 32 or 64GB exceeded 21MB/s in reality). Again:

• http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/954-sd-card-performance/
  
• http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic...rformance/
  

Thanks for that Tkaiser. I'm still new at all of this and has been educational. Over here a 16gb evo card costs about $23 usd vs the cheapo Kingston at about $6 usd. I will be trying a $7usd samsung card (http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Class-Adap...B00IVPU6L4) and report back. By the way if i wanted to compare random i/o speeds of these cards is there a program that i could use? Preferably windows based if possible

[hyperlogos]

I would normally use iobench on Linux to test disk performance. You might try iozone. http://www.iozone.org/

[tkaiser]

Thanks for that Tkaiser. I'm still new at all of this and has been educational. Over here a 16gb evo card costs about $23 usd vs the cheapo Kingston at about $6 usd.

Sorry, but where do you have to pay more than $10 for a 32GB EVO? This is one click away from your Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IVPU786/

To test speeds you use H2testw or f3 in a first step (this tells you sequential speeds and whether your card is fake or not) and then CrystalDiskMark to test random I/O too (see the explanations here: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-microsd-card/)

And you should always keep in mind that all Samsungs I tested are pretty slow directly after powering up. They need some time to get faster (maybe some calibration or something like that happens)