Confusing Symbols on SD Cards
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- čas přidán 7. 06. 2024
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What do all those weird symbols and icons on SD cards mean?
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It's good to be back! Thanks for watching, everyone, and for your continued support.
i loove you jon
Jon, you can't escape cryptobros
great vid, only thing you missed of importance (especially for ppl using sd cards in a phone or steamdeck) is application class. If you using an sd card in those cercumstances is worth it to go for an A2 class card over an A1
Looks like you just went through a hard R. I assume that means recovery. 😏
Glad you're back.
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
So did everybody else tbh
stupid question: is a1 or a2 faster? i’m guessing a2 but i wanna be sure
@@Bukki13 a2 is more than double
@@BEASTBOOST ok thanks
And the Steam Deck
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.
Well, there is a slight difference.
Those codes for SD cards worked fine at first, but no one expected the format to live so long.
So when existing marking became obsolete and no longer usable, they just did a quick patch, then another and another, so now the standard is just a big patchwork.
In other words SD simply outlived its own standards.
With USB existing naming did not became obsolete, it would still work for a long time,
but the USB consortium wanted better free and confusing advertising so they did just that.
On top of that it feels that people behind USB naming just could not get into consensus with each other and just started randomly changing stuff hoping it will work.
@@hubertnnn Im happy for sd
@@hubertnnn True, they're almost opposite problems. Sticking with the standard for too long, vs changing it too much.
@Channel
You are a casual electronics consumer.
@@Keepskatin On the contrary, casual consumers don't look up spec sheets.
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.
I knew that thanks to @technologyconnections
@@Shadow-RAM Probably where I learned it too, now that you mention it.
Fun fun fact.
SD stood for SECURE DISC I think
@@eddie826 whatever it stood for, now it stands for secure digital
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.
Unless the pin has somehow been bent back. I like when the notch becomes loose over time.. its exciting! Every time I plug in I never know if I'll write over my data or not
Floppy disks worked this way also. Indeed, on the actually floppy floppy disks, you'd use a piece of tape to cover the hole as the "correct" way to do it.
It's basically how 3½" micro floppies did write protection, with a sliding switch. -8" and 5¼" floppies as well as- VHS and compact cassette needed to be permanently altered for write protection.
@@Crlarl No, the floppies didn't. They had a little notch in the side that if open would let you write, and if you stick a tape over them they were writable. And the disks came with little rectangles of tape designed to fit over the hole.
You might be thinking of the practice of cutting a notch in the other side of the packaging so you could use both sides of the single-sided floppy.
Yes, there was a break-off tab on cassette tapes to prevent writing, which you could also cover up with tape if you changed your mind.
@@darrennew8211
Yeah, you're right. I was mixing up which way it worked.
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.
Thanks. I didn't know this.
I was about to say this, many Sony cameras take good advantage of them.
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.
I still have a chonky 64mb SD from my first photo camera. Wild evolution.
128MB? Meh i have old 32MB SD card in drawer
My first personal computer had a tape drive with a 15min per side tape.
My first thumb drive was 16mb ... I bought so many and threw out my floppies
The first 2TB MicroSD I owned cracked me up. I held it next to the 1GB hard drive my dad bought to upgrade his Packard Bell x486 he bought when I was a kid.
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!
That reminds me of the old 9v batteries that had 6 AAAA batteries inside, those little suckers where impossible or extremely expensive to get in my country and it was just better to extract them from those...
It makes sense. Just print the same size microSD and get shipped a plastic shell for half of them. Makes for extremely efficient factory use.
@@josuelservin I wonder what legal rigamarole enables that. I'm yet to see such thing, all 9V batteries I've dismantled so far are either a solid brick thing or the cells are nowhere close in size or termination of AAAs and unusable if disassembled.
I assume some loophole makes sticking 6 AAAs into a 9v cell more cost effective from a tax standpoint
@@Mordecrox They didn't say AAAs, they said AAAAs, they are even thinner and I have only ever seen them used inside fancy stylus pens
@@JustTheJames exactly! it's 4A and they where (and still are) quite rare, and I did used them for the stylus on an ancient digitizer tablet.
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.
Well it was probably shot way before and scheduled to release today
Oh, did something happen?
@@lpnp9477 LTT got hacked
@@lpnp9477 Bitcoin scammers took over the LTT channel and some of its related channels, including this one, a few days ago
@@lpnp9477 It's him. It's the Regular Viewer™.
4:12 Small mistake there, it's 1GB/s, not 1TB/s
Just a factor of 1000 small mistake LOL
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😂.
Same lmao
I did not even notice. I automatically interpreted it as 1GB/s, as 1TB/s is just impossible. If you didn't write about it, I would have never known!! lol
Why'd he say 1tb per second tho
@@jamesmoses4066 slip of the tongue, obviously ;-P
@@jamesmoses4066 low quality control nowadays
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.
Ask the Wiki Page he skimmed all this info from.
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.
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.
People from 2090 be like: you used cards with less than 128 petabytes of storage? Lol, so old and outdated. I bet the write speeds were less than 30 terabytes a second too.
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
Missed this Information in the video too.
It realy makes a big impect in these use cases. When you want to watch your surveillance fotage and recognice your card died. Or you don't need to buy a new card every year.
The real answer to endurance question is always Samsung. They are the best at manufacturing memory chips.
@@mrofinUtortxoF no, maybe they are quite good, but normal Chips, will never live as long as the special endurance Chips from other manufakturer. With a garanted live experience of 13 years continius writing.
@@Sid_Argon endurance (and then trust the marketing people). Most SD cards sold in my country have 5 year warranty. Do they trust in their product? No, warranty is just included in the price. Does the price of SD cards drop dramatically every year for like 20 years? Yes. So a dead card will not be an issue in 5 years.
Once again: endurance is marketing
One of the reasons I prefer microSDs with a SD adapter in my camera is that, by taking the card in and out every day, you ware out the pins on the adapter, not on the card, so you can just switch it for a new one if you need to.
00:04:18 1 TB/s? I assume it’s GB/s, maybe in 15 years it’s TB/s
4:15 i'm guessing writers meant gigabyte & not terabyte
Definitely. :)
I'm 40 years old - and a 1tb microSD still looks like magic forkery to me. I pirated the full version of Doom on 9 floppies! It took me days to spread it over the Schoolyard! There was incoherent supply and demand - a complete disk copy took about 6 minutes. This meant days and days of changing floppies, only to get your gang going. I started charging 8 bucks for it plus 7 bucks for the floppies - and it worked out pretty good. Doom was only 15 bucks to buy at ID if you had the shareware - but that's not the point!
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.
I know for a fact that you don't want to saturate your card with data, nor any kind of storage for that matter (besides maybe the RAM which can take it pretty well) since it might lead to data corruption. So, as a rule of thumb, always leave some space free in your storage device, like a few gigabytes or even more if you have a lot of space, just to be sure.
Many micro-sd cards stop writing altogether when they are "done." That's when you know to destroy and toss it. Samsung sells an ultra-endurance micro-sd card that's not the fastest (but still C10 U3 V30) but lasts greater than 8x more than a typical card.
A1 symbol: hiding in the dark
A2 symbol: killing crewmates
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.
I hate online retailers not listing specs properly. Often times the box has better info than the listing.
Technology Connections has a good video on why the D in SD is a disc.
you did forget a1 and a2 which are pretty much required if you want to use the card in something like the steamdeck.
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
note that support for the slide switch on a standard sd card has to be respected by the device, if the devices chooses it can write regardless of the switch
After learning this… Now you can go watch the Technology Connections video explaining why the SD logs looks like a disk (cd/dvd) when SD cards have nothing to do with those types of disks.
It's so nice that I can tune to this channel anytime and quickly get information that I will use and was too lazy to look up myself.
This is why I love this channel. Clear and concise and very informative.
After some experimentation, I concluded that quite many card-reading devices are in fact forward-compatible: e. g. SDHC-tested devices *can* (usually) handle SDXC too. This was a particular joy for a friend of mine who owns a Windows tablet where microSDHC is the only means of storage expansion.
Alas one of my recent purchases didn't work at first until I realised that it requires specifically a micro SDHC and will not recognise any SDXC card
Something major you appear to have missed is the endurance. Some SD cards are marked as High Endurance and are very good for dashcams.
I was thinking the same thing.
I've purchased a few High Endurance cards for dash cams myself.
I'm be curious to learn how much more endurance High Endurance cards achieve.
@@ddegn I've been using the same High Endurance microSD in my dashcam for 6 years without issue. As long as it's a reputable brand, they seem great!
Some manufacturers like SanDisk even offer 30years warranty on their "Extreme Pro" series. If the card dies under normal use just write them and you will get a new one.
Pretty amazing and simply shows how confident the manufacturers are now when it comes to endurance.
@@yienmaster04 Good to know. Thanks.
@@kruemelfelix Kingston and Corsair used to give lifetime warranty on user class devices ages ago. I would never put my trust in SanDisk - the cheapest brand on the planet. Popular doesn't mean reliable. A-DATA had faulty smartphone series cards, Kingston had defective computer SSDs... I only trust specific models now, NO brand loyalty or pride, they lost that privilege. Hope you're happy and never lose important data, but just don't blindly vouch for a brand, they will eventually make you regret it. 😁✌
RGB SD cards would be a megaflex.
Nobody would ever know until that one friend asks "what size card do you have for your switch?" Only for you to pop that port open and blind them with the rainbow assault of rgb
As confusing as it is, I think we should appreciate how much information is contained in a logo.
I mean.... Yea, but you can also print a QR code on top, and each dot is the size of a dust grain on the card, and it contains even more information...
and if you color the QR code, it looks even more fancy, and in the color, you can save even more information because of the Colorchannel...
It is even more confusing as it is now, and absolutely nobody can read the information... but hey, i would appreciate how much information is contained in the "logo"
@@servus6267 They could just put what every symbol means in the back of the package. I don't think that would be too much to ask, right?
There is very little information in each of the logos, there are just too many logos.
So glad that all the tech tips channels are back on line
This is the most useful Techquickie for me. The amount of time I wanted to understand these cards is horrendous. Thanks for the tips.
It’s good to have the channel back, but I hope that new faster SD card standard is made available for the Switch 2.
I have a Switch too. I honestly hope they take years to make the new Switch
Hah, look at this peasant not having the 128 TB SD UHC EX V90 Micro SD card
@@XaXa17x Ummm, why would you want that?
@@Maxrepfitgm cuz mine is still new
@@XaXa17x That's it? That's the reason??? So what if somebody buys it next year then should they wait to release it again?
This video came right on time! I was just looking for an SD card for my school photography class, and I was so confused about which specs were the best.
Simple, clear, to the point, and very helpful. Thanks!
I'm glad you guys got your channel back!
Glad you guys are back.
This was ultra informative. i immediately grabbed my SD cards that i had recently purchased to follow along. i learned so much. thanks for this.
Okay, Riley, that was totally confusing. The gist is that larger numbers are not necessarily better, but that depends on where the number is located. The infuriating part is that companies print these codes on the SD card, but the specifications in the description do not list them or go into detail about what they mean.
tl;dr V30, V60 etc. are the most useful specs on a glance because it's actually validated write-speeds (given the right SD card reader)
My Canon 5DMKII runs on FAT32 Compact Flash. It's limited to a 32GB card size, and cannot format in camera larger than that. But with a CF to SD adapter, you can format to your heart's content. You just have to use a computer and disk manager EVERY time you want to wipe it. The craziest thing is SD is pretty slow when compared to the ancient CF format. You still need a U3/V30 SD card to match the camera's write speed for burst photos.
I believe the different markings for speed are there to indicate compliance with a spec.
The requirements for video recording differ from image or audio recording so I guess they get certified for the purpose.
nice job getting the account back! hope it stays in the right hands for a long time
for a long time, but not forever :D
Nice to see yall are back up and running again!
All comes down to just 3 numbers: sequential read, sequential write and random IO per seconds. Typical values: 130 MB, 50 MB, 4,000 or so.
Thank you for explaining all the markings, I've been confused by them for a long time.
A note on mounting. If your phone or tablet has an SD card it is very important that any time the card is mounted for read/write it must be synced and unmounted before the device is unmounted. It must be unmounted before it is removed. Failure to do so is liable to corrupt the card.
Phones vary.on how well the phone syncs and unmounts the card especially when it shuts down because the battery is exhausted. Don't let.the phone run down all the way.
It's these kinds of things that I have to look up every time I have to buy an SD card for my DSLR and I swear each year, they include a new symbol to make things more complicated and aggravating, "what's this new symbol? how fast does that mean? Does my camera even support that speed?". As mentioned in the video, I'd appreciate if there was standardized breakdown of the R/W speeds on the package so I wouldn't have to waste an additional hour googling what the new symbols mean.
There is also the fact the the uhs cards also had a different pin layout, where the old ones only have one row on contacts, the uhs cards have two rows to help with the data transfer speed.
UHS does not require the second row. The second row is the PCI Express connection that was discussed in the video, separate from UHS.
Very Informative. I actually learned something about SD cards that I honestly did not know about them. Thanks guys. I now know what card I'm after for my phone upgrade. 💯
It's often pointless to get the fastest card, because your device also has its maximum read and write speeds. For example, Steam Deck uses UHS-I so the max speed is about 100 MB/s. I guess something like the Nintendo Switch has similar speeds.
I've been waiting for exactly this video! Should've come 2 Weeks earlier as I just bought 2 SD-Cards. Great content!
Two questions: 1) Using a MicroSD card in a SD adapter... does it degrade performance (speed) or no impact? 2) Given a number of high endurance marketing, is that something to look out for?
I believe it's just a simple pass-through device, just lining up the contacts between the SD card slot and the Micro SD card.
For endurance claims just check the warranty. If they don't trust their own product to hold up then why should you?
If the manufacturer provides like 20 or 30years of warranty to their cards you can be sure that it will last quite a while. They wouldn't do this else ;)
So I'd rather look out for warranty instead of the "high endurance" label.
i don't think there's really a difference between a microsd in an adapter and a normal sd considering a lot of sds are just microsds in bigger shells
Zero difference, the adapter is just a straight pass through wiring device, it does not have any electronics in it. The performance still depends on the capabilities of the SD card reader.
Lol imagine an RGB rave party emitting out from your camera’s SD slot
I'm waiting for LTT branded SD cards that outperform your average Macbook
Welcome back. Glad you guys were able to recover.
I wish I knew about this a couple of months ago when I was shopping for a new SD card for my cars dashcam. It would have helped save me the headache trying to figure out all that mess.
Should be notes that "write protect notch" only TELLS your cardrider (internal in laptop or USB) that you want this card read-only. Its always up-to reader to actually implement circuit to even see if notch set in this position for this restriction to work and not everyone do. Many cheap chinese card readers simply oblivious about this notch and never tell driver that its sets to locked.
Wow, i really REALLY needed this. Thanks so mooosshh!!!!
Recently had a device where I needed a replacement mini-SD card. None available locally, Amazon, eBay, etc. Through discussion forums, found a place in the UK where I could obtain one. (I'm in the US). Thank you, UK guys!
Great video with an awesome sense of humour making all of this new tech so much more understandable thank you.
I literally just spent time going through these to buy a card for my Steam Deck...you couldn't put this out a couple days early lol. Although the A1/A2 Classes aren't covered in this video which was important to me.
A1/A2 are essential for gaming and boot drive cards and they completely ignored them.
This video reminded me of my recent issues with buying storage cards over amazon. I bought 2 and they did in fact read at the proper speeds but they acted like they were end of life with reading and writing errors anytime i tried to do anything including either trying to set it up in a vita mod or try to use it for switch storage. Decided to go with a cheapo brand from someplace local and haven't had a single issue with it. ~.~
Prob recycled e-waste
my humor just cracked in the end LMAO!!!!
There is also "TF card". The TF format was made into the MicroSD standard so it's identical.
TF card is used now just to save paying royalties to use the SD logos
Fourth criteria is durability. I buy endurance cards for this reason.
It’s good to have you back TQ
They started printing the speeds on the cards as well, but in my testing, the actual measured speeds if the newer sandisc 170mbps cards is exactly the same, as their 90mbps ones.. So yeah, even good will isn't good enough
The difference in quality of SD card is the worst thing about them. Some are good, most are horrible, the problem is you can't tell as there's not standard quality rating.
4:15 1TB/s??? Something seems off by a magnitude of 1000x lol
Something I always wanted to sit down and do the math on is using the highest capacity microSD cards how of those would fit in a standard 26ft U-Haul box truck. A random thought I came up with after watching an radio observatory I think physically ship their hard drives back to a lab because it was faster than trying to send the data over any sort of online connection.
Have you seen Coridoor Digitals "VFX Artist Reveals the TRUE Scale of Data!" ? Not this exact question, but similar.
I think XKCD addressed this. I think he also had a comic where he figured out you could put all of iTunes on SD cards that would fit in a soda can.
In the complete opposite direction regarding both carrying capacity & reliability see: RFC 1149, RFC 2549, & RFC 1149. the IPoAC protocol.
What's stopping you?
I don't believe it's part of the SD standard, but there's also "Endurance" cards that utilize more rugged flash memory and other things to make them last longer than normal cards in security and dashboard camera applications.
Those applications are continuously erasing and writing to the card, which will render a normal SD card useless after a few weeks or months, while the endurance cards can last for years.
Technology Connections had an extensive video on the history on how the SD card got its markings.
Saw this before but good update thanks TechQuickie
SD Cards are as needlessly confusing as memory naming!
I'm a local tech. Great video and great simplification of all the different card types out there.
Love this explanation ❤
No mention of the A marking that specifies the application class? Shame. That basically gives you the IOPS rating of a card
ah yes, the standard that i stopped following somewhere after the SDXC area - feels a bit like a different kind of USB IF there with the SDs.. still confuses me every time i need to get near it.
Great to have you back!
am so happy that this channel is back
I had to look up a chart for these because the one I bought for my video camera wasn't fast enough.
Thank goodness Techquickie is back again 😊
At least they've managed to follow the basic rule of bigger number means better
The thing is some cards will say the speed but in reality it's not the same as a V90 certification even if the speed is the same. i feel like the V90 stuff is more about minimums/averages vs maximums which are often what is shown on the cards.
Great SD Card Reference Video.... Thank You
Very good video! Clear and to the point and easy to follow. 10/10 would recommend.
Good to See you back ❤
Excellent video thanks to the team
I needed this video because I was about 3 days away from googling it as I'm about to buy a new one for the gopro9
All jokes aside. This is the best info I've every seen about an SD card. Thanks
Very informative, Thank you.
Well, at least its not USB level of confusing
i was actually really curious about those symbols cause i modded my switch recently and got myself a retroid pocket 3+ too
Clear and precise ,earned my sub
This makes the USB-IF naming scheme sound reasonable
1:04 That Write-Protect is not hardware based inside the card, it is software based on the operating system level.
I had seen write software that can ignore the state of that switch ... and physically it is a plastic that do not act inside the SD card at all, it only acts to a switch on the port and the state of that switch can be software-ignored/bypassed.
They are back let's go