Customer Reviews

A-DATA Class 6 microSDHC Flash Memory Card with SD Adapter 8GB

5 star:		(63)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I bought the A-Data 16GB Class 6 MicroSDHC card as an upgrade for my Sandisk 8GB Class 4 MicroSDHC card. I wanted to stick with Sandisk but noticed that most Sandisk 16GB MicroSDHC cards available at the time of this writing have a Class 2 rating. I went with A-Data since theirs have a Class 6 speed rating.

I tested transfer speeds using a Sandisk MobileMate MicroSDHC USB reader plugged into a Windows 7 PC transferring a single 992MB file. Results are shown below:

Sandisk Class 4 8GB MicroSDHC card:
Write: ~75 seconds (13.2MB/sec)
Read: ~50 seconds (19.8MB/sec)

A-Data Class 6 16GB MicroSDHC card:
Write: ~126 seconds (7.8MB/sec)
Read: ~64 seconds (15.5MB/sec)

The Sandisk Class 4 8GB MicroSDHC card is significantly faster and clearly surpasses it's minimum speed requirement for a Class 4 rating. I'm curious to see how fast the Sandisk 16GB Class 2 and Class 4 MicroSDHC cards perform and if the slower data transfer speed observed on the A-Data 16GB MicroSDHC card is common across all manufacturers with their 16GB MicroSDHC cards.

Although the review posted by the person who timed transfer speed of this card against the Class 4 Sandisk card looks damning, it is important to remember that single-file transfer speed is not always the most important criterion when considering a card like this one. Potentially more important, particularly on a larger card like this, is random seek and latency figures. On larger cards, it can take significantly longer to locate the file that's being looked for, since there simply is more to be searched. A higher-rated card should have a random seek time small enough to not interfere with the card's ability to achieve the rated speed. Without seek and latency data, such comparisons are almost useless.

I am using this card on my rooted T-Mobile MyTouch, and am very happy with the performance. Since one of the things I'm using it for is to offload apps from internal memory onto the sd card and run them from there, there are a lot of small reads taking place all the time, making seek time critical in my case. I don't have any figures on seek or latency time, but I can say the performance has been very satisfactory.

So far so good. I am using this for the T-Mobile G-1. I have put video podcast from Itunes, an assortment of movies in it's entirety, about 8gb of music, pictures, you name it. It might be a 2-3 second lag wile starting up what you want to watch as far as video, but after that I had no problems. Grant it I am not that computer savvy, but this is a good card, at least for right now until other cards of your likeing come down off of their prices. So G-1 users I don't speak for all of the G-1 users, but this card works very well with the G-1. In October I heard that the new G-1 is coming out so this card will be a welcomed addition or until a 32gb comes out. Give it a try.

Length:: 0:16 Mins

A-Data is one of the major flash RAM manufacturers from Taiwan. Their claim to fame was their excellent performance to cost ratio. They seemed to have continued this tradition.

I needed a larger SDHC card for my Panasonic LX3, which also shoots HD video and raw photos, demanding high transfer rate and large storage capacity. When I found this package for a bargain price I took the bite, as it is also a micro SDHC format for uses with smart phones and PDA devices, among an increasing list of other miniaturized electronics that are adopting to this now universal standard (olympus and sony just abandoned their xD and memory stick on their latest crop of products/cameras). There is no premium for this versatility as other standard sized SDHC cards sold for about the same price if not more at the time of my purchase.

Frustration free package (see uploaded photos) is just a brown envelope with the manufacturer packaged hard case inside holding the adapter and the card itself. I believe the packaging is sufficiently protective. Amazon actually put this brown envelop into another small shipping box. It is probably not necessary, but I appreciate Amazon's taking extra precautions.

The microSDHC card looks well made, fresh off the press with no scratch or smudges, and printed digits. It fits very snugly into the SD sized adapter, that you have to push a little harder to get it in. There's no wiggle or shakes after it sits into the slot. Nothing feels flimsy about this package, which probably should be the par but often isn't.

Transfer rate also performed as expected. I have a sustained rate of over 6MB/sec during download transfers. There has been no problems using it with the LX3 by downloading straight from the camera's USB port, or using a SDHC card reader. I have experienced no problems (yet) and the card had been reliable, while providing the responsiveness (cycle time between RAW capture is negligent compared to a slower class 4 or even a class 2 card) and transfer speed (for large HD video files) that I seek.

There's not much one needs to do for a flash ram other than its reliability, functionality, and durability/build quality. This card apparently delivered on these fronts, while providing the dual-format versatility, at a price I can feel happy about. It's a little better than I expected, actually.

Addendum: Benchmark results for the card I received, obtained by using FDBENCH software using built in card reader on a Thinkpad X61s:

***** FDBENCH Ver 1.02 (C)2003-2007 ep82kazu *****
Drive D:\
Drive Size 100MB

Disk Read Write RRead RWrite (KByte/s)
10252 13615 10128 13233 4031

Copy 2k 32k 256k 1MB (Operations/min)
4054 7260 6288 2040 630

Copy 2k 32k 256k 1MB (Kbyte/Sec)
3923 161 2243 5861 7426

The read/write speed for contiguous files as demonstrated are well above class 6 speeds (6000KB/s). RRead/RWrite are random read write speeds. Apparently more fragmented the file the slower the transfer rate, which is also normal. For your reference only, as there are probably room for error depending on testing hardware and production batches.

Length:: 0:08 Mins

I bought this card because A-Data is known to provide the best bang for the buck (in other words, great performance with an economic pricing). There were overall good reviews on Newegg about the card. Beware though, the card that Amazon ships you is not the A-Data 8GB TURBO microsdhc Class 6, but rather the regular A-Data 8GB microsdhc Class 6. Thus, Read/Write speeds are slightly slower than the Turbo version. This is also the case if you select Amazon Frustration Free packaging. Free space is actually a little less than 8GB (7.7GB) when popped into my Nokia E63 phone, but otherwise, it works fine with the smartphone. It comes pre-formatted to FAT-32 system.

Some stats for the card (Taken from the packaging):
Approx number of photos
6MP camera 3812
8MP camera 2318
10MP camera 1618
12MP camera 1354


Approx minutes of video
6Mbps HD 135
9Mbps HD 90
13Mbps HD 63

Overall, it's a great buy, but if you're looking for the A-Data 8GB TURBO microsdhc Class 6, you will have to look elsewhere. Check the serial number. If it reads AUSDH8GCL6-RA1, then it is not the TURBO version.

I purchased this item on 06/30/09 for my (Sprint) HTC Touch Pro. It is a very fast card, that has been easy & simple to use, and worry-free. Therefore, and for the money, I think it is one of the greatest things since the making of sliced bread.

Got this ADATA 16GB Micro SDHC in July. Worked as advertised until October. In October, it all of a sudden decided to just stop working. My cell phone (Sprint HTC Hero) locks up with this card installed, my computer says "I/O error, can not write to disk", same thing happens when I try it in my laptop (both are Windows 7 Pro. Also, when the card was working, I tested the speed of the card, it would write at 5.93MB/sec and read at 11.23MB/sec. That's not quite class 6 as it is advertised, but was fast enough for my situation, so I worked with it. Overall, I would NOT recommended this card to a friend, I would steer them to the Transcend 16MB Class 6 SDHC card, it's a few dollars more, but my other Transcend card (same size and class) is far faster and has never failed in the 1 year or so that I've had it.

***UPDATE***
ADATA stands behind there products. I sent them a email and they issued me an RMA#. I had a brand new card in my hand within 48 hours.

***UPDATE***
The replacement card they sent me worked for all of 5 months. Now all of the sudden my phone wont even acknowledge that the card is installed in the phone. Other card work fine in the phone so I know that it's not the phone. I put the card into my computer and it says that it's not formatted and asked to format it. I click OK and it formats it, but now my 16GB card can only hold 512KB. I looked in Windows Disk Management and it shows 1 FAT32 partition of 512KB, no other unallocated space...NOTHING! So now my card is DEAD AGAIN!! Going to try AGAIN to get it RMA'd....AGAIN! I WILL NEVER BUY ANOTHER ADATA PRODUCT...EVER!!! Good thing it has a lifetime warranty, if you buy this card, YOU WILL NEED IT!

Using this on a Touch Pro 2. It has some extreme data bursts when transferring files on to it. I have seen it burst and start at 150MB's per second and slowly work its way down to the class 6 rating. Transferring 2GB's of movies to the phone takes about 3 minutes. Pretty ridiculous rates if you ask me. I think this has to do with windows 7 and the fact that i have it optimized under windows. By optimized i mean that when the Touch Pro 2 is connected by USB, i select the option to connect it as a disk drive(cool feature of the TP2, not sure if other phones do this), then under windows 7 device hardware properties i have windows 7 set the phone as optimized for speed. Windows 7 is really ready for flash as they said compared to previous OS's. Either way the memory card writes ridiculous rates and reads even faster. Great product. Even better then i thought. I didnt format the drive or do anything with it other than put it in the phone and let windows 7 do the rest. So far been using it about 1 month and great product. Lifetime warranty a big plus!!

I bought this SD Card for my T-Mobile G1. I rooted my phone and am using this sd card for all of my roms and my apps and it works great!! I highly recommend this product to anyone looking for a fast writing SD Card.

this card has enabled me to stop carrying my ipod... since i can carry my music collection on my phone , and has plenty of space to store pictures since the LG enV touch has a 3.2 megapixal camera