Customer Reviews

Patriot 8 GB Class 6 SDHC Flash Memory Card PSF8GSDHC6

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

tl;dr: Fast memory card, get it. Patriot is good. Still awesome after 6 months.

For those of you who are unsure of what card to buy/feel like brushing up on your memory standards:

SDHC was created as a successor to the SD (Secure Digital) and MMC (MultiMediaCard) formats. When the original SD format was created a while ago, its maximum capacity was 2GB. Since flash memory is so cheap now, you'll rarely find any SD card other than the maximum 2GB flavor around anywhere. Enter SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity). SDHC adds two main things to the former SD format:

-More capacity

-A minimum speed rating (aka 'Class x')

8GB is pretty much equivalent to the space of a double-sided DVD. Yeah, an entire double-sided DVD in the size of a stamp. 2000 moderate quality mp3's, 11 CD's, over 1100 12MP photos, and depending on your camera's format anywhere from 30 minutes (MJPEG probably) to 90 minutes (DIVX/MP4) of 720p HD video, over 3 hours of VGA video @ 30fps--it's pretty sweet.

Class is important here if you do any of the following:

-'Burst mode' photography (multiple frames per second)

-Large image file photography (dealing with RAW formats and such)

-30fps videos of any resolution, moreso with HD video

-Use this card as additional storage on your netbook.

This card is rated as Class 6. This means the MINIMUM transfer speeds, ie: reading and writing, happen at a minimum of 6MB/s (that's megaBYTEs not megaBITs per second). I tested this card with a few large file transfers from my laptop, and found the following (EDIT: scroll down a little for updated read/write speeds):

Write: 9.5MB/s avg

Read: 21.9 MB/s avg, 22.2 MB/s max

Access time: 0.7ms

This is fast enough for taking all VGA (640x480) video, about two higher quality 10MP photos every second, and most 720p HD (1280x720) video. It should be ample as extra storage in a netbook, though it's about a third the speed of a notebook hard drive. Class 6 is a sweet spot right now in terms of price/performance. Class 10 is much faster but of course much more expensive, and class 4 isn't that much cheaper IMHO.

A note on capacity: Capacity is measured really stupidly in all digital media storage (hard drives, memory cards, etc). All companies define a gigabyte to be 1000MB, and a megabyte to be 1000kb, etc etc. In reality it's 1024KB per MB, and 1024MB per GB. Not a huge difference, going from 1024 to 1000, right? Well, sort of. This card has a capacity of 8,027,897,896 bytes after formatting (manufacturers will say 'See! Over 8 billion bytes!),' which equates to 7.47GB. When you're wondering where the other 0.5GB went, it's because manufacturer conversions ate it. I hope they're happy. Ah well. Patriot is cool.

Anyways, this card is great. Patriot is pretty awesome with memory, and I see their customer service reaching out to people who have had memory mishaps all the time on here and on Newegg.

Hope this helps some people. Sorry if I confused anyone! Happy, erm, memory-writing?

That is all.

::EDIT June 9, 2010::

That it not all! :)

Others have stated this card is slightly thicker than normal. I didn't notice originally but perhaps it's true. I have not encountered a reader/camera/computer where it didn't fit yet, so I'm not sure. FURTHER EDIT: It's the *exact same size* in every dimension (as far as I can tell) as three other SD cards that I have.

A note on read and write speeds that I posted earlier: you will probably see better speeds from your computer than your camera. Here's an updated comparison of its average performance after using the card for a few months:

In my camera:

Read: 6.2 MB/s

Write: 6.6 MB/s

In my computer:

Read: 21.4 MB/s

Write: 10.3 MB/s

Here you see the limitations of a camera's SDHC card controller. What this means is my camera can only talk to the card at a certain speed, but my computer (being more powerful than my camera) can talk to the card much faster. Despite this it's still plenty fast enough for 720p video in my camera. I have a simple point and shoot, so your camera might be different. What's the point of this? Honestly, not much. But I'm sure someone will find it interesting!

So 6 months and thousands of photos and videos later, it's still a fast and reliable card.

::Quick further edit June 12, 2010::

The card is more rigid and more well-built than my older Lexar/SanDisk SD cards. I can't take it apart without destroying it. It's not thicker, either.

*That* is all.

Fast card that does about 16.5MB/s read throughput.

Worked immediately out of the box in my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18 camera. It was able to see all 8GB with no formatting required. I am able to record 640x480 videos on at full 30fps with no skipped frames or other slowdowns. Definitely recommend this card for anyone looking at fast and reliable SDHC card.

If you would have asked me 2 months ago, I would have given this little 16GB SDHC card 5 stars. At the end of last year, I purchased two for my digital camcorder. Using a SanDisk reader, I got 20MB/s read and 19MB/s write -- way above the Class 6 minimum. Very satisfied.

So, based on this, I purchased a third for my spouse's DSLR in February. To my surprise, it appears identical, even with the same part number, but Patriot changed the design. The biggest problem is that it is too big. It jams in several of the card readers I have including that in a primary laptop. It jams in my digital camcorder. These devices use a push to eject mechanism, and they don't eject. It really takes a lot of effort with really good fingernails to pry it out since the spring eject is not strong enough.

Further, they redesigned the insides. It is now about 2/3 of the speed previously--which is still very good, but obviously they changed the design and went to a cheaper MLC flash. Either that or Patriot sources these from multiple facilities, and I was just lucky. Before, I would wholeheartedly recommend this, but not any more.

After looking around and comparing specs on all of these SDHC cards I finally got annoyed by the process and just picked this one. I have owned it for a month now and use is with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ35. So far so good, no hiccups with my pictures, shooting HD video, or transferring to my computer. I can't give you detailed read/write speeds because I'm not that big of a nerd, but I will say that it is fast enough. ENJOY!

After hesitancy given the recent review regarding the design change, specifically noting the card was too thick to fit, I took my chances based on the price, and sufficient previous feedback, and hoped to get my hands on the "good" model.

UNFORTUNATE.

Exactly like the previous reviewer stated, this card is just a hair thicker than standard sized SD cards. But when the card itself barely a mm to begin with, a hair's difference is all it takes to render this card USELESS.

Purchased to use in my Samsung High Def video Camcorder, that shoots straight to SDHC. With ample force, I could get the card to squeeze down in the slot, BUT, don't plan on getting it out without a small screwdriver or knife blade. That thing was jammed in so tight, the spring eject would not work (again, confirming what the previous reviewer noted).

Tried it in my SDHC card slot on my Dell mini 10v, TOO thick for that as well. Again, extra force would get it to squeeze in, and the computer recognized the card at 16.13GB. But I had to get tweezers to tug it out.

What's the point? You would think a great manufacturer like Patriot would recall this MAJOR design flaw? If you want to take a chance on it fitting in your device, go for it, and it just might fit...that ONE device. But GUARANTEED it will NOT fit in all of them. If it fits your camera, may not fit the card reader, or vice versa.

Overall...not worth the risk. Patriot, get working on a redesign so this product can live up to the many positive reviews the older model earned.

For now, I'm trying the Patriot class 10 model for about $10 bucks more. Love the brand, just cant reason using needle-nosed pliers to eject my SD card every time I want to rip my video.

Purchased 2 of these SDHC cards for Canon point and shoot cameras. Both have worked flawlessly. Good value for a Class 6 card.

I got the 8GB version of this card. The card gives higher than class 6 performance when writing initially (8-9mbps) however, the speed declines as the number of files increase, and then drops drastically that it becomes a bottleneck (even slowing down to less than 1mbps). This meant that as the number of pictures in the card increased, the speed of the card declined, and made it too slow for me to even record video from my ZS3 at the lowest AVCHD format speeds (7mbits) which is supposed to require a constant 2-3Mbps. I had to then opt to MOV format.

I have two of these and both are junk. The plastic around the contacts is disintegrating. Aside from that, when the second started breaking up, it did it inside the card reader and that has now quit working. Patriot will replace the cards but refuses any responsibility for the card reader. I will not buy any more Patriot cards and I've decided not to let Patriot replace the damaged cards. Why buy into killing another card reader?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VE4PNS/ref=cm_cr_rev_prod_title

I got this product for less than $20, including S&H. I remember getting smart media cards for my old digital camera and those were over $100 for 128MB. This one's 8GB and works perfectly with my new Fujifilm Z20fd, which I got from my Rewards Points on my credit card. The card works great and is pretty quick downloading to the computer over USB 2, compared to the old USB 1 camera I had from the '90s. However, video files can get large, and those will understandably take a while to download. This card is Class 6, which means (I think) it has a transfer rate of 6MB/s. I am very pleased with this purchase, as 8GB is more than I need (the battery doesn't last long enough for me to get close to filling the card up).

Class 6 is supposed to mean no less than 6 MB/s. I ran ATTO's disk benchmark and found that the Patriot 16GB Class 6 SDHC write speeds range between 4.98 MB/s to 9.94 MB/s depending on the file transfer size. Kingston 2GB "120x" SD was consistently writing and reading at 10 MB/s. My SanDisk 8GB Class 6 SDHC was tested to write 7.45-10 MB/s and reads at 10 MB/s consistently. This Patriot card can dip well below 6 MB/s! The good news is that it appears to write large files/chunks much faster at around 10 MB/s. My Casio EX-H10 is a 12.1 MP camera and this 16GB card is capable of storing 1999 full-resolution photographs or about 23 minutes of its HD-quality video.

Pros: Priced competitively, card looks to be made of high quality materials, sized properly, lots of storage for the buck at a decent performance level

Cons: Not quite Class 6, write speeds can dip below 6 MB/s and actually range from 4.98 MB/s up to 10 MB/s depending on file size.

Overall: 4/5 stars