Customer Reviews

Viking 256 MB Secure Digital Flash Card (SD256M)

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Some have complained that this is not a true 256 MB card because their equipment reads it as 230-240 MB. All 256 MB cards will show as less than 256 MB since part of the 256 MB is needed to store information so that the card will be readable. The same goes for hard drives in computers where a 40 GB drive will show as 38.9 GB or something like that.

Also, some cameras and PDAs have been known to have problems with certain SD cards. If this is the case, then a firmware upgrade to the equipment will often solve this problem.

As for this Viking card, it is a bit of a disappointment. Viking makes great Compact Flash cards so I tried this Secure Digital card, but as many have noted, it is an average performer at best. The sad thing is that most of the cheaper SD cards don't perform so hot. :( I've tried Lexar, Sandisk, and SimpleTech, and they all perform ... slow.

However, they now make high speed SD cards. You'll be much happier buying one that has at least an 8MB/sec transfer speed instead of this one which only has 2 MB/sec transfer speed. If the transfer speed isn't listed, look for terms like "High Speed" or "32x" or "Ultra II" which all indicate that they are high speed SD cards.

I was not deterred by the previous reviewers' comments here; they mostly referred to shipping times being poor, not on the quality of the unit itself. The other critique was that it wasn't a full 256MB, which is true, but is also the case with all "256MB" SD cards.

Having had good experiences with Viking CF cards, I decided to chance it. Got my card quickly (from another reseller); unfortunately, the card was DOA (defective on arrival). Writing data to the card was extremely slow, and would generate many, MANY write errors when sending it large files. What's the point of getting a 256MB card if you can't write large files to it? So, I returned the Viking card and got a Lexar 256MB SD card instead & it works great.

Maybe I just got a rare, defective card, but I'm not brave enough to waste anymore time on it. So, though, I didn't agree with the previous reviewers' reasons for rating this card so low, they did get the ranking right.

I bought the Viking SD256 in November of 2003. It works perfectly with my Palm m500 and has been reliable all that time. (Speaking of the Palm, I have found that a utility such as Handmark's SuperUtility is very useful for manipulating files and folders on the external memory card, and copying items back and forth. The Palm's supplied software is, I think, a bit lacking in these functions.)

I bought my memory card to store eTexts to have with me as a portable reading library for my Palm. I currently have the complete works of Dickens, Poe, and Shakespeare, the complete poems of Dickinson, plus some Jane Austen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson... etc. etc., and I still have plenty of room for more!

For reading eText files, the speed of this card is perfectly fine. Sometimes if I am loading a particularly large file -- such as David Copperfield or the King James Bible -- which was last left scrolled a good way through the document, it takes 5-10 seconds for Teal Doc to load the document and find the right location, but this is tolerable. Once the file is loaded, single-paging through while reading is not noticeably slower than with docs in the Palm's memory.

If I were doing it over again, I would probably get an Ultra II or other "fast" SD card just so the files would open a bit faster, but for my purposes I am quite satisfied with this Viking. You, dear reader, might wish to spend more for a faster SD card if you are going to be frequently transferring files to and from the card, or if you need more speed for your device (i.e. if your camera will have to wait longer between exposures if it is held up by a slower memory card, etc.)

I bought this card for my wife's palm Zire 71 and my plam tungsten C thinking Viking made it since my first 64MB Viking card has never had a problem. It turns out Sandisk makes their 256MB cards. I have corrupted 3 Sandisk 256MB in 2 wks. I did this by writing with the sandisk card reader and the viking card reader. 1 of the three cards can no longer be formatted to recover it. I went to the Sandisk site for help on what I was doing wrong and they have a list of things that can cause corruption to these cards. One cause can be writing any file too quickly to the card. Sandisk's solution is to reformat the card and start over. What good is using these cards if you can't trust the integrity.

At first, I am skeptical with the brand since I'm usually using SD card made by either SanDisk or Lexar. But it turned out this brand work quite well. I am using this SD card for my Canon SD110. Already a good price after 75% off, plus $16 mail-in-rebate. No complain.

Received the card in a reasonable amount of time. Put the card in the slot and it did not fit exactly like the HP 32MB digital card fit. In other words, the HP card has a "spring-like" feel to its insertion and extraction. The Viking card fit snugly in the camera and did not "spring". At first the camera did not recognize the card, then after taking it back out and re-inserting it, the camera did recognize the card. I was looking only for more memory space, so faster action on the camera is not of importance to me. This gives me 440 pictures at 1MB per picture with 2-stars compression. I am happy with the card at the price I paid (~$61.00 w/$15.00 rebate = $46.00).

This SD card is very easy to use and works fine. It was everything I expected to be, just load it in the camera, and works automatically. Transfering files is moderately quick. I would recommend others to get this product.

As others have mentioned, this ... card ... is ... slow! I had two 128MB cards (Lexar and SanDisk) before, and both read/wrote much faster with my Palm Tungsten|T than this card. A backup operation, for example, which took about 2 minutes to write to my old 128MB card took about 5 minutes with this card. The total size of files being backed up is about 13MB. Someone mentioned 5 - 10 seconds to write a 5MB file in another review; I have seen nothing CLOSE to that speed.

I don't know if there are faster 256MB cards, but it may be worth checking out before buying this card.

I guess since my expectations for this card were low, I got more than what I expected.

On a single large file test, it achieved a write speed of 16.5X and a read speed of 46X. So, no its not a high speed card, but I have had bottom line LExars write at much slower speed than this for more money.

I bought this card for my dell pocket PC. This card along with its mailing rebate (which I got within a resonable time) was the best deal out there. There does not seem to be any realiability problems with this card but it is really really slow. It takes ages for me to transfer mp3 files to this card from my PC. Its so slow that I have stopped transferring files!

So I would suggest that this card not be used with any device which benefits from fast data transfers.