Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsShockingly slow write speed
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 March 2022
I'm shortly starting a new job where I will need to take the train to work instead of driving like I used to, so I wanted to make sure I had music on the go. In an earlier job with a train commute I had used a 120GB iPod classic, but sadly this no longer holds a charge well so is only good for usage in a docking station, also my music collection has now reached 145GB and it's nice to have it all available rather than choosing what to leave out. Something I have found in recent years is that mobile phones can now adequately replace separate dedicated devices, such as cameras, video cameras, e-readers, music players and external speakers - so I decided I would just put a bigger memory card into my phone so that I could store my entire music collection there.
My phone can take up to 512GB memory cards, but they were significantly more expensive and 256GB was more than enough for my current music collection, leaving plenty of space for expansion too, hence choosing this card.
When coming back to write this review the listing states it comes with an SD adaptor, mine did not. In theory this should not have been a problem as I could have connected the phone to the PC with a USB cable and transferred data to the card in that way, but for reasons unknown my PC did not recognise the phone. However I did have a digital camera which had an adaptor in use in it - as stated above, a phone can now effectively do the job of several separate devices so the camera doesn't get a lot of use anymore so I was able to use the adaptor and plug into the PC's card reader directly. Had I not got an adaptor though, the lack of one would have been problematic. As it is, I now have several devices and small cards scattered around the place while the data transfer is taking place, and it would be very easy to lose or mix things up, so an included adaptor as per the listing would have been welcome.
Now onto the data transfer, and the reason for this review. I had anticipated that transferring 145GB of music data would take a fair bit of time, a few hours, maybe an entire evening, or possibly even overnight, but the reality is significantly longer than that. Already I have had transfers on the go for about 15 hours, windows is telling me another 4.5 hours remain, and that's only for the A-G part of my collection! H-Z will presumably take 2.7 times as long, assuming a roughly even alphabetical split.
The packaging states a speed of up to 120MB/s, this is a read speed which is typically faster than a write speed, I found a comparison website that states Sandisk Ultra cards achieved "51.5MB/s in real world testing." As you can see from the screenshot I took, my results were much lower than that, giving less than 800KB/s or 0.8MB/s vs the 51.5 found by the test site. Suffice it to say I am not impressed with this result!
However, eventually it will get done so I shall persist. I did transfer a handful of albums as a smaller test batch, which still took around half an hour as opposed to the 1-2 minutes I might have expected, and I can confirm that this did work. The phone recognised the card straight away, the reported memory size was around 235GB rather than 256GB but it is fairly typical for useable disk space to be less than stated so this was in line with expectations. The phone played the transferred files with no bother at all, so it looks like in time I will have the portable music solution I was looking for.
It is possible that my 10 year old PC is playing a part in the slow write speed, it may be that writing data to the card while it is in the phone (for instance, transferring from the phone's memory to the card, or recording video to the card) might be quicker, but if not then this could be a problem in future too.
So, the card seems to work, has about 92% of the stated capacity available for use and was recognised by the phone without issue. But the lack of adaptor could present difficulties, and the write speed is far far below expectations.