SD Card for ENVY 14 SB

Hi guys..

I've looked about and haven't found and answer (yet) so i thought i'd ask here to see if anybody can put in their two cents.. I have an ENVY 14 with an i5-2410 and a 160gig SSD.. Am looking to supplement the 160GB with an SD / MMC card. Only question is, are they fast enough (anything faster than a 7300 rpm mechanical HDD would be fine i guess, since i only need it as a data store and not to put applications on)..

So what are my options? Anybody with experience with certain memory cards on ENVY 14 out there who can help? I'd ideally like at least a 32gig one for this little project to be viable..

 

SD cards are slow when compared to straight USB. Lexar makes a 32GB slim usb drive that you can leave plugged in. I have one and love it. However, I can't wait for slightly larger USB3 slim drives to come out...

Lexar® Echo ZX Backup Drive | Lexar

 

They'll come out and the majority will be no faster than their USB 2.0 predecessors. I don't think I've seen a flash drive ever max out USB 2.0's 480Mbit/s (~57MB/s), and I'm sure there won't be a single cheap USB 3.0 drive that gets even close to the interface's 5 Gbit/s.

Guys, don't kid yourself about USB 3. It's designed for fast hard drives/SSDs now and room for other devices to grow in the future.

 

Sorry I don't agree. First off, a USB flash drive has the capability to reach SSD speeds given a better interface. The memory itself *can* be the same in either an SSD or a flash disk though the slower usb2 interface in a stick tends to allow manufacturers to use slower memory to cut costs. However, once a viable and slim usb3 interface is available, a manufacturer won't be able to cut costs on slower memory in order to advertise true usb3 speeds. I could easily max a USB2 stick today *if* the hardware wasn't cheap. You get what you pay for.

I'm not saying your wrong; I just think you are looking at it only from one side of the equation. I'll agree that in the beginning the true performance benefit won't be cheap, but that doesn't mean the benefit won't actually be realized in some product portfolio.

 

Getting a USB drive that can max out USB3 will take a long, long time.

SSDs are speedy by paralleling multiple NAND chips inside using a controller. This overcomes the low bandwidth of the NAND chip itself, sort of like a mini-RAID. In USB flash drives with only one or two chips inside, paralleling the chips won't have as large an impact as paralleling 6+ chips in an SSD.