Thinking of adding some extra space in your smartphone as phone memory is getting low but still little confused what you have to look in a memory card before buying. If you think to buy memory card online or offline there are many options available with different features, speed and in different price range with different brand names of memory cards. The first thing you have to check that the device you are owning is having SD card slot in it or not. For this you can check manual that whether your device is having space for SD card or not and if yes then where is it located and their supported capacity. Often memory cards are divided into two types i.e. SDHC and SDXC.

What is SDHC and SDXC

The only difference between SDHC and SDXC is memory space in them where SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) cards are having space upto 32GB and SDXC (Secure Digital Extended Capacity) cards having more than 32GB and upto 2TB.

So the main things to notice before buying a memory card are:

• Capacity
• Speed

Capacity

If we go for capacity we have to check how much data we have to store. Let’s take an example of sandisk 16gb memory card class 10 a photo taken with a good quality camera takes a memory of 5MB means if you buy a 16GB memory card you can store upto 2400 photos and similarly around 2000 high quality songs.

Speed

After finalizing the required capacity have to go for checking speed of the card. Speed is basically how fast the card will transfer data i.e. read or write. We get to know speed by determining the class of the card. Class of the card are being divided into 2, 4, 6 and 10 according to working speed. These class numbers simply tells that at what minimum speed it will transfer data that means if you go for 32gb memory card class 10 it will give minimum speed of 10 MB/s.

Class	Minimum Speed
2	2 MB/s
4	4 MB/s
6	6 MB/s
8	8 MB/s
10	10 MB/s

Now a days the memory cards are coming in UHS class also. Now the question arise what UHS class means? Uhs cards are basically Ultra High Speed class that can transfer data upto a speed of 312 MB/s. UHS class is also divided into 2 types i.e. UHS-1 and UHS-3

UHS class	Minimum Speed
1	10 MB/s
3	30 MB/s

 

Now the question arises if I choose a better speed SD card will it affect the performance of the phone or not? and how you will get to know which memory card is of which class?

So the answer is yes it will effect as if you use a class 10 memory card and stores data in it then you can transfer data at a better speed than a class 4 memory card and even your apps will open more swiftly that are stored in the memory card and the second thing if you notice class is mentioned on the card with logo. If 10 is written there inside letter C then it is class 10 and if there is 1 or 3 is written inside letter U then they UHS-1 and UHS-3 respectivily and the main things is it’s better to buy a memory card having good brand name like SanDisk or strontium else going for a memory card having low price.

Author: Ravindra (vplak.com)