SD Card for General Storage in an Ultrabook?

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paradoxeternal

paradoxeternal

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Oct 30, 2011
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I recently bought an HP Spectre 13 ultrabook to replace my old laptop, and love it, but am a little concerned about the 128gb SSD size limit. I have a 1 TB portable HDD that I usually have with me, but I saw that Amazon is having a sale on SD cards today and thought hey, I can just keep this in the SD card slot on the ultrabook and then I don't have to get my larger, clunkier HDD out when I want to use larger files.

I would mainly use the SD Card to store a few movies to keep handy, or maybe eventually install programs to it later on. I was thinking of getting these Kingston SD cards, either 64 GB or 128 GB. The read speeds are around 30 MB/s, which is definitely enough to store files like word documents, and definitely music, but is it enough for FHD video?

Any advice or knowledge would be greatly appreciated. Most of the info I found while googling was about using SD cards for content creation in cameras, etc.
 
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SD cards are portable storage only. They have the lowest write endurance(typically below 1k p/e...
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paradoxeternal

paradoxeternal

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All of my Word docs are saved to the actual SSD and synced with both Google Drive and SkyDrive (or OneDrive, whatever Microsoft is calling it these days). The SD card would be kept in the ultrabook, as I can see no reason for taking it out. It would be used for keeping extra files and _maybe_ program installation if I ever get to that point. The video files I'd put on it are either from iTunes and can be redownloaded or are mp4 files I've ripped from blu rays with my desktop and stored on a 1 TB HDD in that computer. If it's just for convenience (luxury moreso than total function), is it still a good idea? I don't want to waste $64.
 
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TyrOd

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Aug 16, 2013
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SD cards are portable storage only. They have the lowest write endurance(typically below 1k p/e cycles) of any flash memory device.

While they are less prone to physical damage from being dropped they are an order of magnitude less reliable than consumer SSD's and hard drives.
USB flash drive are slightly more reliable than SD cards in terms of endurance, but can easy be bent/broken, etc...

You'll want a separate hard drive to back up to as well as using cloud backup, 1 is not enough to protect against any single point of failure.
If you don't want to carry around a hard drive with you, then I would suggest a couple of alternatives for backup.
1. Backup to a "personal cloud" device. This is a home NAS drive that you have remote access to.
2. Back up everything to 2 portable flash devices like an SD card or USB flash drive and then back up to a hard drive when you're back at home.

Of course, the more backups the better and in general you want to have 3 copies of your data at all times, 2 physical copies on HDD/SSD, and 1 off-site or in the "cloud".
 
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davidmarie

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I find a high quality SD card to be an excellent source for files you want handy but don't mind losing because you have them well backed up. These could be copies of media files or MS Office files. The slow r/w times won't make a difference if you are just loading text files or streaming media. I have never had an SD card kept in a laptop go flaky on me, but if you have it backed up it's a fine source of extra storage. Soon they will be around $.25/GB and a great way to stretch your storage without having to update your SSD drives for now.
 
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