13 SDHC Memory Cards Reviewed

Conclusion

Many of the high speed memory cards we tested reached almost 20 MB/s read throughput. Some cards were probably bottlenecked by our Transcend M5 card reader, but we didn’t find faster card readers to work with. However, read performance isn’t the issue: we found substantial performance differences of up to 100% in the write throughput benchmarks, where the cards delivered between 9 and 18.6 MB/s. And the speed classification didn’t help much, as some Class 4 cards delivered better write performance than some Class 6 products.

Clearly, reviews are necessary to judge whether or not a SDHC memory card is truly fast. The best products in this roundup were the Lexar Professional series and SanDisk’s Ultra III card, but don’t expect them to be inexpensive.