Lead Image © Lucy Baldwin, 123RF.com
Finding the fastest SD cards for the Raspberry Pi
Speed Racer
A few issues back, I examined the infamous label soup that is printed on modern SD cards, exploring the meaning of those arcane runes and the standards they represent [1]. The most common variants of performance speed found in stores today is summed up in Table 1 [2] in order of increasing speed, ranging from the now dated C10 (speed class 10) to the newest A2 (application performance 2). SD cards are advertised on maximum throughput – meaning sequential I/O. This choice is perfectly sensible given their primary application area is to store pictures and video. For computing, however, random I/O is a much more interesting metric.
Table 1
Common SD Card Storage Speeds
| Label | Rating | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| C2 | Speed class 2 | At least 2MBps of read/write speed |
| C10 | Speed class 10 | At least 10MBps of read/write speed |
| UHS 1 | Ultrahigh speed class 1 | At least 10MBps (same as C10) |
| UHS 3 | Ultrahigh |
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