How do I check the class of a micro sd card? [closed]

Question

I'm thinking about getting a new sd card and read that the class of them really matters. I'm looking at getting a 16gb one with a class not less than class 6. How do I check for the class?

Answer 1

An SD Card class basically the minimum sequential write speed that the SD card supports. Testing the class of an SD is quite easy, just copy a 1 GB file to an empty card and measure the time it took for the copy. A class 6 SD card should support at minimum 6MB/s.

Also check out the markings on the SD card, there should a logo like the following:

the number in the logo describes the speed class.

Answer 2

Specification sheets lie, packaging lies, the mark stamped on the card itself lies. I have lost track of the number of "class 10" SD cards that only run at a couple of MB/s or the number of 8/16/32GB cards that have an actual capacity of 2GB!

If you really want to know how fast a card is (and whether you have been duped with a card which is smaller than it reports and will thus corrupt your data when it gets full) I would highly recommend testing every single SD card you buy.

The best testing tool out there is h2testw on the PC. This writes a unique, verifiable pattern to the drive, completely filling it. Since the pattern is unique, it can verify that the data read back is actually the same as was written and that the card isn't reporting that it has a higher capacity than it actually has.

Since the class is related to the minimum write speed and SD cards get slower as they get full, this also ensures that you are testing speed under the worst case conditions.

If anyone knows of a similarly robust and reliable Android application to test the SD card in a tablet/phone directly, I would happily update my answer.

There is an open source project called F3 (which is short for Fight Flash Fraud or Fight Fake Flash) which is very similar to h2testw for Linux and Mac, but I don't have any personal experience of this. It might however form the basis for an Android port (the source code is on github).

Answer 3

You can test SDcard speed in command line :

adb shell
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/sdcard/test bs=512 count=2048000
rm -f /mnt/sdcard/test

that will write a 1GB file with zeros bits in sdcard.