SD card recommendations?

Guess what? I was driving in the car yesterday and felt something hit my foot, (had shorts on) and when I looked down after getting to my destination, it was my missing SD card that fell out from up inside the dash!!! I couldn't believe it!!!

So now it is going back in, albeit with a small piece of tape over the card slot.

Every once in a while you get lucky!

Wow! You are lucky. Did you go out and buy a lottery ticket?

I've got one of the Micros that i use with my camera, with an adapter.

Not had the chance to use it with my Nuvi yet, but I've never had any problem with it.

I can imagine though, that the warning about being carefull about removing it from the addapter for the Tom Tom GPS, and putting it back in the adapter, repeatedly, could be an issue. I could see that wearing out the part of the adapter that holds the actual card in place, very easily. I think the material is just simple plastic, may not be the sturdiest stuff around...

Check out

www.supermediastore.com

As of today they have a couple of class 6, 16 GB SDHD for under $33 (delivered)! And, as we all know, the price will only trend downward ....

My RiData (Lightning Series) is about half full of mp3s and it only takes a couple of seconds to load all the info. How cool is that!

I had a problem with a micro sd (and adapter) card. When the GPS was exposed to elevated temperatures (either in a closed car, or on the dashboard on a hot day), the micro sd would loose good contact with the adapter, and would not be recognized by the GPS. I would try removing and reinserting it - with mixed and only temporary success. I started to experiment with putting a thick piece of paper in back of the micro card (in the adapter), but just bought myself a regular sd card (they are inexpensive enough)

Ah finally a mention of the all important class type - you are the first to bring this up in the thread.

I would recommend a class 6 card, as this is the write speed rating in Mbits/second. represented by the number 2, 4, or 6 with 6 being the fastest.

While it is good for folks to understand what the class number means, it really has no bearing if you're only going to use the card in your gps. The gps does not write to the card, so the speed would have no impact.

If I want to load up music for my unit or transfer POI, then I'm somewhat concerned about the speed at which the computer would write the data to the card. As long as the GPS can read the files fast enough that my music selection or route doesn't skip, who cares?

This is from my guide on ebay specifically for usb stick but it should apply here as well for memory cards that I wrote.

If you choose to buy on ebay.

After you receive the product,
1. look at it to see if it says sandisk, or whatever brand name you bought.
2. Go to a store Bestbuy, Radio Shack, etc.... See if they have similarly packaged material. But this is not a sure fire method as they update packaging occasionally.

Here are some sure fire methods taken from my ebay guide, yes that I wrote.

First method:
Format it, make sure you can do either FAT32 or NTFS.
If you can't maybe your system hasn't been configured correctly.
a. Go to My Computer>(Pick your USB Drive).
b. Right Click > Properties
c. Go to the hardware Tab on top
d. Choose your USB device and click on Properties.
e. Go to Policies on top.
f. Choose optimize for performance and click ok.
Now try the format again.
Format it NTFS. If you get an error then there's a good chance it is a fake.

Second Method:
This is just a twist on the first method. We will try to convert the drive to NTFS.
Bring a command prompt up. (Start>Run>cmd)
enter the following and press return. I'll use z as my usb drive.
convert z: /fs:ntfs
If you get an error. theres a good chance that it's fake.

For you Mac people. This should also work, though untested on a fake stick (I threw mine away rather than returning it for the cost of shipping so that the seller couldn't resell it).

Go to Disk Utility
for the OSX users it should be in Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility on your primary disk.
for earlier versions of MacOS you're on your own in finding it. Though the following procedure should be about the same.

Go to the left hand side and choose the usb stick. Don't choose the indented one or it won't work (it won't screw up your system either)
Click the partition tab on top where it says "First Aid" "Erase" ....
Just below the top line there should appear another button that says "Current Partition"
Click and hold it down.
Choose 1 partition and release your mouse click.
The box below the button should now say "Untitled 1".
To the right of the box there should be another button to the right of the word "Format". Make sure that says MacOS Extended (Journaled). If not click it and choose
it from the pull down menu.
Click the Apply button on the lower right.

If it gives an error or hangs forever (give it about 5 to 10 minutes) then chances are it's a fake.

If you write files to the card with it plugged into you gpsr device or the SDHC slot on your computer (or sync it to your media library) then you will want the faster write speed.

You might as well not even have an SDHC card if you do not plan to write anything to it and save yourself some coin!