Memory cards , not all are the same !

yo guys ,
we  love all our gadgets   mobile phones , tablets , cameras , mp3 players etc but all of them have one common thing , storage and honestly we need more and more storage everyday. so it is natural that you will want to buy a memory card for your device, but with so many companies selling so many cards you might come face to face with a sight, that a particular 2gb memory card actually costs almost twice than that of a 4 GB one , now you would ask yourself this question , who's gonna buy a 2GB card for the price of  two 4GB cards ! and you would be right , if only both the cards were equivalent in every other aspect but chances are very high that those 2 cards are not same on every other aspect thus making the 2GB variant better than the 4GB one so you see there are things you should know before you go about choosing just any cheap card that gives you the largest space for the lowest price ....

Physical shape

   Now this is probably the most obvious distinction between 2 given cards you need the right card for your device and though you can get away with the smallest and use adapters to use them as required, it's generally,as a rule of thumb ,best practice to use the card size that  your  device was intended to be used with .

Capacity/size
Memory cards are available in many different capacities, so you need to see how much you need and how much your device can handle , and  because most phones & tablets can use up to a max of 32 GB this should not be much of an issue , but again your device might differ , check the specifications for your specific model no. , now this of-course is the most decisive factor when you buy the card so make sure you get as much as you need , here, the more the merrier applies after all it never hurts to have a few extra gbs , just in case ...

Speed Class  

Usually called class ,  speed class is mentioned on the card  by a number , many a times placed in a circle ,Speed Class ranges from Class 2 which is the slowest to Class 10 which is the fastest. There does exists a faster category called UHS Class 1 for Ultra High Speed, but most current devices can't use these super fast cards.The various card classes have different speed ranges according to different memory card manufacturers.for Sandisk cards, a Class 4 card will offer read and write speeds of 15mbps (megabytes per second) and a Class 6 card will handle 20MBps, and Class 10 cards reach 30MBps. Kingston,on the contrary, claims that its Class 4 cards are capable of delivering a 4MBps data transfer rate.
in general you should opt for a class 4 or class 6 if you are going to use it in a smartphone or tablet and a class 10 for cameras and other high res. applications . so you see though it is  often overlooked  speed class is a very important figure in determining a card's real life performance.

Write cycles
memory cards will not work forever and in case you were wondering ,Flash memory indeed has limited write cycles. However, by now it is highly  unlikely that you will encounter this within the normal lifetime of  a  memory card. Usually this life expectancy is a multiple of 10,000 write cycles today and SD cards do include this special circuit to manage wear-leveling, that is, spreading out the writes over the storage media evenly to avoid "hot spots"—places that are written too frequently and therefore fail earlier than the entire card so while you should not worry you should watch out for incredibly low  write cycle cards that have every other feature in the book .

i hope the next time you head out to buy a memmory card you will just not look at the capacity but also at other aspects :)

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