Product Description

In the fast-paced world of Digital Photography, you rely on your camera and its capabilities. You also rely on your SD card to be fast, reliable and compatible with your camera. To meet the needs of professional and advanced photographers, SanDisk has developed new, optimized SD cards that have a minimum sustained write speed of 9MB per second and a read speed of 10MB per second, take advantage of the advanced features of high mega-pixel digital cameras, deliver superior speed. Now you can capture those high-resolution images even faster! Do it all with low power consumption, which means longer battery life. SanDisk Ultra II SD cards are ideal for your most demanding photo shoots, including photojournalism and event, sports, nature and fashion photography.

Product Details

• Brand: SanDisk
• Model: SDSDH-512-901
• Platform: Not Machine Specific
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .50" h x 4.50" w x 6.30" l, .50 pounds

Features

• Faster write speed means less time between shots
• Ready for rapid-fire shooting
• High-density flash memory and optimized controller technology lets you save large image files faster
• Lifetime Warranty

From the Manufacturer
The new SanDisk Ultra II SD cards have a minimum sustained write speed of 9 megabytes (MB) per second and a read speed of 10 MB per second. Get faster speed for all the things you do.

In the fast-paced world of Digital Photography, you rely on your camera and its capabilities. You also rely on your SD cards to be fast, reliable and compatible with your camera.

Features

• Have a minimum sustained write speed of 9 MB per second and a read speed of 10 MB per second
• Take advantage of the advanced features of high mega-pixel digital cameras
• Deliver superior speed. Now you can capture those high-resolution images even faster
• Do it all with low power consumption, which means longer battery life
• SanDisk Ultra II SD cards are ideal for your most demanding photo shoots, including photojournalism and event, sports, nature and fashion photography

Customer Reviews

Performance is worth the price premium.
I just received a SanDisk 512MB Ultra II Secure Digital card and did a quick & dirty performance comparison with the non-ultra SanDisk SD card. If you just want the results, then go to the bottom of the review. For the more inquisitive, here is my test configuration:

linux-2.4.22 (with ehci to enable usb2.0) connected to . . .
usb2.0 hub connected to . . .
SanDisk SDDR-88 usb2.0 memory card reader

commands for the write test:
- mount -o noatime,sync /dev/sda1 /flash_memory
- cat testfile > /dev/null
- time cp tesfile /flash_memory

The first command forces any writes to the flash_memory to happen immediately, so there is no caching going on. The second command reads through the ~50MB testfile and caches it into memory (no need to access the hard disk). The third command actually copies the test file to the memory card and times it.

commands for the read test:
- umount /flash_memory
- mount -o noatime,sync /dev/sda1 /flash_memory
- time cp /flash_memory/testfile /dev/null

The first command unmounts the flash memory and clears the cache. The second command mounts the flash memory so the computer can access its files. The third command actually copies the file, which must be read directly from the card because we cleared the cache, and times the copy.

The read and writes tests were performed multiple times, and the results varied little between iterations. The 512MB card was completely empty, and the 256MB card had a small 3MB file.

The SanDisk Ultra II card turned in some impressive numbers:
writes: 4.95MB/sec (5048.2KB/sec)
reads: 8.19MB/sec (8389.96KB/sec)

For comparison, here are the numbers for the SanDisk 256MB non-ultra card:
writes: 0.86MB/sec (876.44KB/sec)
reads: 1.53MB/sec (1570.69KB/sec)

If you need performance, then the SanDisk Ultra II series is the way to go. The Ultra II reads and writes more than five times as fast as the plain-vanilla SanDisk secure digital card. In my case, I will be using the card to store MP3 files for a portable audio device, and waiting around while moving MP3s is not how I want to spend my time. So, I bought the Ultra II. Your needs may vary. Buy accordingly.

Also, I realize that other manufactures market "high-performance" memory cards, but since I don't own one, I can't recommend/jeer them here.

Performance and price - think twice
There's a review here where someone takes their COMPUTER and analyzes the performance of the card. Unfortunately, most of the time what matters is how the card works with your CAMERA. A camera generally doesn't move data as fast as a computer, and it has to process it first - so those tests really only measure how fast you can download the images (or other files) to your hard drive. If that matters to you, great.

For the rest of you, especially camera users, here's the real story:
- You need a faster than standard card if you plan to use 30fps 640x480 video. It's also a good idea with high resolution cameras, if they are especially fast at processing and writing the images.
- But ... I just bought a different 512MB SD card for $10 after rebate. It's hard to beat that price / performance ratio if you're just storing photographs. Sure, video of the 2 year old nephews is fun a couple times a year, but other than that, regular speed cards work fine for many uses.

Always buy what's right for your needs. And, if the price differences are small, go with the faster card.

There are promotions every week on various memory cards, look for one if you have time. Those can make higher speed cards a good value, though the standard speed cards have gotten so inexpensive you may want one as a backup as well.

So Far So Good
I have purchased the Sandisk 512 MB Secure Digital Ultra II for my newly acquired Kodak 7590 digital camera. So far I have no problem with it. I also use it on my Toshiba notebook which has a built-in SD-card reader. So far it works fine on the notebook computer too. I have read customers' review for the Sandisk 256 MB Secure Digital Ultra II. People were complaining about the card went dead on them after some time of use and they are returning the card for refund. I hope this will not happen to me.

So far, I am very happy with it. It stores more than 200 pictures at 5MP @ Fine JPEG Compression. As for the speed of the card. I can't really tell the difference when I compare it with a regular Sandisk 512 MB Secure Digital card. Both seems to work just as fast in the digital camera and the notebook computer.