risks of going cheap on sd cards?

I am running out of my budgeted funds and am feeling the SD card costs. Its only a couple more hundred, but... its money I don't really have. There are some 32gb speed class 10 SanDisk sd cards, that are not on the recommended list, but are more than half the price of the recommended (7 USD compared with 15 USD). Any cautionary tales out there? I could obviously test them out, but I feel like I would need to test several of them and for long periods of time which I don't have the luxury to do.

I am looking at this one in particular. https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-microSDXC-Memory-Adapter/dp/B073JWXGNT/

And recording at 48kHz.

4 comments

4 Comments

olivier.crouzet

Jun 14, 2019

Hi Adam,

I have the same SDcard " SanDisk-Ultra-microSDXC " and I have error during the recording phase... no recording occur and the LED green lighted ! Did you try to do domething with your SDcard ? Is it right ?

Thank you for your reply.

Olivier

Adam

Jun 15, 2019

Replying to

Hi Olivier,

I did test out the cheap one Ultra microSDXC for a few days outside my apartment and listened to a few sample recordings and found that it did ok. Although it was a really short set of recordings and I did not analyze the data in depth, so I couldn't really test them out. In another post, there was a report of no difference between the SDXC and the cards on the recommended list. Regardless, I was feeling skittish and ended up finding a better deal on the SanDisk Extreme microSDHC, which was only US$3 more expensive, and so I am going with that. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1375051-REG/sandisk_sdsqxaf_032g_gn6ma_extreme_microsd_32gb.html. It's on the recommended list and I don't want to risk my data.

So in the end, no real conclusion on the Ultra microSDXC (which appears to satisfy the speed class 10 requirement, but was not recommended for whatever reason)!

Sorry to hear you lost your data. Based on my memory of reading through these discussion boards the AudioMoth team mentioned that the issue with the cheaper cards is that they are able to record the sound, but the more inexpensive cards may at times be overloaded and have to overwrite small sections. This means that in your case you should have recorded at least something, whether a jumbled mess or not, some data should show up no matter how cheap the card. This makes me think that the issue is not the card, but something else.

Best,Adam