MicroSD cards and standards …
There is a lot of confusion about the speed of MicroSD cards these days and various standards exist. Overall its easy to buy yourself into the wrong card type and for copter data acquisitions with the P4Pro the card speed is essential.
So here we go:
UHS-I and UHS-II (Ultra High Speed Classes):
UHS-II is the newest standard but is not supported by many yet. The Phantom series 3 and 4 all need UHS-I and definitely the fastest UHS-I cards. The UHS-I bus goes to 104MB/s whereas the UHS-II bus goes up to 300MB/s (theoretical limits – the cards will not perform at this speed).
u1-u3 Rating:
UHS Speed classes are subdivided in to u1 and u3, while u3 performs minimum at 30MB/s write speed (needed for copter flights).
Video Rating:
A new speed rating is called “video rating”. It scales from V6 to V90. The fastest cards are v60 right now (possible values are V6 V10 V30 V60 V90, but note that V60 and higher is usually UHS-II bus type and not supported by Phantom 3 and 4 series).
C-Rating (c1-c10)
Speed Rating up to 10MB/s write – this is a slow class rating and c10 should be always possible for fast cards.
SDHC vers SDXC:
Up to 32GB capacity the cards have the label microSDHC whereas cards bigger (64-256GB) hold the label microSDXC.
For the Phantom3A (5MB/s max write speed) Phantom3Pro (60mb/s =7.5MB/s) and Phantom 4Pro (100mb/s=12.5 MB/s) series the fastest at writing to card seems to be right now the UHS-I SanDisk Extrem plus and Extreme pro cards (90MB/s sequential write). While this seems overkill the u3/V30 just certifies that you will never be below 30MB/s write speed under real world / all temperature conditions.
- SanDisk Extreme PLUS microSDXC UHS-I u3 V30
- SanDisk Extreme PRO microSDXC UHS-I u3 V30
Nice summary from Wikipedia goes here:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroSD
