I keep seeing people misunderstanding what the class rankings of microSD cards are and mean. And, unfortunately, there's no independent rating authority to guarantee that some company claiming to have a Class 6 card really is a Class 6 card. So if people want to chime in with their real-world measurements of cards, that'd be great.
First of all, Mb means Megabits or millions of bits, MB means Megabytes or millions of bytes -- 8 bits in a byte. Computer Science 101, folks. So pay attention when your cable provider uses an upper-case or lower-case "b" in their advertising.
Class 2: read/write at 16Mbits/second (~1.9 MB/second).
Class 4: read/write 32 Mbits/second (~3.9 MB/sec).
Class 6: read/write 48Mbits/second (~5.7 MB/sec).
Class 10: read/write 160 Mbits/second (~19 MB/sec).
win32diskImager, which you'll probably be using to write an image to a microSD card, will give you a basic rating of how fast it's writing to your card...or reading from it when you make a backup -- and I recommend backup images so you don't have to start completely over sometime. I'm sure others will recommend other things like Sandra for measuring speed, and they're probably more accurate.
Your card-reader is probably hooked up to a USB 2.0 bus on your motherboard, and that's 480 Mbits/second, so don't try to blame that as the bottleneck; unless you're running USB 1.0 which is only 12 Mbits/second.
Just thought you'd like to know.
First of all, Mb means Megabits or millions of bits, MB means Megabytes or millions of bytes -- 8 bits in a byte. Computer Science 101, folks. So pay attention when your cable provider uses an upper-case or lower-case "b" in their advertising.
Class 2: read/write at 16Mbits/second (~1.9 MB/second).
Class 4: read/write 32 Mbits/second (~3.9 MB/sec).
Class 6: read/write 48Mbits/second (~5.7 MB/sec).
Class 10: read/write 160 Mbits/second (~19 MB/sec).
win32diskImager, which you'll probably be using to write an image to a microSD card, will give you a basic rating of how fast it's writing to your card...or reading from it when you make a backup -- and I recommend backup images so you don't have to start completely over sometime. I'm sure others will recommend other things like Sandra for measuring speed, and they're probably more accurate.
Your card-reader is probably hooked up to a USB 2.0 bus on your motherboard, and that's 480 Mbits/second, so don't try to blame that as the bottleneck; unless you're running USB 1.0 which is only 12 Mbits/second.
Just thought you'd like to know.
Last edited: