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SD Card Question

Benjamin,

Benjamin,

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 13, 2012
65
1
Brighton, UK
Booting off a SD card and placing my apps and programs on one.
What do I need to know?

I want to keep the SuperDrive, as I use that often enough to require one right now, in the future I might remove it and place a SDD in it's place. What is the speed difference between a SD card and SDD?

Also what time of SD card should I get. I want something that is fast but also cheap. But I really do want quality rather than price, so something that is quite nippy.
I'm looking in the 128GB range.

Thanks!
 
Benjamin said:
Booting off a SD card and placing my apps and programs on one.
What do I need to know?

I want to keep the SuperDrive, as I use that often enough to require one right now, in the future I might remove it and place a SDD in it's place. What is the speed difference between a SD card and SDD?

Also what time of SD card should I get. I want something that is fast but also cheap. But I really do want quality rather than price, so something that is quite nippy.
I'm looking in the 128GB range.

Thanks!
Click to expand...
You will need a very high speed SD card to use it with any efficiency. As far as I know, the highest speed is about 30MB/s, which is quite slow compared to even a 5200rpm drive. So booting an OS off of that will be very cumbersome and running apps will be pretty unstable.
 
off an SD card??? by SD you mean SanDisk right?

They are no where near as fast as an SSD ( you wrote SDD) and you are going to a pay premium price ($150+) for a descent 128GB SD card.

Not sure exactly what you are doing, but you might as well use that money to buy a 256Gb SSD that you can use as the main hard drive.
 
mohsy90 said:
off an SD card??? by SD you mean SanDisk right?

They are no where near as fast as an SSD ( you wrote SDD) and you are going to a pay premium price ($150+) for a descent 128GB SD card.

Not sure exactly what you are doing, but you might as well use that money to buy a 256Gb SSD that you can use as the main hard drive.
Click to expand...

^^ Yes
 
Benjamin said:
I don't have that sort of cash to splash though, but ok!
Click to expand...

Why do you want to boot applications off of a SD card??

What's wrong with your main hard drive?

A SD card as a read/write speed of 30-45 Mb/s whereas SSDs have read/write speeds of 400+ Mb/s.

I don't see the logic behind what you are trying to do.
 
SDHC uses a fairly slow 4bit SPI type interface. A FireWire 800 drive is workable as a boot drive.
An internal SSD is many times faster than either, another option is a Hybrid drive like a Mometus XT
 
I just thought a SD card would be a similar speed to that of a SSD.
I can easily manage off a HDD, and will. Thanks! :)
 
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