Tag: sd card

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Storage

The Best external HDD for the Wii U is a High Endurance 256GB MicroSD card!

Back in May of 2015, the Wii U was still a thing. It was an amazing thing. But the Switch has come along and stolen all the glory.

Sure, the Switch is a lot of fun, but the Wii U is a solid low-cost Switch-like experience that’s worthy of exploring. But many are wondering how to store data on it.

black-n-white-wii-u

In 2015, I lamented the fact that Nintendo missed an opportunity. The black and white versions only shipped with 32 and 8GB of flash storage, respectively. Most gamers would want to download all their games and after a few games, quickly run out of space.

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Storage

The Best external HDD for the Nintendo Wii U is a 120GB SSD!

Updated 12/20/2018: New revision of this article here:

The Best external HDD for the Wii U is a High Endurance 256GB MicroSD card!

(Old copy below for historical reasons):

Updated 05/26/2016: If you are one of the 12 million Nintendo Wii U owners out there, chances are that you know how awesome the Wii U truly is. As you may recall with the regular Wii, there were the larger games found on disc and online shopping known as “WiiWare” that you could download. Because this downloadable content was rather small, it didn’t really take up much space on the internal memory system. And if you really needed more storage, there was always the SD card slot. No big deal.

black-n-white-wii-uWith the Wii U, there are two models:

  • The white model with 8GB of internal flash storage
  • The black model with 32GB of internal flash storage

By today’s standards, both sizes are rather paltry. And now that it is possible to download full games directly to the Wii U, it is quite easy to fill up the internal memory. (Xenoblade Chronicles X… Super Smash Brothers… etc…)

What to do… What to do…

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Storage

A list of UHS-II SD cards, readers, and cameras

For those of you not in the know, most current SD cards implement an Ultra High Speed bus (which is abbreviated UHS-I or UHS-1) because it is the 1st version of this bus. It has a maximum transfer rate of 104MB/sec. Since there are some cases which require higher transfer speeds, the SD card consortium has created a new bus called UHS-II (or UHS-2.) The difference is two-fold:

  1. UHS-II raises the maximum transfer rate up to 312MB/s.
  2. UHS-II uses an additional row of pins/contacts to get there.

uhs-i-vs-uhs-iiThis means that UHS-II cards can only be fully utilized if the device using it has physical support for these extra pins/contacts. If the device does not have these extra pins (and that’s pretty much all devices as of 2014), then the SD card will fall back to UHS-I mode.

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Storage

Which portable USB 3.0 SD / MicroSD card reader is the best?

After reviewing the whole SanDisk SD card line-up recently, it seems obvious that we all need to move more and more data around, faster and faster. So how to choose which SD card reader for getting pictures and videos off our cameras?

Looking on Amazon.com reveals a whole mess of USB 3.0 SD card readers. Some as cheap as $5, others are more expensive costing $10 and $15. But how do you really know what you’re getting? The average Amazon.com review isn’t all that comprehensive.

Three USB 3.0 SD card readers were picked from the pile (all around $10), put under the microscope, and then a bunch of SD cards were thrown at them to see what happened. Surprisingly, each SD reader had its own advantages and disadvantages with no clear winner. Choosing which one will come down to personal preference, mostly.

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Storage

The best SanDisk SD card for your digital camera

If you’re not shooting pictures with your cellphone camera, then it’s probably a good bet that you’re probably using a digital camera that takes SD memory cards for picture storage. There are lots of SD card manufacturers out there, but perhaps the most popular SD memory card manufacturer is SanDisk.

3-Sandisk-sd-cards

Looking at SanDisk’s website, it appears that they have quite the line-up of SD cards. One would think that 3 different SD cards would be enough to sell to a camera-happy world, but SanDisk seems to think that 6 different cards is needed for all your different photo shooting needs. So which card to buy for your camera?

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Storage

Review: Leef Supra 3.0 USB flash drive -vs- The 633x Lexar MicroSDHC card

When reviewing the Top 16GB USB flash drives under $20 of 2014, it was observed that the ever-tiny Leef Supra 3.0 was surprisingly fast for such a small thing. This warranted a closer comparison to something like a Lexar 633x MicroSDHC card (with USB 3.0 Lexar reader) which was a tad larger, but overall, pretty close to the same size. In addition to this, a generic USB 2.0 MicroSD card reader was thrown in for contrast.

LexarUSB3-vs-LeefSupra3
Lexar USB 3.0 MicroSD reader, Leef Supra 3.0 16GB, and USB 2.0 MicroSD reader

The nagging question was “How does the Leef stack up to the competition?”

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