Generic SD cards on the T5?

[brianlee]

Wonder if any T5 owners can help me? I am wanting to buy a 1GB SD card for my T5 (my first expansion card). The official Palm one is £80 here in the UK. A generic one runs to £50 and I can even undercut that on eBay.

Has anyone encountered any problems on the T5 with using these sorts of non-Palm SD cards?

Plus, do all of the new designations "60X", "High Speed", "ULTRA Speed" etc. actually mean anything when used on a Palm? Or conversely, do they cause any compatibility problems?

Thanks for any advice.

Brian

[Papageoff]

Plus, do all of the new designations "60X", "High Speed", "ULTRA Speed" etc. actually mean anything when used on a Palm? Or conversely, do they cause any compatibility problems?

That is a very good question.

[Drunkard]

A card that is faster should still work. A cheap SD card is like anything else thats cheap. You get what you pay for.

[jjesusfreak01]

A card that is faster should still work. A cheap SD card is like anything else thats cheap. You get what you pay for.
Not necessarily. Sandisk cards off of the internet are generally the cheapest, and they are high quality. The SD slot on the Palm is a generic SD slot and has a generic driver. It should work with any card. The slot may not be capable of using the speed of faster cards, but they will still work.

[Dick Tracy]

In general, the 60x and similarly very high speed SD cards are designed for use with cameras so that you can write the large image files to the card quickly. Most applications on the Palm are more read intensive, so not much is gained by using the extremely fast cards. You can detect a difference between regular and High Speed cards though. Sandisk Ultra has had good reports on other Palm boards.

[Jesus is Lord!]

I have used many different generic sd cards in my T5 and never had problems. 3 are 1 gig cards (60x and 66x), 1-64 mb, 1-128 mb and 1-256 mb. I of the 1 gig cards is a Sandisk Ultra II. The rest are all generic and the only problem I've ever noticed with any sd is they might not get recognized after being inserted. It's a rare occasion and a simple matter to remove and reinsert the card. I can't tell if the high speed cards are faster in my Palm (they sure make a difference in my Canon 1D Mark II camera!), but I change the videos on my card often in a USB 2.0 card reader, the files are huge and it's nice having the faster cards. Palm most likely farms out their Palm branded sd cards anyway. I would suggest getting a cheap one from buy.com, newegg.com or somewhere like that.
Louis :)

[ackmondual]

There's no real reason to get a PalmOne brand (which is rebranded from the "3" Sandisk, Panasonic, and the last one was Toshiba i think?), so you're essentially getting the same thing but at a lower price.

For speed, AFAIK, "normal" and 32x may be some noticeable but not huge difference. Even moreso with 60x. It should still work at 60x, but you won't see that much transfer performance increase since digicams make full use of that extra speeds (take multiple 8MP shots one after the other with low delay and fast transfers to/from the card). Overall, speed means nothing in compatibility. As long as the card is SD format, it should work (may need to reformat it first). U may not get the extra speed with cards like 60x since the SDIO slots in Palm devices don't take advantage of all that speed is all.