Great Bargain on 32 GB Cards...

...I think. It's gotten tough for me to keep up on all the product offers I hear about. some aren't what they appear, some are bettered elsewhere, and, in some cases, I personally just haven't kept up. I mean, my first 1 GB card cost $150, used. I'm more up to date than that—that was the digital Stone Age, nearly eight years ago, and nobody could be that far behind.

But to me this looks like a really good deal: SanDisk Extreme SDHC Class 10 (30MB/s) 32GB cards, normally $98, for $59.95 each if you buy more than one.

Just go to this link, change the quantity to "2" or more, and click "Add to Cart" to see the discount.

I've steeled myself for the four messages I'm about to receive from shopping ninjas explaining to me why that's not as remarkable as it sounds. Go ahead, hit me, I'm ready.

Lexar is defending with a similar deal on 32 GB cards, albeit somewhat slower ones of 15 MB/s throughput.

Mike

[Note: Ctein is on vacation today. His Wednesday column will return next week. —Ed.]

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Chuck Kimmerle: "My first memory card was a PCMCIA Viper card, purchased in 1999 for $500. It held 64MB. As it was an actual hard-drive, impact damage was catastrophic, to say the least."

Comments

[Nico Burns]

Not SanDisk of course, but Class 10, and the reviews say it is actually faster than its rated 10 MB/s: $42, and you only have to buy one :)

I await news on the 128gb and 256gb cards, then I can finally move my music collection onto flash.

[Jeff]

It's only a bargain if the card is not corrupted or lost. I much prefer 4GB or 8GB cards. (Plus, I just don't shoot enough to require all that capacity.) Others will of course have a different view.

[John Nollendorfs]

Why are you buying such "Monster" cards Mike? Shooting video?

I just recently bought some class 10 8 gig no name cards for $13@. If I'm going to lose one of those small suckers, I would rather not lose all may vacation shots in one brain fart.

John Nollendorfs

[Alexandre Buisse]

Ouch. We've always had it bad with prices in Europe compared to the US, but this is getting ridiculous: the same memory card costs 180$ here in Copenhagen...

[MHMG]

My first memory card is still tucked between my ears and weighs approximately 8 lbs (so I'm told). It used to have user expandable ram, and I have used that feature successfully over the years, but lately I'm suspecting it's starting to get some data corruption. Oh well, it's still serviceable after 57 years, but I hope it will not need total reformatting any time soon!

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Hmmm; you can get off-brand class 10 32GB cards considerably cheaper (around $40 for example). But not Lexar or SanDisk.

People have religious positions on memory card brands, and nearly always the very top performance is from one of those two; but frequently a range of third parties are all quite close. I don't have any personal horror stories with cheaper brands, so I tend to use them.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Well, one argument for a 32GB card might be that you never take the card out of the camera in the field, thus avoiding lost card issues. I've currently got 3 8GB and one 4GB card that I take with me for my big camera, and while I've never lost one, handling them is one of the points where I could mess everything up fairly easily. (CF, not SD; the little camera that takes SD only has one 8GB and onr 4GB Eye-Fi.)

Video, of course, is another potential reason.

[John Gillooly]

Can't resist! I bought the original D1 NPS order and had a serial number within the first 4 or 500 hundred. Bought two 64 mb cards for around $270 each. Didn't sound that outrageous when you figured you could shoot around 42 images per card, erase and repeat indefinitely.

I moved to 1GB IBM Microdrives for a while because they were around $350, which was a fraction the cost of solid state drives. A couple of drops from less than three feet, catastrophic loss of assignments and i was forced to but a solid state 1GB card. It was a Lexar CFII, the fatter variety, and set me back $1200!! I have the receipt somewhere.

John Gillooly
Boston

[Mike Johnston]

John Gillooly,
That's really way back on the Moore's Law spectrum, isn't it?

To make you feel a little better, my brother once bought an outboard 20MB hard drive for $800!

Mike

[Eric]

My first hard drive was a 10 mg for $1000.

Makes my first 4 gb CF cards at $400 a pop seem cheap. :)

[toto]

"I await news on the 128gb and 256gb cards, then I can finally move my music collection onto flash."

Won't be long before cameras play mp3's.

[Patrick Perez]

In the old f@rt computer department, I recall the computer magazine I sometimes helped out at in the early 80s had a Corvus hard drive about the size of a Justin (cowboy)Boot box. Retail at the time: $5,000, which probably equates to over $13K now. It was backed up using a peripheral called the Corvus Mirror, which put the data into the inter-frame buffer area of NTSC video on a VHS cassette.

The first big memory card I bought was a 1GB Lexar, for about $180 in 2000/2001.

My cellphone has more computational power than my first PC clone, a higher resolution display, wireless networking, 128x the RAM, 160x the mass storage and I suspect more storage than existed as on-line storage world-wide when I was born in 1963. I've got 16GB on a sliver of memory smaller than my pinkie fingernail. I would bet that there was less on-line (note: I am specifically saying not near-line storage). And the phone is 2 years old, when I upgrade in a few months, each of those characteristics is likely to increase. Oh yeah, the phone cost (unsubsidized) about $600. The PC was $1500, which was a steal in 1991 for a 4MB RAM/100MB HD '386 25MHz!

Don't bet that storage/ram usage/requirements will ever level off. Rust never sleeps.

Patrick

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I took the carcass of the last of my two 300MB 5.25" half-height drives to Minicon last year, to be taken apart by children. Cost me $1500 new.

Which was the same price I paid for my first hard drive, a Seagate ST-225 in 1985. That drive wouldn't hold two RAW files from my D700 today.

Get off my lawn! (waves cane)

[Paris]

I still have the first hard drive I ever bought, a 20MB that's about 4 inches thick and weighs maybe 4 pounds. Don't remember what it cost, but I'm sure it was a lot.

What I do remember is that my wife thought it was a dumb thing to buy, since no one would EVER have 20MB of computer stuff.

[David Woerner]

Does anyone know why the SDHC is $50 while the CF is $163 for the same size at B&H?