Kingston 32 GB microSD Class 10 Card Review

Specifications

• Capacity — 32GB
• Dimensions — 0.43 x 0.59 x 0.039 ( 11mm x 15mm x 1mm)
• High-Speed Class Rating—
  Class 10: 10MB/sec. minimum data transfer rate
• Operating temperatures — -13°F to 185°F (-25°C to 85°C)
• Storage temperatures — -40°F to 185°F (-40°C to 85°C)
• Weight — .1 oz (2.7g)

Testbed System

• HP G62-340 US Laptop
• Athlon P340 2.2 GHz
• 3GB DDR3 RAM
• Samsung Class 2 16GB microSD card (Stock card with Motorola Droid)

Testing methods

To test out the card speeds, we tested them in two phones – the Motorola Droid 1 and the Samsung Galaxy S Fascinate. The Motorola Droid 1 represents the older generation of Android smartphones in our testing while the Samsung Fascinate represents the newer generation. The same tests were run on both of the phones to see if the high speed microSD card was being bottlenecked by the older generation hardware of the Droid 1.

We ran our normal suite of storage tests in a PC environment. The card was tested in the microSD to SD card adapter that came with the packaging directly inserted into the SD card reader on the laptop. Then the card was tested while the smartphone was connected to the laptop while the USB mode being mounted.

We also tested the cards in a DSLR camera, the Nikon D5100.

A recent tweak was found for the read cache value for Android OS which enables a substantial increase in data read speeds. Please refer to the following link for a detailed explanation on this:

http://www.xda-developers.com/android/increase-the-reading-speed-of-your-sd-card/

The read cache on some ROMs on Android phones is set at 4KB or 128KB. By increasing the size of cache, higher read speeds can be achieved. We used this tweak in our testing with Android hardware to see if it varied our results.