How much speed is really necessary for a tablet? I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 9.7" and am purchasing 2 separate cards; one for my music and one for my movies. I have been comparing the Samsung EVO+ (UHS-1) and the Pro+ (UHS-3) memory cards. How much speed is really necessary in a memory card to play a video?

Question

AlStar250 · Accepted Answer

Well speed to "play a video" will be different than speed to record that video from its source (like a GoPro or a smartphone camera). How much speed depends on the resolution and speed (frames per second) of the recording and the bigger the file the more required write speed is necessary to capture the image. That tablet shoots 1440k @ 30fps which is average by today's standards (1080p on the low end to 4k on the top). The EVO+ should be plenty card for that as I have used them for many 1080p video at a much faster 60fps without issue. Once you get to the higher resolution files 2.7k and 4k then you will most likely step up to the PRO. Or you could buy it now and be future proofed when you upgrade your device. Hope that helps.

Answered by AlStar250 8 years ago

HairNutz · Answer

Short answer to your question: UHS-1 is all you need.

Long answer: The speed of the Pro version is for those that are constantly transferring large amounts of data over USB 3.0 To/From the card. Most useful for large megapixel cameras and video recorders as it saves a lot of time transferring data. Youll need to be using a USB 3 reader to take advantage as USB 2 bottlenecks and youll never see 80/90mbps transfers.

UHS 3 cards also come in handy for those dealing with 4K recording and playback which, to my knowledge, no tablet supports as of yet.

As of today, the Pro line is on sale. If you can find the Pro UHS3 for the same price or less than another name brand that is UHS1, by all means get it. Otherwise, unless you are often transferring dozens of gigs daily and using a USB 3 reader, or are recording 4k you wont get the speed.

Stauf · Answer

To play video? I don't think you could find a card slow enough to be a problem with playing video. The issue is when you are recording video. SD cards are almost always slower to write than they are to read. If you are recording high def video uncompressed, the speed of a card starts to become very important.

For your application, I would not worry about speed. However, the speed of the card will impact how quickly you can copy a video onto the card. That being said, sorry to make this complicated, but it also highly depends on the SD reader in your device. Many reader/writers can't write to a card as fast as the card can accept data. In that case, buying a faster card will not speed up your transfers at all.

CathyDS · Answer

The higher the speed the higher quality video playback.

Birdman · Answer

Faster is better...saves battery life too!!

MikesReview · Answer

ABSOLUTELY - you should definitely want this if you watch movies or take pictures especially if you take video - WRITE SPEED is everything for motion and photo's.

ajc7677 · Answer

The EVO UHS-1 card will work well in your tablet. The only downfall is that the write speed is reduced to about 20 MBPS so it will take longer to install data to the card. The read speed is high at about 80 MBPS so reading the card will be a non-issue. I chose to purchase the PRO UHS-3 because both the read speed [95 MBPS] and write speeds [90 MBPS] are high and the price difference was minimal between the EVO and Pro cards at the time of purchase.

Answered by ajc7677 8 years ago

Darby · Answer

This card is designed for Full HD video. That's why it's so fast. Unless you're using Full HD, you don't really need it. But you'll probably pay almost as much for a slower card.

JimmyFranchise · Answer

The EVO will be fine. No need to get the Pro. You will only really notice a significant difference when transferring files to another device. Hope this helps.

CommunityAnswer · Answer

Depending on the encoding compression of the video and the processing power of the device to decode that video stream it will take anywhere from 250kb/s to 8MB/s transfer rates to play video.

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