Lexar Media 1GB SD MEMORY CARD ( SD1GB-231 )

Rating:
Summary: Hoped for a bargain, got a dud
Review: I had high hopes for this bargain-priced 1GB SD card, which I purchased to use w/ my flash-based MP3 player. Unfortunately, the card doesn't work properly. Once I write the music files to the card (a VERY slow process, taking about 10 minutes to write the entire card, given the turtle-like write speeds), my player doesn't see about half of the tracks/albums. I've tried emptying and rewriting the card multiple times, as well pulling all of the tracks out of their album directories and writing them to a single, top-level directory, all for naught. I can't discern any rhyme or reason as to what it recognizes and what it doesn't, which changes each time I rewrite the files. I also have twice run into mysterious errors ("Cannot create file or directory") while trying to write to the empty card. I'm stymied, and will be returning the card.

Rating:
Summary: Different experience from the other reviewers
Review: I have found this card to write consistently at just about 5MB/sec, which, coincidentally, is the same as the minimum write speed of Lexar's 32X high speed 1GB SD card. 5MB/sec is entirely adequate for my needs and in fact faster than I expected; in fact, it is the fastest SD card I have used so far.

Write speed faster than: Sandisk 256MB, Kingston 128MB, Kingston 256MB, Viking 128MB, Viking 256MB, SimpleTech 512MB. Of these, the second fastest was the SimpleTech at 3.9MB/sec, followed by the Sandisk at 2.7MB/sec. All of the Vikings and Kingstons I have tested write at about 1.5MB/sec.

This is the only 1GB SD card I have tested.

I have run into no errors after using the card in multiple devices for four weeks, and use it frequently to record 640X480 MPEG4 video w/sound in my Kodak still camera. The videos have turned out fine and the longest one I made was about 900MB in size. Filling up the card has not been an issue.

One of the other reviewers commented that the card might have been OEM'ed by Toshiba (which tend to be slow at writing); the card I have doesn't appear to be a Toshiba because it was made in the USA (whereas most of the Toshibas are made in Taiwan or Japan) and the plastic exterior is physically different from those of Toshiba cards I have seen.

Based on my own experience using the card, I would recommend it, but given the other reviewers' experiences and the feedback numbers I may just have gotten lucky.

Rating:
Summary: A lame duck card
Review: I purchased the 1gb Lexar card, and 5 hours after I started using it, I've got corrupted data that no amount of formating or data deletion will remedy. Given that I had already disceted the box into small pieces to send in for mail in rebates, I contacted Lexar and sent it to them on a Warrenty claim [cheaper then driving back to the retail location I purchased it at anyway].

I got it back yesterday, and it was suffering the same problem I sent it in for in the first place!

Their solution, they pay for the return shipping of card #2, and swap it out for two 512mb cards.

Not happy. But at least they are somewhat responsive to fixing the problem.

Rating:
Summary: Fast on read, slow on write
Review: I returned this one the day I got it from Amazon. It was fairly fast when reading from the card, but writing was very slow. Although my Palm T3 showed the card to be from unknown manufacture, its performance numbers suggested it was likely made by Toshiba (Lexar resells other people's products). While Toshiba SDs are reliable, they are known to be slow on write. And that was exactly what I saw. If you use the card mainly for MP3 or carrying Palm/PPC data, go for it. If you need to frequently write to the card (such as doing Palm/PPC backups, or using in a digital camera), go get one made by SanDisk (faster) or Panasonic (fastest, but very expensive), or specially marked high speed SDs.

Rating:
Summary: Somewhere in between
Review: I was able to transfer 965 MB from an internal hd on my computer through a USB 2.0 multi card reader in 4 mins. and 40 sec. That ends up roughly 3.4 MB/sec. To check data integrity, I ran a bitwise comparison between the source and target directories, which completed in an amazing 3 mins. and 11 sec. So, the read speed on this card is at least 5 MB/sec.

The hd was a slave unit, don't know if that impacted on the write limit. In any case, this card is faster than most on the market, and with the rebate ended up being cheaper than all of them. Color me satisfied.

Rating:
Summary: So far so good!
Review: It's working great with my Navman iCN 510 GPS (which btw is an incredible GPS system!) No problem, fast access and fast download of the maps. Read some people taking forever to download maps, so was surprised to find that it took fraction of the time for me. Don't know if it was the card or the PC which determines the speed, but it took me about 45 minutes to download about 600MB worth of map onto my Lexar.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible quality. Doesn't work in all SD devices
Review: Lexar cards don't work in Panasonic SD Audio devices. I couldn't understand why it wouldn't work since SD is supposed to be pretty standard. I called Panasonic and they said that Lexar and Kodak cards are so low in quality and slow to write that they won't work with the the SD Audio format.

No problems using other brands like Sandisk, Panasonic, Kingmax, etc.

Rating:
Summary: Fast enough for my SD300's VGA 30fps video mode
Review: One of my reason for getting a Canon SD300 digicam is its great video capability - it's capable of shooting 640x480 at 30 fps until the memory card is full. Prior to this card, I had 4 Sandisk 256MB SD cards, and 3 of which have problem in this video mode (blinking red "!" mark with skipping frames).

I was concerned about this card's speed performance after reading some of the reviews, but now I'm glad to say that it works well on my SD300. It is able to handle 640x480x30fps with no dropped frames on my camera. I've shot up to 3 minutes, creating a 350MB+ AVI file, with no problem. And it's very inexpensive to boot. I didn't need the 32x cards which costs about 30% more.

With that said, you should note that I have the new Canon SD300, which was released only a month ago and is a fast camera in general. Your mileage may vary based on the camera you have and its speed when streaming video from internal buffer to memory card.