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Amazon sells a 16 GB SanDisk Extreme card rated at 45 MB/s for about $22; I just bought a 16 GB SanDisk Extreme card rated at 30 MB/s from newegg.com for $16 and change.

Would the SD Extreme rated at 45 MB/s be significantly faster than the 30 MB/s version in the real world? I'm going to be using these cards as emergency boot drives for my Mac.

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I'd say that for an emergency boot drive, reliability is much, much more important than speed. – CajunLuke Oct 12 '12 at 16:38

closed as off topic by daviesgeek, robmathers, Stu Wilson, CajunLuke, patrix Oct 12 '12 at 18:20

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1 Answer

If your camera's image processor is fast enough to process 45 MB/s of data, then it's your card that'll be bottlenecking your time to take the next picture.

You might notice a difference in available resolutions/frame rates for capturing video, since some options might exceed the possible speed of your storage.

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Did you read my entire message? "I'm going to be using these cards as emergency boot drives for my Mac." My real question is whether the 45 MB/s card is significantly faster in this situation. – odysseus Jun 21 '12 at 3:08
lol oops, but yet you'll still see a 50% speed difference, because your mac is more than capable to load faster, but the drive speed will be bottlenecking the load speed – XAleXOwnZX Jun 21 '12 at 3:25

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