Are UHS Speeds Needed For SD Cards Used In Surveillance?

JH
John Honovich
Jun 03, 2014
IPVM

A member mentioned that he upgraded his SD card used in a Samsung camera from their 'Ultra' to 'Extreme Plus' line. While those terms sound like marketing mumbo jumbo they do reflect one major specification difference.

An 'Ultra' card supports Class 10 speed (30 MB/s read) while an 'Extreme Plus' line supports UHS-1 (80 MB/s read). See the SanDisk series overview / comparison page.

By comparison, "Axis recommends using SD cards of acknowledged good quality with speed class 4 or higher." That's far far lower than both a Class 10 or an UHS-1 card.

On the other hand, lots of IPVM members are reporting problems with Axis edge storage recording, presumably with non UHS cards.

So this begs the question - do surveillance applications need the more 'powerful' UHS (Ultra High Speed) cards?

And, if so, do IP cameras even support that?

Any ideas? Experiences?

AG
Alexander Gutierrez
Sep 10, 2014

John,

I have tested "cheap" 2 Gb SD cards and andisk Ultra 64 SD Cards with Flir's Digimerge cameras. Discovered that recording in Continuous mode is recomended, because motion detection causes tte camera to create a file every time a MD video clip is generated, thus filling the SD cards in few hours.

Flir's Digimerge 1080p minidome offers 2 Format modes: SD Video and EXT3. Using a small capacity SD cards (2 GB) both formats can be used (got D1@5 fps videoclip with a size of 45MB per hour, really good!); but I changed to a SanDisk Ultra 64GB SD card (30 MB/Seg): I could only format in SD Video format, causing that a D1@5 fps videoclip using more than 700 MB/hour.

Still testing, but be careful when proposing long storage (days) on SD cards!

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Mar 04, 2021

Sorry for resurrecting this old thread, but I had wondered about this as well. Can "typical" Edge cameras benefit significantly more from WD Purple UHS-III or is UHS-I sufficient?

Edit: I suppose 4K+ cameras are the ones that can benefit more from UHS-III and above.

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