How much do you know about mini SD card? Do you know how many types of mini SD card? Can you decide whether to use mini SD card for your phones or other mobile devices? If you are unsure of these questions, please read the following post. Maybe you can get answers from it.
What Is Mini SD Card?
Many of you have used SD card. But have you ever noticed that it is a mini one, regular one or micro one? There are several SD card types including Mini SD card, Micro SD card and so on. Compared with micro SD card, mini SD card is less acquainted by users and there isn’t sufficient information about it.
As a result, the following post aims to introduce mini SD card in detail.
History and Target
Mini SD card is the abbreviation of mini Digital Secure card. It was first announced and demonstrated by SanDisk Corporation in 2003 and it is a small extension of SD card standard.
Compared with regular SD card, mini SD card is smaller in size (about 60% of regular SD), more stable in performance and more power-saving. It can be used cooperatively with special mini SD card adapter and completely compatible with regular SD card slots.
Therefore, mini SD card is more suitable for phones and other mobile devices.
Physical size
SD card can be divided into five card families: SDSC, SDHC, SDXC, SDUC and SDIO. Moreover, these card families have three differet physical sizes: the regular size, the mini size and the micro size.
According to the card families, three types of mini SD card appear. They are miniSD, miniSDHC and miniSDIO. Despite different types of mini SD cards, each of them has the same physical size 21.5 mm × 20 mm × 1.4 mm.
Storage Capacities
Storage capacities, however, does not depend on physical sizes but on which standard the SD card is connected to. Cards using the standard of SDSC regulates its storage capacity up to 2GB, cards using the standard of SDHC regulates its storage capacity up to 32 GB and cards using the standard of SDXC can save data of 2TB at most.
As SDSC uses a file system of FAT 16 and SDHC employs a file system of FAT 32, mini SD card can recognize FAT 16 and FAT 32 files. More information about different file systems can be referred to A Brief Introduction to File System.
By the way, you may suffer data loss of SD cards because of misoperations, virus attacks or system crash and so on. Many of you are in bewilderment when meeting this problem. It is recommended to resort to a piece of professional data recovery software such as MiniTool Power Data Recovery. You can also back up files in advance.
Mini SD Card VS Micro SD Card
From what has been mentioned above, mini SD card and micro SD are two subfields of SD cards. How much do you know about the two memory cards? Do you know how to choose the right one between them for your phones?
On the one hand, they have something in common.
- Both mini SD card and micro SD card are compatible with SD smaller devices such as a cell phone.
- Both mini SD card and micro SD card supports FAT 16 file system.
- Both mini SD card and micro SD card have write protection switch to prevent accidental data deletion.
On the other hand, they have something different.
- Mini SD card and micro SD card are different in physical size. Micro SD card is smaller than mini SD card. Its physical size is 15 mm × 11 mm × 1.0 mm.
- Mini SD card and micro SD card are divided into different types according to its card families. Mini SD card can be divided into miniSD, miniSDHC and miniSDIO, while micro SD card can be divided into micro SD, micro SDHC and micro SDXC.
- In terms of capacity storage, Micro SD card provides larger capacity than the Mini SD card.
- Mini SD card and micro SD card are different in costs. Generally speaking, smaller SD cards are less cost-effective than larger ones because they have higher demands of components. Mini SD card is less expensive than micro SD card.
Conclusion
In consideration of its multiple advantages over regular SD, mini SD card is widely used among phone or small devices users. Know more about it and you can decide whether to employ it for your mobile devices and you are able to make use of it better as well.