I think the MicroSD card below is suitable for mass storage.
But what I’m missing on the spec sheet of the Fairphone 4 is what the max speed of the card reader bus is. It only lists the max size and type. I can go full re$%rd with the most expensive SD card. But if the Fairphone can only read/write at suboptimal speeds, then it doesn’t matter to go for a fast SD card. Then I can go for a cheaper one with more storage.
Does anyone know more details about this? If not, then I’ll contact customer support of course.
I’m also interested to know what support says, or if anyone knows what SD card speed classification the fairphone can operate at.
In the meantime, I found an interesting test on Reddit.
They tested some current and past high end phones (2016 LG V20, 2019 LG G8X, 2020 Poco X3).
The results seemed to be consistent across all of them, in that A2-class SD cards did not appear to operate at a significantly faster rate than cheaper A1-class cards.
Those results are in no way conclusive or directly applicable for our Fairphone 4, but seems to indicate that SD card readers across two wholly different brands over the past few years affect speed less than how well the OS is working, and that they seem to top out at A1- class speed.
Very tentatively, I would assume that you should buy an A1 -class card at minimum, possibly A2 if it is not more expensive, and probably not A3 as it will have no further performance increase.
The speed the phone uses to access the card is one thing, the other is, how fast you can read or write it in your computer. So I would always go for the faster card, as long as the price is reasonable.
True, but also, if you have an older phone, going for the fastest one (A2 or A3), you may end with a card that is not compatible with your phone - or so I believe. So checking what the phone can cope with is always a good first step, in my mind.
Under rare circumstances, there might be an incompatibility. But in nearly all cases, these SD cards are up- and down compatible. As long as you don’t cross capacity borders, like SD, SDHC or SDXC.
Well… You can call the FP2 an old and experimental phone, but still if you check this list: List of compatible microSD / SDXC cards for FP2, some of them were tested as not working, I myself had such a problem, where simply the “Plus” on the card was the problem, the non-plus card works perfectly.
Agreed, this is probably a “rare circumstance”.
List of compatible microSD / SDXC cards for FP2