It seems there is no need for a phone casing.
Concerning the SD card, does anybody have advices concerning what to buy? It is written “MicroSD Support SDHC, SDXC, UHS” in the FP2 specs. But is there anything else to know before buying an SD card?
If you have any other idea concerning this topic please feel free to post.
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Just buy one from a “brand” with the size you think you need (pictures, audio). There are a lot of cheap, bad SD cards out there. Speed it not so important … I think. SDHC and SDXC should just work fine.
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I think you should get at least a class 6 flash card. I don’t know about the format though.
Check this out for different speed classes of SD cards.
Hello,
Can we get an official announce about the maximum speed of the FP2’s sd card reader ? (I asked myself for the RaspberryPi2 (RP2).
“SD cards have a class rating that indicates the sequential write speed. So a class 4 card will write at 4MB/s and a class 6 card at 6MB/s. So you might naturally assume the higher the class the better… but not necessarily. SD cards are used in cameras and video cameras where they sequentially read and write large file sizes. But a computer uses random read/write access and the file sizes are typically very much smaller.” Source
So, what do we need in our FP2 ? Speed or random access time ? (I assume speed as it is mostly used for medias of some MO)
Probably not here, as this is the community forum. If you need an official response, it’s best to raise a support ticket with Fairphone directly. That being said, the concerns you highlight are not specific to the Fairphone 2. They’re specific to a task type. Simplified summary:
- Saving video or taking many pictures quickly after another: you’ll need high sequential write speeds.
- Playing HD video or accessing large data files from the SD card: you’ll need high sequential read speeds.
- Running an operating system, like they do in your source: A mix, but random read/write becomes more important. The same would probably apply to databases etc. where the data access doesn’t follow a pattern from beginning to end of a file.
In a phone the OS doesn’t run from SD card. Sequential read/write is usually what’s more important for use in a smartphone, unless you have some very specific usage scenarios. What it comes down to is that the Fairphone2 itself doesn’t need a specific card - the tasks you decide to run on it determine whether to prioritize random or sequential speeds.
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It’s also worth mentioning that the sequential read or write speed, which is the basis of the speed class of the card, doesn’t go hand in hand with the random access speed. For example Samsung EVO or Sandisk Extreme series cards are often recommended when good random access speed is required, and they’re not slow with sequential access either. But as Johannes said, random access speed is not that important for photos, music, videos etc. where files are large, but makes a huge difference e.g. when installing apps in the SD card (or with an older Android phone where the whole data partition is on the card after running out of space with the internal memory). There are benchmarks available for instance in the Raspberry Pi forum. YMMV, since there could be differences also in how different devices perform with the cards.
In any case I believe that with 32GB of internal memory, most of us won’t have to install apps on an SD card, which typically means it would be used mainly for media files, and just getting a quality card with good sequential speeds would be good enough.
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I had to do it.
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Hello, I’m Ine and would like to know if anyone has experience with good micro sd card used in the fairphone?
Thank You!