This article is part of a series of tutorials we are developing for professional drone pilots
SD cards are constantly improving. How do you know which you should buy for your drone? What do all the letters on the card itself mean? What will work in my drone?
Certain drones only support certain SD cards. The Phantom 3 I used previously could only supported an 8gb SD card. The Phantom 4 Pro supports up to 128GB. Make sure to check what your drone can support before buying something too large or too slow.
When buying an SD card you are going to want the card with the fastest write speed possible. However, the packaging can be misleading. It will often display the read speed instead of write. Sometimes you have to read the letters and numbers on the SD card to know it's true write speed.
Do you plan on shooting bracketed raw photos? Do you plan on taking 4k video? Generally speaking anything with a U3 will do ok. However, faster is better up to a certain price point. We like cards that are around 60mb/s write speed. SanDisk is the big name in the industry. We are big fans of the SanDisk Extreme Pro and highly recommend it. If you get a SD card that is too slow your video recording will suffer and you may have errors or video that looks 'jerky'. If you have SD cards you prefer feel free to comment below!
This article is part of a series of tutorials we are developing to help drone pilots servicing the real estate industry. If you like what you've read consider joining our Drone Pilot Network
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