There are two schools of thought when it comes to selecting memory cards for your camera. One is to carry a lot of smaller capacity cards with the reasoning that if one card fails, you only lose that card’s images. The other way is to go for it and get the biggest and fastest card your camera can support. If you’re like me, you go for big and fast and the OCZ Gold-Series SDHC cards allow you to do just that.

I’ve been using the 16GB model for several months and love it. It’s my “go to” card when I’m shooting, especially for long periods (in fact, I find myself disappointed if I’ve not cleared it off or forgotten it). In the time I’ve used it, I’ve had no failures with it at all. It’s kept up with the speed of my Samsung GX-10 for normal shooting and bursts without issue or complaint.

The 16GB I used appears to be slightly thicker than 8GB or 4GB cards and it originally was quite snug going into the camera’s card slot. I was initially worried it would not fit. However, it fits just fine in my card readers and over time has come to go in and out of the camera more easily. I did not test the OCZ Gold in other capacities, so I cannot say if it’s the whole line, just the 16GB, or perhaps just this particular card. It could also be the card is within specification, but the Samsung slot is incorrect.

The card is a Class 6 SD, which means it’s rated at 150x speed (whatever that means). As cameras have caught up to being able to use the higher speeds, you definitely want the highest rated card you can have. Class 6 cards in general are guaranteed to perform at a speed of at least 6MB/second. (Classes 2 and 4 are 2MB/sec. and 4MB sec. respectively). Most often they are faster and would be limited by hardware considerations.

In my benchmark tests*, my 16GB model averaged 8.386 MB/second writing and ranged from 7.042 to 9.326.

The OCZ Gold Series SDHC card has been a true and solid performer in the field and in my computer. For its speed and reliability, photographyvoice.com gives this card a rating of HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

* Our benchmark for file writing is to pre-load an actual 16MB digital camera RAW file into memory and then write it out to the card 20 times byte-by-byte (not copying the file). We track each the elapsed time for each file and then calculate the bytes per second and covert to a MB/second value (1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes for this benchmark as is the standard with most drive performance evaluations).