SanDisk 16GB SDHC Netbook Memory Card

SanDisk 16GB Netbook SDHC Card Review

If you were an early adapter of a netbook computer, you have likely found that the storage space available on your netbook to be inadequate. Many of the Asus Eee PC 700 and 900 netbooks shipped with just 4GB Solid State Drives (SSDs) inside, which doesn’t last long at all in this age of digital media. Since these netbook models don’t use or offer a traditional 2.5″ notebook storage drive slot, the expansion options for increasing storage space are very limited. In case you are wondering, the 4GB SSD that comes in the ASUS Eee PC 900 and many other models is soldered on, so there is no possible way to upgrade or change it. That means you have two choices; you can either add in another SSD by opening the system, find the unused Mini PCIe slot and installing a PCI Express SSD, or for those that don’t feel comfortable opening the netbook, you can beef up the storage space by placing a SDHC card into the Secure Digital slot on the side of the netbook. SanDisk really liked the latter of these two options and re-branded a couple of their regular Class 2 speed rated SDHC cards as Netbook SDHC cards last week. By installing a SDHC into your netbook and leaving it there as a new drive youll expand your netbooks storage for additional videos, movies, music, large files, and more.

Many of our readers might be wondering what the difference is between a regular SDHC card and a netbook SDHC card and you should be. There actually is no difference between the two and SanDisk’s marketing team even informed us that there is absolutely no difference between the two other than the branding and the marketing of the products. The SanDisk netbook SDHC cards are available in both 8GB and 16GB capacities and come fully backed by a 5-year limited warranty. When it comes to pricing the 8GB card carries an MSRP of $39.99 and the 16GB card carries an MSRP of $79.99. At first we thought SanDisk was marking up the price on these kits, but they can be found online for much lower.

• SanDisk SDSDNT-016G-A11 16GB Netbook SDHC Card = $38.24 shipped
• SanDisk SDSDNT-008G-A10 8GB Netbook SDHC Card = $29.24 shipped

To install the SanDisk Netbook SDHC Card into a netbook you just need to slide it into the Secrure Digital expansion slot that is located on the front or side of numerous netbooks and leave it there as a new drive. Your operating system will detect the device, install any needed drivers, and even assign it a drive letter for you. The picture above shows the SanDisk SDSDNT-016G-A11 16GB Netbook SDHC Card ready to be inserted into an ASUS Eee PC 900 that has a 4GB SSD installed from the factory.

After the 16GB Netbook SDHC Card is installed it will show up under device manager as a USB 2.0 device under the original disk drive. The ASUS Eee PC 900 disk drive is labeled as ASUS-PHISON SSD in the image above.

The SanDisk Netbook SDHC Card we are using is rated at 16GB, but the actual capacity that can be used is 14.8GB. Now that we know the basic features of the SDHC card let’s take a look at performance.