GoPro SD Card

It’s a good thing you’ve come across this page before you spend money possibly buying a GoPro SD card that won’t work well with your GoPro! Read the following to know exactly what you need. You may experience one of the Common Problems seen here if you don’t have the right GoPro SD Card!

As per the supplied manual, GoPro recommends SD cards labeled as Class 4 or higher.

You can get 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB memory cards.

I personally have a SanDisk Extreme Class 10 16GB GoPro SD card. GoPro recommends name brand cards as they tend to be more reliable. SanDisk is a popular card brand.

The Class Rating basically indicates the write speed of the card. Class 6 is 6 MB/s, Class 10 is 10 MB/s. As far as I know, this is more important with a high end digital camera in situations where you take many pictures in a short period of time. If you have a Class 2 card and you try to take 10 pictures in a few seconds for example, it won’t let you because the write speed of the card cannot keep up with the rate at which you’re taking pictures so it needs to buffer (i.e. you need to wait to take the next picture before it finishes writing the file to your SD card). This could potentially happen if you’re taking HD Video on your GoPro with a low class level card. The reason being a 1080p video file is very large and might exceed the writing capability of your card. It may also cause the camera to stop recording or even cause the file to become corrupt. If the file is corrupt, it will not be viewable and you will lose the file!

I have never experienced any type of failure since my GoPro SD cards are Class 6 and Class 10 – take no chances!

Another reason you want a more reliable GoPro SD card is due to the vibrations and forces that the camera will potentially be exposed to. Jumping or excessive vibrations could cause a lower quality card to stop recording.

The cards listed as Extreme or something similar will be able to take some abuse and vibrations without failing. I bought an Extreme 16GB Class 10 card for $39.99 which was a good deal at the time.

As far as memory capacity goes, on my Original Hero, I have a Class 6 8GB GoPro SD card. I have never ran out of room on it. For my Hero 2, I decided to get the 16GB since the picture file sizes will be larger with the 11MP resolution. The last thing you want to have happen is the no more memory warning. The bigger the card capacity, the less likely you will run out of space.

Also, don’t forget to download the day’s footage on your computer and delete it. This way you have an empty card for the next time you go out!

You can learn more about selecting the right GoPro SD Card on the GoProFanatics.com GoPro Forum.

GoPro sells the 16GB and 32GB Class 10 SanDisk memory cards directly on their site. Purchase your GoPro SD Card by clicking on the SD Card image above.