Best USB Drive or SD card

[Howardn]

My dashcam works fine on my Model S - hardware 2.5. But, sometimes the pictures it produces are grainy and have noise in them. I am using a Samsung 64 GB USB drive with a speed of 200 mb/sec. That should be enough, but it isn't. A friend says SD cards are faster so I am trying a Sandisk 64 gb pro endurance. Nobody seems to have the specs for the USB port on the model S, but I think is USB 2.0. Does anybody know the specs and what we should be doing?

 

[Mediocrates]

SD cards are nowhere near the performance of decent USB flash drives, and what you are describing sounds like one of the Samsung SSD-ish USB drives at that performance level. However, if the USB ports in the Model S are USB 2.0 (which I believe is the case), none of that matters. Effective maximum speed is 30MB/sec on USB 2.0.

However, it is unlikely that USB performance is affecting picture quality. The pictures are already generated before they are saved to the drive, so any imperfections in them are present before the performance of the USB device comes into play. Furthermore, images are not large, even relative to USB 2.0 maximum speed. For example, an uncompressed high-definition (1080p, which is 1920x1080 pixels) full-color (32-bit, which is 4 bytes) image would be about 8MB in size. If the image is compressed (such as JPG or PNG), it would be much smaller.

In short, probably not your USB device (or performance therein) that is causing degraded image quality.