I own a Nikon D80, and I'm looking at buying a SDHC card so that for $100 (or less) I can get a fast 8GB card and not have to worry about running out of space over a weekend trip or changing cards while out. I went looking for benchmark tests on SDHC cards and the results were not very indepth:

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/memory- [...] 278351.php
(somewhat useful, but not really enough cards or tests to be useful)

http://www.extremetech.com/article [...] 716,00.asp
(doesn't test performance where it matters. How fast can a camera or other device write to the card, which translates to how fast the user can take photos in continuous mode.)

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/m [...] =6007-8531
(extremely helpful tests and numbers, but only for SD cards. It hasn't been updated in over a year and doesn't have any SDHC cards tested.)

I don't know how to go about requesting it, but I would love to see a test of sub-$100 8GB SDHC cards (with one or two super premium cards thrown in to compare against) tested for read/write speeds in a PC as well as write speeds when used in a D80 or similar digital camera.

If there's a better place to request this than in the forums, please let me know...otherwise, any help in trying to buy a good, but relatively inexpensive 8GB SDHC card would be greatly appreciated!

I would like to bump this post in agreement.

Upon my own fact gathering, I did put a "2 and 2" together regarding sdhc.
I evolved from fat 16 (didn't need to be there but tried it anyway) Of course the fat32 on the same storage was a miracle as I went towards maxxing out bytes per sector in the formatting experiments....at 8gb and up maxxed out bytes per sector was the winner..So for now I am applying that old test to SDHC and true controllers of it.
I did find some tests but for "transcend" brand name hooked up to a lap top with a documented 14MB write starting at 2048byte chunks (hmmm fat 32 max per sector?)and it stayed there all the way to 8092.
anyway. would love more facts. Comparing to a hdd only goes so far.
also the concept of "wear-leveling", I only read and do not know for certain, that it is in all true SDHC cards.
Class6 only needs 6MB guarantee, so to find over doubled speed write is like the hyper threaders of the sdhc world, depending on the gadget writing to it.
if you need 10mbit/s write (such as high quality dvd camcorder) I can only guess 8gb class 6 SDHC MINIMUM for your SDHC device...upon remembering a hard drive experiment of might be 9-10 year ago.. The fat 32 maxedd bytes per sector was the fastest file system I have ever run,(even today) of course now I am all on ntfs, but not forgotten for the SDHC and fat comparison.

and finally I just purchased a transcend 8gb class6 because of a laptop test. i hope it is not a disappointment when it arrives and tested out. I want my 10mbit DVD

I third this motion.

Also I have noticed that will SDHC cards are rated class 2 thru 6, some makers are still listing the old “X” rating (i.e. OCZ and Lexar). A 133x is rated to 20MB/sec sustained write speed (which sure beats the crap out of 6MB/sec).

I am searching for the same info. This may help:
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Benchmarks

I have 4GB Transcend SDHC Class 6 cards. The performance is poor. Apparently, "class 6" is no guarantee of good speed.