Top SBC Micro SD Card (Group Benchmark) 

This was great, and must have been tedious to go through.

Chris, I expect you will receive Knighthood due to your outstanding work.!

Thank you so much, there are loads of videos that either don't cover this, or are over 4 years old An updated very detailed video about the little buggers is a warm welcome

• The thing that complicates is that for any given card, some attributes might be higher while others might be lower. For example, you might have to choose between a C10 A1 V10 (SanDisk Ultra) or a (no A rating) U3 V30 (SanDisk Extreme Plus). Unfortunately, it's not always as simple as pick the one with the bigger numbers (price not withstanding). • 8:03 - Hmm. 🤔 The Lexar has the highest write IOPS but the second-lowest write speed. 🤨

my dad's dashcam chewed on a cheap sd fairly quick ... so we got him endurance one and so far, so good

Great analysis of real world performance. What is surprising is the overall performance of each uSD was remarkably close and you could choose any of the cards tested and achieve very good results. Thanks Christopher for taking the time to do these test and provide the results in an easy to understand synopsis.

Great analysis, Chris. I do photography and use my GoPro *in addition to* using SBCs so microSD performance is something I'm always thinking about and my experiences are pretty in line with the outcomes of your benchmarking. One problem I've had with Samsung is that it seems to have a pretty substantial amount of variability: I've had Evo + and Pro Selects that have outstanding performance only to get another from that same line and have it be terrible. AFAIK they're all originals (proper serials, no sketchy packaging), so it really just seems to be kinda hit or miss. Usually I stay away from Lexar just because the price premium they typically have doesn't correspond with better performance/longevity but yours seems reasonably priced. I also hadn't even heard of those high endurance cards, I'll have to check them out. Great video as always!

Even this vid is already 2 years old, you gave me an idea what sd cards should i buy specially my laptop that only have 64GB emmc storage and doesn't have m.2 slot.

I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this video. It was interesting, informative and simply brilliant. Well done!

Important thing to note with SD cards is that the standard defines interfacing, but the implementation is up to the manufacturer. No wear levelling is enforced by standard, but it is up to the manufacturer how he implements it (if he does it at all). There is very little documentation about it, for example here sandisk mentions wear leveling in 1.5.4 (www.alliedelec.com/m/d/04db416b291011446889dbd6129e2644.pdf). Therefore, according to my own research, avoid no-name SD cards for any application. Here is some information about how to monitor sd card on RPI: raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/251/how-can-i-determine-when-an-sd-card-needs-replacement

Greetings from India sir. Its lockdown here in my city. watching videos or making videos (or reading books) is the option left for me...

I used a Sandisk ultra 64 gb card from 2015 when it was first launched. It has been replaced 3 times under warranty till date. I am using a Samsung Evo 32gb from 2016 and is working flawlessly till today. You must have taken a lot of time to make this tedious video. Thank you from all of us for making such amazing videos.

Again, your comparisons are wonderful. I don’t think that anyone else would buy all these SD cards and then take the time to do the comparisons. It is obvious that the tests were fair and unbiased. I will use this video to help guide my purchases in the future.

For endurence using a SD card you can make changes to how the operating system works. For instance you can allow dirty data to accumulate and merge before writes. Good for log files. You can also turn off the accessed timestamp for files. And you can turn off swap and use zram instead. OMV has this "packaged" in their flash memory plugin. And I think it really makes many SBCs function as very reliable NAS platforms with impressive endurance, running from SD card. The plugin is nice for PC based NAS as well. Using the flash memory plugin you can run the NAS from a USB stick with good reliability. Of course this only works if you don't use the flash memory for things like databases or media metadata. But it is usually possible to store that stuff on other media. Perhaps you should make a video about how you can make a SD card or a USB thumbdrive work as a boot and root filesystem drive by reducing the writes to the flash memory?

This was by far the best microsd review I’ve seen . Thank you.

Who are the four downvoting, what is wrong with these people. Nice and informative video, as usual.

Hello Chris, 👋🏻 Explaining SD cards, excellent as always. Beautifully done. Makes my locked down Sunday brighter. 😁 Just keep on going making this excellent videos and stay safe.

Notice the price differences between Amazon *.COM* and *.UK* at 5:49? Here is US/UK: 1.287 1.088 0.750 0.697 0.891 0.901 0.955 Conversion rates from 0.750 to 1.287 is a huge variance. Amazon .CA does the same where sometimes the Canadian price is better than the US but more often it is not. Shop and compare all sources and don't assume one is always less than the others.

Great video, must've been quite tiresome to bench all those cards. Your comforting videos and calm demeanour are always welcome, but just what we need at the moment :)

The tip about the new diagnostic software was a welcome bit of information. I found this review very timely due to the fact that I’m running a number of MotionEyesOS Pi’s and I was looking for the best SD card to use. Thanks Chris 🙏🏿 Stay safe and healthy my friend! We are living in troubling times but we will pull through😉

Every video is learning tour de force.... Thank you Christopher, for everything you do.....

I did not expect the Lexar to perform as well as it did, I bought the san disk extreme pro without seeing this video first but after watching it I am confident I made the right choice

I’ve been torture testing a Samsung Pro Endurance 32 GB for almost a year now with Home Assistant. I have a ton of sensors, most of which update multiple times a minute, with the default db sync time of 1s. So far the card has survived 800 GB of writes on the data partition. Those are almost exclusively tiny database writes, so given that NAND needs to be programmed in 16~128 kB blocks, the actual number of reprogrammed bytes is many times that. I’m very impressed and have bought more.

Highly anticipated video. Excellent stuff, thank you!

Just recently switched from the SanDisk Ultra to the San Disk Extreme PRO. Thanks for the justification, sir!

This video answers a lot of questions I've had on the topic, thank you for all the effort you put into this.

the intro is just flawless 😍

Thank you, Chris. Based on your review I settled for the Sandisk Extreme Pro 32 Mb currently selling for £9.69 from Amazon. All this in time for the delivery of my Raspberry Pi 400 next week. All your reviews are very much appreciated.

Just got my hands on a Raspberry Pi B board. Going to set up Amibian on it. Wanted to see the difference between the (very reliable/usually decent for transfer speeds) Sandisk Ultra and more expensive cards. This video was very useful and saved me a lot of reading. Lexar looks the way to go for me. Thank you.

You are still tops in my book. Thanks for the tips on these essential little cards.

Great video, Christopher! Another area you may want to explore is USB-C cables. That has become a real tangled mess! (Pun intended!)

I have been ask what SD card are more suitable for Raspberry PI. Thanks to your hard work, we know what to recommend. Another great show.

Another awesome video. No one else explains tech so clearly. Also I don’t trust most tech videos that rate products because the majority are geared to go for a sponsors product. You have never let me down!

The microSD card slot on raspberry pi's up to version 4, is limited to approx. ~20 - 23MB/s R/W. Having a better card wont help you in any way. (unless you get a card with more IOPS). You can overclock the card reader on the RP's, to get almost double the speed, but that might introduce corruption and instability. RP4 has a better bus speed, and with the extra bandwidth you can get ~43-44 MB/s R/W.

I some time like to buy from different vendors. You never know if some electronics have a high fail rate or if the product was miss handled. This was a great video Thank you and please be safe out there everyone

If you don't mind loading a separate OS , the Samsung Evo is a good choice for comparisons. Budget minded and rock solid, the Evo will do the business in the long term for development and system logging.

As always a great production. A bit of a differnet channel. Sort of look dated and at the same time totaly up to date and hugely satisfactory to watch. Great stuff!

Chris, I consistently enjoy your methodology in putting together your presentations. They are very well thought through and give great data. You get to the point and summarise your findings in an exacting manner. The consistency and thoroughness of your approach gives us confidence in your assessments and is a real testament to the number of subscribers of your channel. You're doing good Chris, and I'd brew you a mug of tea any day of the week.

Yeay, thank you chris for doing this video. I appreciate it. I still find it amazing that you can fit so much memory on a fiddly bit of plastic chip. Not all memory card readers as the same ... would you be interested in making a video about those maybe? All the best, kieron

This is extremely useful information Chris, thanks. Appreciate the time and effort this must have involved.

Christ this info was so hard to find, you have like the only relevant benchmark and it covered everything I was looking for, god bless.

Chris you're a hero thank you for being on RU-vid!

Huge appreciation for all the work you put in to obtain all these results. Thank you Chris.

Great! i love how i can always use the actual information coming out of your videos sir, from having my own open vault to getting my very own atomic pi

As always, a very well made video. Thanks for putting in so much effort, this does help in deciding with the next set of cards I am planning to buy. And yes, thanks for including the high endurance cards too!

Thanks for doing this video. Its been really helpful especially when I have been struggling with my Jetson Nano setup and which one to go for. Your overall recommendation did help me select an SD card Lexar as an option and found an excellent deal with Amazon.

Excellent video, as always. Now, during lockdown, started ordering; the PI4 is already delivered, next some SanDisk's extreme pro or the Lexar, depending on the price and availability.

Three certainties in life - death and taxes on one hand and on the other hand - superb videos from Christopher, just as he has delivered here once again. Faster cards are particularly useful in an SBC, I have a Pi 4b (4gig) and I swapped out a 32gig older card for a faster Lexar 32gig card - HUGE difference in all operational functions when you're using it as a desktop replacement. I also spec'd a card for a friend of mine in Australia and we achieved staggering write speeds on it - it was so fast writing Raspbian I thought it'd failed to write at all and did it 3 times over (I was doing this remotely through RDP over SSH). I think from memory it was a Lexar 128gig card, he was using a USB 3 micro card reader. It seemed to be writing at roughly hard drive speeds.

Please stay safe Chris. I'm expecting to spend a lot of time playing with my Raspberry Pi and stuff over the next few weeks. Your videos will be a lovely highlight to look forward to.

Amazing detailed tests...Saved for future reference and shopping carts! If you do a similar set of tests on USB sticks i.e. booting a PC via USB and if and when the Pi or other SBC's can boot off USB would be equally save worthy....as always the background info that you give is next to impossible to find in one place...I learned so much more than I expected when starting to watch

Revealing. Again a relevant test suite design. Thank you. I continue to be amazed at the low prices.

Long overdue review. Thank you!

Thank you, your channel and your work helps me maintain some sense of normalcy! I hope that you are well.

thanks for the video answering my question chris! ❤️

your videos are a ray of sunhine in these crappy crappy times. thank you & stay safe

The SD card bus speed on the Rapberry 4 will always be a limiting factor (~40MB/s IIRC?) so, as long as the read/write speed of the card can exceed this, the 4k iops performance (inherently bad for SD cards) and endurance would be best to rate for SBCs taking the SanDisk Extreme PRO out of the top listing (although it's fab for cameras etc.).

Sir, you are out of the ordinary. You have a vocation to serve the common benefit of society and that honors you.

I have heard that counterfeit microSD cards are a big problem. I'm glad you didn't get any. Typically, they are slow and greatly over-report their capacities. Other than slowness, you wouldn't know until you tried to fill the card with files. Thank you for your work.

Great video! Some other things to consider when buying an SD card is, what environment will the SD card going to operate in? I have a pi in my attic, which reaches pretty high temps in the summer. For example, the Samsung pro and Sandisk extreme and high endurance (and probably others) have a higher max operating temperature than many other SD cards, so I chose one of these. Another example could be if you want an SD card in for you dash cam in your car.

I don't think your videos are too long, so changing the length won't really matter- let the topic and how much you really have to say about it determine the length. Keep doing good content and the views will follow. You could also add a forum that your members could suggest show topics- and other members could vote on which they really like. Here are some topics I think you could make some interesting content for: How much CPU performance does my PI/Pico/Arduino have compared to older personal computers? I think most people would be amazed at how powerful our cheap modern SBC and micro controllers are compared to older PCs that they might remember using. Maybe a chart showing integer MIPS or other CPU benchmark vs year of introduction for 386/486/Pentium/Pentium II etc. Portable storage- Do NVME USB enclosures make USB flash drives obsolete? Compare performance of a few samples of each like your Top SBC Micro SD Card (Group Benchmark) video. It would also be useful to look at some real-world test cases like copying a directory with a bunch of files and doing system backup. Why isn't my new computer that much faster than my old one except in benchmarks? Explain how Amdahl's law shows why multi core performance can be very disappointing with real world software you could also touch on why graphics cards can actually make use of thousands of processors.

Great info. I am pleased that high-endurance cards are being brought to market. Seems that the boot speed's are all comparable, and if one runs as much software as possible from a nice fast USB3 drive, one should be able to make them last quite a long time. Thanks again!

Great video young man, I was wondering this exact thing a few days ago!

Great video! Thanks! This is exactly what I want. I’ve been waiting for SD card speed test since Raspberry Pi 3.

Hi Chris, having bought Jetson Nano, I thought I could simply get away with cheap sd cars available on eBay with large storage. Well, they all got chucked out and were not useful at all. I watched your video and went ahead with Lexar High-Performance sd card and yes this turned out to be perfect for my projects and learning. A big shout out to you for helping me in judging in purchasing a right sd card.I would also like to tell people here PLEASE DON"T BUY THOSE CHEAP SD cards on ebay they are just a waste of precious time than money.

The 1st thing that struck me from the summary/price list of cards at 5:45, was how relatively cheap the 32GB cards are now... as compared to say... 10 years ago... which were about 10x as much as now (US$150-200+).

Cool... the best SDC for a SBC based on its USP and VFM. Perfect for when I dd my ISO. TVM Chris

Really a great job. Now we can consciously choose an sd card. Your videos are always very useful and comprehensive. Thanks Chris, it's nice to know that we can always count on you to learn new things and thus stay up to date.👍🤗

I haven't tested the 32GB version of the SanDisk High Endurance card, but I somewhat reverse-engineered a 128GB version and it used four 32GB SanDisk BiCS3 3D TLC NAND Flash dies internally. SanDisk's reluctance to tell me this even in direct correspondence with their support staff suggests this is subject to change at their discretion.

Appreciate the details ! Thanks for yet another useful video

YOU ARE THE MAN! Dude, you really are AMAZING ! It takes a LONG time to do this. GOOD JOB BRO!

Very useful. Thanks for the closer look.

Thanks for doing all this research, I'll be referencing this data on future purchases

Thanks for this comparison. My go-to card became the Sandisk Ultra after years of enduring the slow speeds of Kingston class 4, which were the cheapest ones on ebay. Slow cards compounded the sluggishness of earlier Pi models, and Kodi became unusable. Lesson learned. The right sdcard is transformative and i'm glad the word is being spread.

Bought some Lexar sdcards based on this and not disappointed! Thanks. Price on Amazon isn't bad either. Ran these tests plus JeffGeerling.com's sd card tests and they are the fastest I have used for the pi4. Combined with a 2.0GHz cpu and 600MHz gpu overclock and it feels as fast as my windows laptop now

Between your two videos on this topic I finally feel like I have a clue about this topic. Thank you.

Lots of good work. Could detect a very small trace of seriousness in your delivery. Thanks for giving me something neutral to watch this morning.

What we really need is some way to gauge/measure the wear/write leveling? I have a project with several dozen rpis over the last couple years, not an esp taxing application, and two cards have failed, and there is really NO "reliable" OS indication of the write failure -which we think it is. One card we read to remake it, the other card loses writes on a reboot, but "works?" Digging into kern msgs I get clues, but I wonder if the OS/Linux is up to figuring out what is going on under the hood for these microSD cards!? Can the "fsck" handle these cards? I noticed agnostics pkg, but don't think there is anything in there for that... Thanks for a great video!!!! Best explanation I have found.

Really good information Chris. Very useful, now that the SBC's are getting faster and more usable as desktop systems. Thanks for another great video.

That's insanely useful info. (In fact, I made wallet cards of your charts for next time I'm cruising the SD card displays.) Thanks for enduring all those tests on our behalf. Useful gadget for boosting old PCs: bootable IDE adapter for SD cards. Works great!

Very interesting ! Especially the fact the the "high endurance" cards are not much more expensive than the rest of the field.

Congratulations for your videos all there are crystal clear and very professional. Thank you very much!!

The Lexar also comes on top as the best in terms of performance/cost. By quite a margin too at ~50% over the second best which is the Samsung Evo Select.

Now what would be really interesting would be testing how many writes each manufacturer can take. I care mostly about data retention and longevity. Since all my SanDisks have become read-only I've now moved on to a Toshiba m203 64GB. It's a bit slower in random write/reads but sequential performance is top notch at about 90MB/s read and 30MB/s write for the low price of 10usd I paid.

Excellent Comparison..!! Thank You for the hard work .. Cheers :)

I switched over to the SanDisk High Endurance 64GB cards for my SBC test servers last month based on our SanDisk rep's comments about longevity. These systems are rebooted 6-7 times a day, so the High Endurance feature is important. I use them on rPi 4, RockPRO 64, and O'Droid XU4.

A very revealing set of tests and results proving that the perceived differences are in fact quite minimal with some cards appearing to lend themselves better to certain use cases better than others. After that, it's a case of selecting the best card for your usage case with the advantage that ALL the cards are relatively cheap enough to buy for SBC OS use and you can create as many images or backups of the SD cards and store them on SSD/HDD.

I'm glad that high quality and capacity sd cards have dropped all the way down to $10, although I'd still like to see some tests on cheap Chinese cards, you can get similar spec and 32GB capacity sd cards for as little as $4 on sale (typically closer to $6), you just gotta watch out for knock offs and the best way to avoid those are buying from Chinese brands such as Mixza for example makes good sd cards and looking for reviews with a hw2test picture, also pretty much everything Orico makes is at least decent if not high quality.

I always appreciate your videos.

Excellent video Chris! :) Very useful and professionally made!

YES

Excellent Chris. I bought several non branded SD cards from China over the years and they have failed when using the PI 4B. I have a SanDisk Card that may be a forgery as it does not have the coloured markings of my other SanDisks. Buyer beware!

+ExplainingComputers / Christopher, As someone that has an interest in the single board computer market, I found this video very interesting. However, for the appliances that I generally consider using SBCs for (ie. network gateways, firewalls and other network "middleman" styled appliances), I tend to choose smaller SD cards (usually cards that have a capacity of 8GB) but I think that for low cost workstations purposes, 32GB should be a good overall capacity (especially considering the addition of home and swap partitions. Note that for "always available" larger user based file storage, I would consider implementing a separate NAS that uses a protocol like Samba or WebDAV). I would really be interested to know how the Sandisk (Extreme Pro / High Endurance) and Lexar High Performance compares to the usage of eMMC storage (as an example, I have got a SinoVoip Banana R2 board, which contains 8GB eMMC storage. Whilst boot up speed is not really a "mission critical" factor when considering my intended usage for this device, I think that it would be interesting to examine the performance and durability of SBC based eMMC storage when compared to the three SD cards that you recommended).

ProGrade Digital (made up of former Lexar staff, after Micron sold the brand to Longsys) makes UHS-II microSD cards. I have a couple of their 64GB ones. There are no devices that can take advantage of them that I'm aware of (other than ProGrade's own UHS-II microSD card reader, or a regular UHS-II SD device with their UHS-II microSD to SD card adapter), but when I fill them up with 360° and action camera footage, it's great being able to pull that footage off quickly! They have no App Performance Class rating, though, so designed more for continuous reads/writes (video files) rather than regular read/writes of small files.

Great video, I underestimated lexar cards

When I saw your previous video about SD cards that you have posted a few weeks ago, I was wondering how a good comparison of different brands / types could be useful. So thanks a lot for reading my mind ;)

Man, you must have the patience of a saint, as my dear old mum used to say! Still, as always, you have come through for us once again with another extremely useful video. Not only is this video good for finding out the best card for small form-factor computers like the pie, but also for general use in modern day computers. For example, I quite often use them instead of USB thumb drives for when I want to keep stuff away from prying eyes (insert your imagination here.) I mean, try swallowing a thumb drive over a micro sd and you will see what I mean 😉.

Great video. We appreciate all the trouble you went through to give us this valuable information.

A really well thought out test. Very informative results. Well done and thank you.

Excellent. Can't say that I expect any less from EC - quality meets practicality.

As you indicated, the only thing you were really testing was speed and not longevity. Trying to test the cards to destruction (keep writing and deleting files until they burn out) would have been a valuable result to look at.