Round-Up: 15 microSDHC Cards, Benchmarked And Reviewed

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With rated write performance as high as 10 MB/s and capacities as high as 32 GB, there's plenty of choice in the microSDHC marketplace. Do the contenders actually hit their performance targets? Interestingly, some of them are actually quite a bit better!

Benchmark Results: Throughput

Rather homogenously, the tested microSDHC cards achieve sequential read speeds closely matching their speed class. At the lower end, there are two Class 4 cards, followed by five Class 6 cards that perform very similarly with the notable exception of MemoryStar's microSDHC card. Fortunately for North American customers, that product isn't available here, so you don't have to worry about it.

A similarly coherent picture emerges from the seven Class 10 cards. The speed difference between the fastest and the slowest Class 10 model is only 1.5 MB/s.

The big surprise from this test is the SanDisk Mobile Ultra microSDHC, which takes the performance crown with its 22.8 MB/s sequential read speed in spite of being labeled Class 4.

The sequential write benchmark is dominated by both Class 10 MemoryStar cards, which are in a performance category of their own (but unavailable in the U.S.). Only the Kingston 16 GB card can come close to keeping up. The bulk of our review samples, however, exhibit write performance between 10 and 12 MB/s.

Manuel Masiero
38 Comments Comment from the forums
  • sayakbiswas
    interesting read, but there should hv been more 32gb sticks.....they r quite affordable nowadays...
    Reply
  • BulkZerker
    sayakbiswasinteresting read, but there should hv been more 32gb sticks.....they r quite affordable nowadays...
    I wouldn't consider $40+ (shipped) affordable. Also you have to think that Tom's isn't necessarily buying these cards for personal or business use. 9x out of 10 these cards are donated by their respective companies. Or a warehouse such as Tiger Direct/Newegg.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    last summer I needed some memory sticks for my video camera and decided on a pair of 16GB PNY Professional SD cards which I have been very happy with. Read maxes out my USB port, and writing is consistently above 19MB/s during file transfers.
    Reply
  • In your test setup, I could not find a description of the interface that you use to connect these cards to the PC.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    BulkZerkerI wouldn't consider $40+ (shipped) affordable. Also you have to think that Tom's isn't necessarily buying these cards for personal or business use. 9x out of 10 these cards are donated by their respective companies. Or a warehouse such as Tiger Direct/Newegg.$40 IS affordable for fast and dense media. You do not put fast huge SD cards in a cell phone or cheap camera, you put them in high end still cameras, and budget (but quality) video cameras. Considering when I picked mine up the nearest competition for fast SD cards were in the $80+ range, and I picked up 2 at that price I would say that $40 is quite good. If you have a cheaper camera, there is much cheaper (but still good) media out there.
    Reply
  • stridervm
    Would it be possible that Sandisk gave you a mislabeled Class 4 Micro SD card? Quite suspicious that they would have Class 4 cards that would perform like at least a class 6 one....
    Reply
  • The_Trutherizer
    I've always wondered how good these things would do in a RAID configuration. Say you got a Raid controller capable of handling 32 drives and you found a way to hook up microSD cards to it. What performance would you get? And would it be economically viable at all?
    Reply
  • sayakbiswas
    BulkZerkerI wouldn't consider $40+ (shipped) affordable. Also you have to think that Tom's isn't necessarily buying these cards for personal or business use. 9x out of 10 these cards are donated by their respective companies. Or a warehouse such as Tiger Direct/Newegg.

    40$ for 32gb MicroSDHC is affordable when you consider the fact that 64gb MicroSDXC cards costs 280$+. I am employing a Nikon D7000 dslr when im thinking about these cards.
    Reply
  • theprov
    Can i assume that a "32 gb class 10 kingston micro sd" perform at least as much as a 16 gb? I'm buying a 32 gb soon, and i don't want to find out bad surprises....
    Reply
  • happyballz
    Should have tested them all in one size or in two different sizes (one small one big).. performance does vary, and sometimes significantly because of design mistakes between the sizes etc.

    On a side note what is the deal with tom's being such crappy optimized webpage? I open 5-6 tabs and everything crawls to a molasses-slow on my laptop. I can open 15-20 tabs in other sites no problem.

    Reply