10 SDXC/SDHC Memory Cards, Rounded Up And Benchmarked

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The latest flash-based SD memory cards with UHS-I deliver up to 63 MB/s throughput. Users who want to exploit that performance need to pay attention to a few details, like making sure they upgrade to a USB 3.0 card reader. Which card is the fastest?

Benchmark Results: Random Read/Write

512 KB Random Read/Write

Random read operations using a 512 KB block size work rather well on all the cards, as 16.7 MB/s is the minimum performance we see. Kingston and SanDisk are the only two vendors that provided UHS-I cards. This becomes very obvious when looking at the results.

Random writes using the same 512 KB blocks requires way more time for these cards to organize and store data (read-modify-erase-write). This is not a typical application scenario, but it brings a few cards down and shows some others ahead.

4 KB Random Read/Write

Random read and write operations using 4 KB blocks result in more severe performance drops. You see 2.3-3.7 MB/s total bandwidth in random reads and only a few kilobytes per second in random writes.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos