The Dutch tech website Hardware.info has tested 124 micro SD and SD memory cards from many brands. They benchmarked the cards and listed the results depending on their type and capacity and awarded them either a Great Value, Excellent Choice or Ultimate Product award.
Memory cards with an excellent price-performance ratio were given a Great Value award, cards that are the best in their class and provide good value for money received the Excellent Choice award. The last award is the Ultimate Product award which is reserved for the best performing micro SD and SD cards. For this award the price is considered less important.
Benchmarks were conducted with an UHS II compatible card-reader that was connected to a USB 3.0 port to ensure the test-computer wasn't the bottleneck during transfer speed testing. Given the large number of tested cards, only a limited number of benchmarks were conduced. Hardware.info tested transfer speeds by reading and writing a single 10GB file and by reading and writing a thousand 5MB files. Sequential reads and writes were performed with Crystal DiskMark.
For the last test, Hardware.info made RAW photos with a Canon EOS 650D camera. This camera supports UHS-1 like the majority of the digital cameras, which means it can't benefit from the performance of UHS II cards. To ensure consistent results, the same shot was made, the inside of the lens cap.
The top 5 of the fastest memory cards, ranked on their average speed
- Toshiba Exceria Pro 128GB (193.6 MB/s)
- Toshiba Exceria Pro 64GB (193.6 MB/s)
- Lexar Professional SDHC UHS-II U3 2000x 32GB (184.9 MB/s)
- Goodram MicroSDHC 32GB V90 UHS-II U3 (184.5 MB/s)
- Sony Professional SDXC UHS-II 128GB (181.9 MB/s)
The following cards performed so well that Hardware.info gave them an award.
The best 32GB SD cards
- Excellent Choice: Verbatim Pro SDHC UHS-I 600x 32GB
- Excellent Choice: Kingston Canvas React SDHC UHS-I U3 32GB
- Ultimate Product: Transcend Ultimate Series SDHC UHS-II U3 32GB
The best 64GB SD cards
- Great Value: Kingston Canvas Select SDXC UHS-I 64GB.
- Excellent Choice: Kingston Canvas Go SDXC UHS-I U3 64GB
- Ultimate Product: Transcend SDXC UHS-II U3 64GB
- Ultimate Product: Sandisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-II U3 64GB
The best 128 GB SD cards
- Excellent Choice: Kingston Canvas Go SDXC UHS-I U3 128GB
- Ultimate Product: Sony Professional SDXC UHS-II 128GB
- Fastest: Toshiba Exceria Pro 128GB (but no award due no availability (yet))
The best 256GB and 512GB SD cards
- Excellent Choice: Kingston Canvas Go SDXC UHS-I U3 256GB
- Excellent Choice: Canvas Go SDXC UHS-I U3 512GB
Then on to the micro SD cards.
The best 32GB micro SD cards
- Great Value: Samsung Evo+ MicroSDHC UHS-I 32GB
- Excellent Choice: Kingston Canvas React MicroSDHC UHS-I U3 32GB
- Ultimate Product: Goodram MicroSDHC V90 UHS-II U3 32GB.
The best 64GB micro SD cards
- Excellent Choice: Evo MicroSDXC UHS-I U3 64GB
The best 128GB micro SD cards
- Excellent Choice: Samsung Evo MicroSDXC UHS-I U3 128GB
- Excellent Choice: Kingston Canvas Go MicroSDXC UHS-I U3 128GB
The best 256GB micro SD cards
- Excellent Choice: Toshiba Exceria Pro MicroSDXC UHS-I U3 256GB
- Excellent Choice: Samsung Evo+ V2 MicroSDXC UHS-I 256GB.
The entire test with the performance of all tested cards can be found on the Hardware.info website. While the numbers will speak for themselves, the accompanying text is in Dutch.
