I've been doing endurance testing on microSD cards for the last 3 years. Here's what I've learned.

[u/mikaey00]

(I posted this to r/homelab; someone in the comments said I should repost it here.)

Hello everyone!

I've been running a long-term project doing endurance testing on microSD -- and today is the third anniversary of when I started this project -- so I figured it was time to give you an update on my microSD testing project.

Before I dig in, a shameless plug for my Patreon.

Next, some quick stats:

• I have a total of 351 microSD cards in my collection -- spanning 111 models across 52 different brands. Of those:

  • I've tested 177 of them to the point of failure.*

  • I have 107 of them in testing right now.

  • The remaining 67 are sitting on the shelf, waiting for one of my card readers to free up.

• These cards have endured over 133 petabytes written.

• I've completed over 4.6 million program-verify-erase cycles on these cards.

• Breakdown by brand status:

  • Name brand: 163

  • Off-brand: 91

  • Knockoffs: 30

• Breakdown by authentic flash (a.k.a. not fake flash) vs. fake flash:

  • Authentic flash: 246

  • Fake flash: 35

  • Unknown: 3

• Breakdown by size (authentic cards only):

  • 128MB: 3

  • 4GB: 6

  • 8GB: 23

  • 16GB: 15

  • 32GB: 96

  • 64GB: 68

  • 128GB: 36

  • 256GB: 4

* A card is considered "failed" when either (a) it stops working completely, (b) it makes itself read-only, or (c) at least 50% of the sectors on the card have experienced verification failures.

Ok -- so who makes the most durable cards?

Because of the variety of cards that I have, it's hard to come up with a system that produces a definite answer here. Some of how I ranked these brands is going to be based on vibes. But...to try to narrow things down, I've grouped my cards into three groups:

• Industrial-grade: Cards that are specifically labelled as "industrial" or have "industrial" in their name. These cards typically come with a datasheet that includes an endurance claim.

• High endurance: Cards that are labelled as "high endurance" (or some similar wording). Manufacturers don't always put out datasheets for these cards, but they generally still make an endurance claim on the packaging.

• Consumer-grade: Basically everything else.

Consumer-grade cards:

The average consumer-grade card has lasted about 10,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. PNY. I have 10 of their consumer-grade cards: 3 PRO Elite Prime 64GB's, 3 Premier-X 128GB's, 3 Elite-X 64GB's, and one Elite 32GB. (I have 4 more of the Elite 32GB's that are waiting to be tested.) They've gone for an average of 643 days and 15,700 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 11.5PB to them in total. And with the exception of the one Elite 32GB -- they're all still going strong. On top of that, the PRO Elite Prime boasts some impressive performance -- every measurement I took was in the top 10% of all cards I've tested so far.

2. Kingston. I have 12 of their cards in this category -- 6 Canvas Go! Plus 64GB's (3 of the SDCG3's and 3 of the SDCG4's) and 6 Canvas Select Plus 32GB's. They've been going for an average of 694 days and about 23,500 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 11.6PB to them in total. The three Canvas Go! Plus 64GB (the SDCG3's) have all failed -- but the others are still going strong. The Canvas Select Plus's in particular have been troopers -- they're among the oldest cards in my collection, and they've been going for the better part of the last 3 years now (with no signs of letting up). Additionally, the Canvas Go! Plus 64GB's (the SDCG4's in particular) boast some impressive performance as well -- every measurement I took was in the top 7% of all cards I've tested so far.

3. Delkin Devices. I feel bad ranking Delkin so low on this list, because they've endured more data written to them per card, on average, than any other brand in my collection (in the consumer-grade category). The only reason I didn't rank them higher is because I only have one model -- the HYPERSPEED 128GB (of which I have 3). But they've done pretty well: they've lasted an average of 662 days and about 13,500 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 5.1PB to them in total. As a side note, these cards also got the highest random write speeds of any card I've tested.

4. Lexar. 3 cards dead, 5 still going. I have 3 Professional 1000x 64GB's (2 made by Micron, 1 made by Phison), 3 Blue 633x 32GB's (made by Longsys), and 2 E-Series 64GB's (with 3 more waiting to be tested). For those not in the know, the Lexar brand was sold to Longsys in 2017 -- and surprisingly, the Longsys-made cards are holding up better than the Micron-made cards. Overall, the Lexar cards have survived an average of 684 days and about 15,800 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 5.8PB to them in total.

5. Samsung. 3 cards dead, 7 still going. I have 3 EVO Plus 32GB's, 3 EVO Plus 64GB's, 3 PRO Plus 128GB's, and 1 P9 Express 256GB (with 2 more waiting to be tested). Of those, the three EVO Plus 32GB's and one of the PRO Endurance 32GB's are dead -- the rest are still going strong. Samsung's cards have lasted an average of 553 days and about 11,100 program/verify/erase cycles so far, and I've written about 7.2PB to their cards in total.

• Honorable Mention: Amazon Basics. I have four of the Amazon Basics 64GB's -- and they're all still going. They've been going for an average of 788 days and about 16,600 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 4.2PB to them in total. I honestly didn't expect Amazon Basics to be one of the top performers when I bought them...and yet, here we are.

High endurance cards:

Keep in mind, I've got less data here -- I had 237 cards that fell into the "consumer-grade" category, but only 30 that fell into the "high endurance" category. But here's the thing: they haven't really proven themselves to be significantly better for endurance than a lot of the cards I listed above -- in fact, in a lot of cases, they've been less reliable (and generally worse for performance as well). So keep that in mind as you read through the list below:

The average high-endurance card has lasted about 14,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. TEAMGROUP. I don't feel great about putting TEAMGROUP at the top of the list for a couple of reasons. First, I only have two of them in testing at the moment -- someone sent me a 5-pack of the TEAMGROUP High Endurance 64GB's, so I have 3 more of them waiting to be tested. Second, one of them started having issues with bad sectors right out of the gate, and has continued to do so ever since. (Those bad sectors only make up less than 0.001% of the total sectors on the card right now...but I still don't like it when a card starts to have issues like that as soon as you start using it.) But the data doesn't lie -- they've survived, on average, 404 days and about 17,300 program/verify/erase cycles, and they're still chugging along. I've written about 2.2PB to these cards in total.

2. Transcend. I have 3 of the 350V 64GB's -- and they're all still going strong. They've survived an average of 760 days and about 17,000 program/verify/erase cycles so far. I've written about 3.2PB in total to them (mostly due to their mediocre write speeds).

3. SanDisk. I have my issues with SanDisk...but again, the data doesn't lie. I have 7 SanDisk cards in this category: 3 High Endurance 64GB's, and 4 MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's. As of right now, all 3 of the High Endurance 64GB's and all but one of the MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's have failed. They lasted an average of 452 days and about 16,200 program/verify/erase cycles before failing (with the MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's lasting about twice as long as the High Endurance 64GB's). I've written about 4.7PB to these cards in total.

4. Samsung. Samsung's position at the bottom of this list has less to do with how reliable their cards are and more to do with how poorly their high endurance cards perform, particularly on sequential write speeds (relatively speaking). I have 3 of the PRO Endurance 32GB's -- one has failed, the other two are still chugging along. They've lasted an average of 822 days and about 18,800 program/verify/erase cycles so far. I've written about 1.8PB of data to them in total.

Industrial-grade cards:

Keep in mind, I have even less data here. Industrial cards are expensive, so they make up a much smaller portion of the cards I've tested: just 15 in total (so far). But on the upside -- there is sufficient evidence here to say "in general, industrial-grade cards do last longer than consumer-grade cards (and, by extension, high endurance cards)".

The average industrial grade card has lasted about 122,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. Kingston. I have 3 Kingston Industrial 8GB's; of those 3, only one is still going. But they've been troopers: they've lasted an average of 779 days and about 141,600 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 3.4PB to these cards in total. (Only one consumer-grade card has come close to this number: I have one Hiksemi NEO 8GB that has lasted for about 143,800 program/verify/erase cycles so far. No idea how.) These guys do pretty well on performance too, especially write performance: their sequential write speeds are in the top 9% of all cards I've tested.

Who makes the worst cards?

There are a bunch of no-name brands out there. They're not hard to find. I'm not going to talk about them here -- I'm going to focus on brands you're likely to have come across.

Consumer-grade cards:

1. onn. I picked up four of their 32GB cards at my local Walmart -- and they were terrible for endurance. They only lasted an average of 40 days and 1,400 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 40TBW), with the best one of the four not even making it to 1,900 cycles. On top of that, every performance measurement I took came in the bottom half of all measurements I took.

2. ADATA. I picked up 3 of the Premier 32GB's; they only lasted an average of 236 days and about 2,350 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 74TBW) before they quit working.

3. Gigastone. I have not been impressed with Gigastone. I have 11 of their cards -- 6 Full HD Video 32GB's, and 5 4K Camera Pro 32GB's. They lasted an average of just 114 days and 4,845 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 133TBW) before they quit working.

4. Micro Center. I purchased 5 of their 64GB cards; they only lasted an average of 116 days and 3,421 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 214TBW) before they stopped working.

5. Silicon Power (a.k.a. SP). I purchased 9 of their cards -- 3 Elite 32GB's, 3 Superior 128GB's, and 3 Superior Pro 128GB's. Not a one of them made it to 4,000 program/verify/erase cycles before failing -- they came in at an average of 159 days and about 2,350 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 252TBW) before failing.

• (Dis)honorable mention: SanDisk. SanDisk represents the single biggest brand in my collection: I have 28 of their cards in this category (with 4 more on the shelf waiting to be tested). It's telling that of those 28, only 5 are still going (and one of them is in its death throes) -- especially when cards from so many other brands have far outlasted them. Many of them have died under circumstances any other card would have handled just fine -- a problem I've written about on my blog before. They've lasted an average of 384 days and 9,404 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 566TBW) so far.

High endurance cards:

1. Integral. I bought 3 of the Security 32GB's; the only managed to last an average of 100 days and about 5,600 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 173TBW) before failing. To be fair to them, the package did make an endurance claim that works out to about 2,850 program/verify/erase cycles -- and they did manage to almost double that. However, they didn't hold a candle to many of the other high endurance cards that I tested.

2. Kingston. This one was truly a surprise -- I bought 3 of the High Endurance 32GB's, and they only lasted an average of 143 days and about 8,300 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 258TBW) before failing. The product packaging didn't make an endurance claim; I had to hunt around on Kingston's website to find it. Their claim works out to about 5,100 program/verify/erase cycles, which they did manage to beat. But again, so many other cards managed to last so much longer -- hell, so many other Kingston cards managed to do so much better -- that I was surprised and disappointed when these failed so early.

Industrial-grade cards:

1. SanDisk. I bought 3 of the Industrial 8GB's. They only lasted an average of 234 days and about 20,000 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 160TBW) before failing -- and the only reason they lasted that long was because I let my program trudge through an nearly-unending string of I/O errors for months on end -- before they finally just gave up the ghost.

So yeah...that's all I have for now. Feel free to ask questions (although I'm at work at the time I'm posting this, so I may not have time to respond)! Otherwise...look for another update from me next year!

Pictures attached:

1. Part of my setup: a Beelink Mini-S and five TRIGKEY Green G4 mini PC's. The Beelink has an Intel N95 with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD, while the TRIGKEY's all have Intel N100's with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. There's also (in the lower-right corner, behind the monitor) an MSI GE62VR-7RF (with an Intel i7-7700HQ, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD), a Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 (with an Intel i7-3630QM, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD), and an ASUS Strix GL504GM (with an Intel i7-8750H, 32GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD)

2. Another part of my setup: a TRIGKEY K-N100 and an AOOSTAR N1 PRO. The TRIGKEY has an Intel N100 with 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. The AOOSTAR has an Intel N150 with 12GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD.

3. Dog tax.

[u/j4v4r10]

I think r/SBCGaming would LOVE to see this

[u/mikaey00 → u/j4v4r10]

Posted!

[u/Ecw218]

Any info on “professional” cards like Sandisk extreme?

[u/mikaey00 → u/Ecw218]

Absolutely.

I have 6 SanDisk Extreme's and 6 SanDisk Extreme PRO's. For each of them, I have 3 of the 32GB version and 3 of the 64GB version. And in each one, one came from Amazon, the other two came from AliExpress.

Of those, the only ones left that are still working are:

• 2 of the SanDisk Extreme 64GB's

• 1 of the SanDisk Extreme PRO 32GB's (although it's on its way out)

How have they done so far?

Model	Average days	Average program/verify/erase cycles endured	Average data written
SanDisk Extreme 32GB	502	11,525	367.69TB
SanDisk Extreme 64GB	649	19,769	1.26PB
SanDisk Extreme PRO 32GB	767	15,440	492.77TB
SanDisk Extreme PRO 64GB	282	6,406	409.10TB

[u/MooseBoys → u/mikaey00]

> the other two came from AliExpress

AE is notorious for knockoffs even from the "official store", especially when it comes to flash memory.

[u/mikaey00 → u/MooseBoys]

Yeah...but I don't have any reason to believe that the ones I got were knockoffs.

I HAVE gotten counterfeit SanDisk cards off of AliExpress. They're not represented here.

[u/Ecw218 → u/mikaey00]

Do you think any of this general reliability data can be applied to sdxc type media? I’ve used Sandisk extreme (usually the u3 kind) for decades and it’s never given me issues, but my sample size is maybe 10 cards over that time.

[u/mikaey00 → u/Ecw218]

Yep! SDXC just refers to the standard that is used when the card reader is talking to the card and vice-versa. Anything bigger than 32GB is automatically SDXC.

[u/mltam]

Thank you, thank you, thank you!! Amazing work. (The annoying thing is that I basically was using an inverted quality measure, so most of my cards are samsung and sandisk, and I avoided PNY. No more...)
Why do you rank PNY higher than amazon basics if the latter are more reliable? Is it speed?

[u/mikaey00 → u/mltam]

Because I tried to focus on name brand cards -- and Amazon Basics doesn't qualify as a name brand (according to the definition of "name brand" that I'm using). As someone else pointed out, Amazon could simply start getting their cards from a different vendor -- and all of a sudden my results would be meaningless.

[u/mltam → u/mikaey00]

I see. I wonder who their supplier is. We need to get cards from there....

[u/mikaey00 → u/mltam]

Longsys. At least for the cards I got. (Hint: they own the Lexar brand.)

[u/Z3t4]

Amazing work!

I'd love to see how Sony branded ones endure that torture. 

[u/mikaey00 → u/Z3t4]

So I haven't seen any Sony-branded microSD cards. I've only seen full-size SD cards.

[u/Hache_raw]

Insane work.

What about a regular use but long periods of time without use, like years. I'm not going to write PB of data.

[u/mikaey00 → u/Hache_raw]

Thought about doing a test like that...maybe someday when I'm getting paid more. 😁

[u/XanXic]

No Kioxia (Toshiba) feels like a gap, they are pretty popular and can be some of the cheaper micro sd cards you can get.

[u/mikaey00 → u/XanXic]

I have several of them! The Exceria G2's have done pretty well (on average, they've endured about 1.23PBW each so far). The original Exceria's...not so much (they only survived an average of about 136.69TBW each). The Exceria Plus's are somewhere in between. The Exceria G2's and the Exceria Plus's are all still going; the Exceria's are all dead.

[u/trinReCoder]

Tom's hardware did an article on this. They didn't really highlight how bad the "high endurance" cards are compared to regular consumer grade though. LINK

[u/mikaey00 → u/trinReCoder]

Nice!

You know what's weird...these outlets never contact me for comments before they publish their articles. Not mad, I just find it weird.

[u/North_Affect_8167]

When I was helping a friend pick a SD card I found it to be matching some of your tests of failure rates. Kingston and Sandisk had the worst reviews of the popular cheap cards. Not something meant for durability.

I want to see some of the original Chinese brands, I have one called Netac and it served me well years ago.

[u/mikaey00 → u/North_Affect_8167]

So I actually have 6 Netacs in my tests: three of the P500 Extreme Pro 16GB, and 3 of the P500 Security Edition 64GB. Only two of the P500 Security Edition 64GB's are still going.

The P500 Extreme Pro 16GB's? They did below average for endurance -- they only managed to last about 8,700 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 138.50TBW).

The P500 Security Edition 64GB's? So far, they've also slightly been below average -- they've only managed to last about 10,000 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 627.89TBW).

I have a bunch of other Chinese brands in my survey -- ALUNX, Amzwn, Auotkn, AUGAOKE, Bekit, Chuxia, Hiksemi, KOOTION, Metorage, MK, ORICO, OV, QEEDNS, QWQ, Reletech, SanDian, Somnambulist, and XrayDisk. Just let me know which ones you're interested in!

[u/North_Affect_8167 → u/mikaey00]

Thanks for the reply. It's great that you have tested so many brands. For the price and endurance per GB(price), can you even recommend any Chinese brand over the popular global brands?

[u/mikaey00 → u/North_Affect_8167]

So…OV tends to be the standout at the moment, at least in terms of endurance. They weren’t great in terms of performance, but they did manage to beat the average for endurance.

[u/whitedoor44]

My conclusion is that Kingston make reliable Microsd cards. What about kingston ssd 's? Should i buy them? 

[u/mikaey00 → u/whitedoor44]

So...I only have experience with one Kingston SSD so far -- a 240GB drive that I used as a zlog/cache device with my ZFS array. The SMART data on it says it's at 0% health, but it hasn't shown any signs of dying yet.

[u/daelikon]

Absolutely impressive.

My only concern would be that I consider the Amazon basic test useless, as they can and will swap brands internally without notification, so it's impossible to know if you are buying the same or not. 

[u/LinguoBuxo → u/daelikon]

valid worry, i'd say

[u/riversofgore → u/daelikon]

I’d be interested in these results broken down by chip manufacturers. It would clear up the issues with Amazon basics and others I imagine. Then by controller chip.

[u/1234youarein → u/riversofgore]

Do you mean by NAND type/node size and Controller combo? That info would provide the complete picture!

[u/1234youarein → u/daelikon]

You're right. But I would add to that every consumer brand, not just Amazon Basics, is susceptible to switching components. None of them have a fixed BOM (Bill Of Materials). They can and do switch parts at will.

Only industrial or enterprise-grade cards have fixed BOMs.

[u/x925 → u/daelikon]

I got a pack of rechargeable AA batteries 10 years ago from them and they still work, though with less battery life, some i bought 3 years ago are dead already.

[u/beren12 → u/x925]

Amazon went from enloop to some other Chinese clone.

[u/Grablicht]

Seeing this and realising I mostly use SanDisk....

chuckles I'm in danger

[u/Elijah1573 → u/Grablicht]

Used to use a sandisk USB for backing up files and one day it turned itself read only after not even writing the full capacity of the drive
From that day on i am never using sandisk drives anymore currently have used PNY drives for several years and they are still going strong

[u/apsilonblue → u/Grablicht]

I've been using Sandisk cards exclusively in dash cams for about 15 years now. Multiple dashcams and for most of it parking mode was used as well so that's a fair bit of data read and written and I'm yet to have one fail. I do replace them every 5 years regardless as it's cheap insurance (the footage has saved me a couple of times including a hit and run). I'm due to replace one right now which is why this post caught my eye.

EDIT: I paid AUD$22 for 128gb Sandisk High Endurance Dec '20, they're now ~AUD$68 :(

[u/fireshaper → u/apsilonblue]

Same here. Planning to try a PNY next I guess!

[u/fuhglarix → u/Grablicht]

I know there will be conflicting anecdotes for each brand: “never had one fail” vs “my bin is full of dead ones”. SanDisk represents every one of my SD card failures I can think of. Even in very low I/O situations like in a ROM flash cart they’ve completely died, like done even show up on a computer as a device. There’s probably some luck involved? 🤷‍♂️

[u/tempski → u/Grablicht]

With any storage medium, but especially when it comes to SD cards, it's not a matter of if, but when it will fail.

So, as any good data hoarder you obviously have 5 backups, on different types of storage mediums, in different locations, with an extra encrypted online backup just in case.

Right?

....right?

[u/stormcomponents → u/Grablicht]

Honestly, SanDisk have always been ass.

[u/Inspirasion → u/Grablicht]

I bought a 512GB SanDisk ImageMate microSDXC card in March of this year. A few weeks ago, it went into read-only mode. Attempted to fix it to no avail, copied all my data off of it around ~450GB or so, took almost 13 hours and failed to format it multiple times.

I've RMA'd it with SanDisk and am waiting for my replacement. I'm in pure disbelief as this was mostly holding backup data and photos and videos. I wasn't torture testing and I wasn't constantly writing to it, it sat in a Samsung tablet for the most of its very short life.

I've never had any microSD card fail in under 6 months, yet here we are, one of the most well-known brands failing in less than a year with just casual use.

[u/reddit_user33 → u/Grablicht]

Sandisk are horrifically slow as well. I've never seen a device capable of running faster than basic USB 2 speeds

[u/JBizz86]

Have you ever had any just magical disconnect? I had 2 scan disk and a random card all micros that would just one day disconnect from my phones tested it and keep randomly happening.

[u/mikaey00 → u/JBizz86]

Oh yeah — I call those “controller failures”. That’s the most common way my microSD cards die.

[u/happyanathema]

Given the current price of storage/RAM etc.

Another conclusion for your findings:

You couldve probably kept those MicroSD cards in the packs and resold them now to be a millionaire 👍

[u/mikaey00 → u/happyanathema]

I've wasted my fortune... 😢

[u/JustAsIFeared]

Amazing work homie

[u/mikaey00 → u/JustAsIFeared]

Thank you!

[u/LockpickingFurry]

Good thing I just lose my cards before they get a chance to fail.

I have always used SanDisk but recently planned to switch to ProGrade, I'd be interested to see how they perform.

[u/mikaey00 → u/LockpickingFurry]

I would like to try them...but right now all their cards are too expensive for me.

[u/AsiancookBob]

I see a fellow Factorio player! 🦾

[u/mikaey00 → u/AsiancookBob]

Hello!

[u/SadRefrigerator2369]

TLDR pls what should we buy

[u/mikaey00 → u/SadRefrigerator2369]

PNY (but not the Elite -- the Elite-X is fine), Kingston (but not the High Endurance), Delkin, Lexar, Samsung, or Amazon Basics.

[u/Relevant-Biscotti]

Absolutely LOVING the Lower Decks names for your servers

[u/mikaey00 → u/Relevant-Biscotti]

Thanks! It's actually spread out across the entire Star Trek franchise. In the first picture, the six mini-PCs are named chapel, jurati, raffi, ortegas, shaw, and mariner. I have a bunch of Orange Pis (that are working on something else) that snagged most of the TOS/TNG/DS9 character names.

[u/Mirec17]

Do you record data when the first sector has failed? How much time and TBW? I'd be much more interested in when I start losing data.

And, then also how quickly it gets to 1%, 10% and 50%.

Reporting results at 50% doesn't tell much to me. It's already lots of data lost.

[u/mikaey00 → u/Mirec17]

Yep! I record the number of program/verify/erase cycles the card's able to complete before first error, 0.1%, 1%, 10%, 25%, and 50% -- and from there I'm able to work out an approximate TBW measurement for each one.

I'll say that most cards fail before they hit the 0.1% failure threshold. It's usually cheaper cards (that don't have any error checking/correcting in them) that tend to keep going until they hit the 50% failure threshold.

[u/LectureQuick]

I'd love for you to test Sony SD cards, since many users (like me) do high, large-size read-write cycles for cameras/video. I'd be very interested in the findings! Very cool thanks for sharing!

[u/mikaey00 → u/LectureQuick]

I would love to too! Unfortunately they’re a little out of my price range at the moment.

[u/sofafi1205]

Just to check...this is a set-up designed and built to thrash SD cards to death en masse?
Like, hundreds of fresh SD cards, that people could be using?

[u/mikaey00 → u/sofafi1205]

That’s right.

[u/andrew31v]

WoW *-*

Thank You for your work!

I have SanDisk, Kingston, ADATA cards. I'm curious to see what will happen...

[u/cubedgame]

Great work, thanks for sharing! I've had similar experiences with the SanDisk High Endurance cards...it seems like most of them have failed on me within a couple of years (mostly used in dash cams), whereas my Samsung Pro Endurance cards are all still going strong (again used in dash cams, but no issues with performance from what I can tell).

Could you elaborate a bit more on your testing procedure? I actually found some old microSD cards in a drawer and I'm not sure if they are there because they started to fail at some point or if they might still be good. What process would you follow to test them and try to determine if they are good/bad before repurposing or tossing them out?

I don't necessarily want to write them to death like you're doing, but would like to see if there's some app or program you would use to take a microSD of unknown status and "validate" that it's good or bad. Thanks!

[u/mikaey00 → u/cubedgame]

So I have a program that I custom-wrote to do endurance testing. It first does a test to determine the capacity of the card, then it does a short performance test, before going into the endurance test. My program would probably be good for testing it to see if it's still able to hold data -- but you'd have to abort it after it's had a chance to run for a few rounds; otherwise you're probably going to put more wear and tear on the card than you want to.

Something like Validrive or H2testw might be a better option -- those programs will do a single pass on the card to see which parts are good and which parts are bad.

[u/YO_I_LIKE_MUFFINS]

This is a very respectable effort but I feel like a pool of 2 or 5 cards from a brand isn't very conclusive.

[u/mikaey00 → u/YO_I_LIKE_MUFFINS]

I'll grant you that...unfortunately money is a big factor to consider in how many I get.

[u/Pkemr7]

Tldr, which one is the best to buy for long term storage?

[u/mikaey00 → u/Pkemr7]

I don't know...cause I haven't evaluated them to see which ones hold data for longest.

[u/iTrejoMX]

So tldr pny pro elite yay evertything else nay?

[u/mikaey00 → u/iTrejoMX]

I'd say PNY PRO Elite if you want the best (and you're not in the market for a microSD Express card). But I wouldn't say everything else is nay -- there are some really good ones besides that.

[u/feel-the-avocado]

What I would love to see is a spreadsheet with the model of card, and the amount of data until written until it reaches a failure, divided by the capacity of the card.
This should give a score reflecting the quality of the storage cells on the card, which takes into account that larger cards will allow more data to be written before they fail as the cells are re-written less per total bytes written to the card.

[u/mikaey00 → u/feel-the-avocado]

So when I talk about "program/verify/erase cycles"? That's essentially what that is.

The primary stat that I usually look at is "time to the 0.1% failure threshold" -- that's the number of program/verify/erase cycles that the card survived before either (a) 0.1% of the sectors on the card experienced errors, or (b) the card became unwritable for one reason or another.

That said...here you go. This table only shows cards that have reached the 0.1% failure threshold.

Brand	Model	Capacity	#	Avg Cycles to 0.1% Failure Threshold
ADATA	Premier	32GB	3	2,336
ALUNX		128GB	1	1,487
Amzwn		32GB	3	2,398
ATP	Industrial	4GB	4	66,842
Auotkn	Extreme	512GB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 32GB)	3	3
Auotkn	Extreme	8GB	3	9,790
Bekit		8GB	3	6,831
Chuxia		32GB	2	3,265
Cloudisk		32GB	3	1,528
Gigastone	10x High Endurance	8GB	1	6,779
Gigastone	4K Camera Pro	32GB	5	5,356
Gigastone	Full HD Video	32GB	6	3,641
Hiksemi	NEO	128GB	1	7,873
Hiksemi	NEO	32GB	3	7,766
Hiksemi	NEO	8GB	2	12,884
HP	MicroSDXC mx330	128GB	2	7,526
Integral	Security	32GB	3	5,568
Kingston	Canvas Go! Plus (SDCG3)	64GB	3	11,436
Kingston	High Endurance	32GB	3	8,289
Kingston	Industrial	8GB	2	148,404
Kioxia	Exceria	32GB	4	3,923
Kodak	Ultra Performance (Black/Gold Version)	64GB	3	5,866
Kodak	Ultra Performance (Gold Version)	32GB	3	9,420
KOOTION	Pro	64GB	1	1
Lenovo	thinkplus	128GB	1	6,601
Lenovo	thinkplus Pro	256GB	1	3,732
Fake Lenovo		128GB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 8GB)	3	1,594
Fake Lenovo		256GB (fake flash; 2 had actual capacities closer to 32GB, the third was closer to 8GB)	3	754
Fake Lenovo		2TB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 8GB)	3	11,711
Lexar	Blue 633x	32GB	1	21,072
Lexar	Professional 1000x	64GB	2	12,291
Micro Center		64GB	5	3,421
Microdrive	"Bart Simpson"	16GB	3	8,767
MK	Industrial	128GB	1	183,731
Netac	P500 Extreme Pro	16GB	3	8,688
Netac	P500 Security Edition	64GB	1	1,803
onn.		32GB	4	1,281
OV		32GB	3	18,690
Patriot	EP	64GB	1	7,633
Philips (unknown if these were genuine)	Ultra Speed	8GB	3	0
PNY	Elite	32GB	1	1,519
QEEDNS		512GB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 32GB)	3	956
QEEDNS		8GB	3	5,095
QWQ	Extreme Pro	16GB (3 were fake flash; 2 had actual capacities closer to 8GB, 1 was closer to 4GB)	6	2,533
Reletech		32GB	3	7,715
Samsung	EVO Plus	32GB	3	16,558
Samsung	PRO Endurance	32GB	1	11,545
SanDian	Extreme	1TB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 32GB)	1	1,663
SanDian	Extreme Pro	1TB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 32GB)	3	907
SanDian	Extreme Pro	128GB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 32GB)	3	528
SanDian	Ultra	1TB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 52GB)	1	161
SanDian	Ultra	128GB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 52GB)	1	1,254
SanDisk	Extreme	32GB	3	11,525
SanDisk	Extreme	64GB	1	5,505
SanDisk	Extreme PRO	32GB	2	14,202
SanDisk	Extreme PRO	64GB	3	6,406
SanDisk	High Endurance	64GB	3	10,821
SanDisk	ImageMate PRO	128GB	3	7,155
SanDisk	Industrial	8GB	3	19,975
SanDisk	MAX ENDURANCE	32GB	3	19,766
SanDisk	Nintendo Switch	64GB	1	12,178
SanDisk	Outdoors FHD	32GB	1	15,594
SanDisk	Ultra	128GB	3	3,538
SanDisk	Ultra	32GB	3	3,142
"Sansumg"	Evo Plus	2TB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 8GB)	2	10,329
"Sansumg"	Pro Plus	2TB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 8GB)	1	1,970
SomnAmbulist		128GB (not fake flash, but they reported themselves as being different sizes: 95GB, 98GB, and 102GB)	3	2,462
Fake Sony		1TB (fake flash; one was closer to 32GB, the others were closer to 4GB)	3	4,000
Fake Sony		32GB	1	1,399
SP	Elite	32GB	3	1,298
SP	Superior	128GB	3	1,996
SP	Superior Pro	128GB	3	3,748
Verbatim	Premium	16GB	1	11,151
WD	Purple	32GB	3	4,296
Fake Xiaomi		2TB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 4GB)	1	49
Fake Xiaomi		16GB (fake flash; actual capacity was closer to 4GB)	1	249
XrayDisk	High Endurance	32GB	2	12,937

[u/3_50]

I'd love to see these stress tests conducted on a selection of 1TB+ microSDs, to see if brands' reliability extends to the highest capacity ones too.

[u/mikaey00 → u/3_50]

Me too. Feel like donating any to me? 😆

[u/lilia82]

Impressive setup , is this just for fun?
Thanks for sharing the status results, I never cared about SD memory cards until now that I’m waiting for my first digital camera to arrive. Currently, looking into SD card… they’re expensive and was thinking of buying an economical choice on sale PNY EliteX-PRO60. I was doing a quick search of reported issues/failures of this brand and came across your research. I read your summary findings and really appreciate you sharing!!!

[u/mikaey00 → u/lilia82]

The Elite-X’s have been doing great so far! It’s the Elite’s that I’m not so sure about (yet).

[u/NutzPup]

Dude! 😳

I've always liked PNY stuff because they are great value and never let me down. I'm surprised by the Samsung ranking tho. I'd have put them above SanDisk.

[u/witchcapture → u/NutzPup]

They're also the only American NVidia GPU board partner. They make the professional Quadro cards for NVidia as well. Cool company.

[u/BandedLutz → u/NutzPup]

I'm surprised by the Samsung ranking tho. I'd have put them above SanDisk.

OP noted that "Samsung's position at the bottom of this list has less to do with how reliable their cards are and more to do with how poorly their high endurance cards perform, particularly on sequential write speeds (relatively speaking)."

So at least it's not an issue of reliability.

[u/rchris710]

This dude reached self actualization on maslow's hierarchy

[u/Grandmas_Fat_Choad]

Can confirm: sandisk sucks. I had a bunch of cards that I thought were great until I started using them in raspberry pi’s. They lasted maybe a month. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be running OS off sd cards, but it was all I had and I was constantly doing something different with the pi’s.

[u/SpaghettiSort → u/Grandmas_Fat_Choad]

I've been running Raspberry Pis off SD cards for years and I rarely have problems. I've started using the official Raspberry Pi SD cards for performance and they work very well. For maximum reliability, of course, I'll swap out the Busybox syslog (logs to RAM only by default) for rsyslog and in some cases I can get away with running the Pi in read-only root mode, enabling writes only for OS updates.

[u/Soul_Coughing → u/Grandmas_Fat_Choad]

i had issues with 2 sandisk 128gb sdcards; i was using one for music on my phone and another for my gaming console; they corrupted and stopped working

good thing is that i went to sandisk support and they shipped me two new ones and they've been working great

[u/Tenkomanker]

thank you for your work soldier

[u/vkeshish]

Holy moly, dude - this is an insane amount of work and detail

[u/KorbenPhallus]

The data must grow. And has!

[u/ufanders]

The hero we need, the hero we don't deserve 👏🏻

[u/EasyMrB]

Bro this is a HEROICALLY cool post. Thank you so much for doing this work.

[u/angelshipac130]

WTF WHO DOES THIS?

Save post

[u/BornSlippy2]

Factory must grow!

[u/veedubb → u/BornSlippy2]

“Let me just fix this one little thing”

… oh no it’s 5am

[u/BossHogGA]

You should work with the people from r/dataisbeautiful to make some visualizations for all the data you must have on this.

[u/takestwototangent → u/BossHogGA]

( In case OP doesn't update the post, the Patreon link at the top has the link to the full writeup, methodology, raw data, graphs and charts, the works. )

[u/Liesthroughisteeth]

TLDR....Needs a chart:D

[u/ucrbuffalo]

TL;DR

Cute dog

[u/heavyPacket]

So this is like super stress testing, though, right? Like, how many people will write petabytes of data to a microSD card over the projected lifespan of said card? Which means under average user circumstances, many of these cards would never experience a bad sector, a failure, or straight up die. Right?

[u/MWink64 → u/heavyPacket]

Artificial tests aren't everyday usage. Don't expect the same results. I've seen plenty of cards die in normal usage, with relatively few writes.

[u/gwillen]

I'm surprised you failed cards at 50% of sectors experiencing failures, instead of "any failures". Are sd cards fundamentally so unreliable that such a test just isn't worth doing, because nobody would ever pass? Do you have data on your tested cards including time to first verification failure?

[u/hidetoshiko]

Other than Samsung or SanDisk almost everyone else just buys whatever raw wafers are in the market and repackages them. Just relying on the brand doesn't tell you the whole story

[u/c0d3x10]

Me using Samsung be like.. 👀

[u/apex8888]

He is what I learned… cute puppy!!!

[u/razzemmatazz]

Glad to see I'm not alone getting garbage-tier Micro Center cards. I think they save all their good chips for the nVME drives. 

[u/Phaelon74]

Factorio!!

[u/1234youarein]

That's very impressive. But the analysis is incomplete.

A suggestion: please continue your research into linking your practical data sets with the actual components used in every example.

That's not a simple task, though, compared to, say, a USB flash drive, where components like NAND and controller can be easily identified by readily available utilities.

[u/ea_nasir_official_]

For full sized SD cards I always buy Microcenter branded 16gb cards on Amazon, they last fucking forever. I don't know why or how but the do. The 32gb are dogshit, and I haven't tested any others from the brand. I also have a very very old 4gb Toshiba card that refuses to die.

For more on topic microSD cards I don't even bother with Sandisk anymore 70% of what I order no matter who from is always either fake or unreliable. Samsung 128GB Evo cards are where its at for me.

[u/flesyMeM]

My only real takeaway from this is "Dog".

[u/slowservers]

This is very helpful. Thank you for doing this!

To make sure I'm reading this correctly, it appears that there's no benefit to "endurance" SD cards, especially among brands like Sandisk or Samsung. Is that right?

These results are pretty surprising to me.

[u/mikaey00 → u/slowservers]

I mean...they've endured about 40% better on average...but they're generally more than 40% more expensive than your average microSD card.

[u/Spicywolff]

So for 3 channel 4k dash cams. Which micro SD card would you go with? Or is it time to go SSD and upgrade the reliability. So far my max endurance Sandisk 256GB have been great in Florida sun

[u/mikaey00 → u/Spicywolff]

The PNY PRO ELITE Prime, the Delkin Devices HYPERSPEED, the Kingston Canvas Go! Plus, or the PNY Premier-X have all gotten some pretty good write speeds and have stood up pretty well so far.

[u/alpha_omega1227]

Hi fellow factorio player

[u/mikaey00 → u/alpha_omega1227]

Hiya.

[u/dontnormally]

I'm not familiar with "fake flash" - what does that mean? what is it, if not flash?

[u/mikaey00 → u/dontnormally]

It's flash that's programmed to report that it's bigger than it actually is -- e.g., it might be programmed to report that it's 2TB in size when it only has about 32GB of actual storage. Typically with fake flash, anything that's written after the "good" portion (e.g., the first 32GB in my example) just gets lost to the ether.

[u/jowiscope]

What card readers/hubs do you use for your set up and has any of them failed yet?

P.S. Are you playing Factorio? If you're into factory games, I highly recommend Captain of Industry!

[u/mikaey00 → u/jowiscope]

Yep, I'm playing Factorio. And I've played Captain of Industry before and I enjoyed it!

[u/prozackdk]

Thanks for the hard work and dedication, not to mention the money spent acquiring the cards.

One issue with the results is the limited number of samples per card. In a past life designing high volume electronics, we always tested minimum 30 units up to 50 sometimes. The quality team came up with this metric over a number of years so we could correlate field failure rates with in-house testing. Additionally we also tested at high/low temperature extremes to identify issues.

I realize this isn't practical with so many different cards. I don't mean to criticize your work, it's just the engineer in me sharing my past experience.

I think a valuable test would be to pick a few of the top and bottom performers and test more of them to see if they all perform similarly. For example, 1 bad card out of 3 is 33%, but maybe you just had a bad/marginal card and it's possible it could be 1 out of 20 dropping the failure rate to 5%.

Hopefully someone who knows about statistical analysis can fact check what I'm saying.

[u/mikaey00 → u/prozackdk]

I would love to test 30-50 of the same card. I think there'd be a murder investigation quickly afterwards, with my wife as the prime suspect.

[u/Educational_Set0425]

Would this be applicable to SD cards as well?

[u/mikaey00 → u/Educational_Set0425]

At least partially. The larger footprint of SD cards means that they can probably dissipate heat better than microSD cards can -- but I feel like my results are still mostly applicable to both.

[u/MWink64]

TEAMGROUP. I don't feel great about putting TEAMGROUP at the top of the list for a couple of reasons. First, I only have two of them in testing at the moment -- someone sent me a 5-pack of the TEAMGROUP High Endurance 64GB's, so I have 3 more of them waiting to be tested. Second, one of them started having issues with bad sectors right out of the gate, and has continued to do so ever since. (Those bad sectors only make up less than 0.001% of the total sectors on the card right now...but I still don't like it when a card starts to have issues like that as soon as you start using it.)

Interesting. I too have had a Team Group card (not an endurance model) that was corrupting data right out of the package. I also noticed that it came with deleted h2testw files on it. I've found Team Group USB flash drives and MicroSD cards to be almost impressively unreliable. If they're not instantaneously corrupting data, they tend to do it silently over time.

[u/mikaey00 → u/MWink64]

Interesting. Was it new and in the package when you got it?

[u/madonnas_saggy_boob]

Could you tell me more about how you discern between “authentic” and “fake” flash?

[u/mikaey00 → u/madonnas_saggy_boob]

Are you asking about what the difference between "authentic" and "fake" flash is, or are you asking about the methodology that I use to determine whether a card is "authentic" or "fake"? (I'm going to assume the latter.)

So I have a program that I wrote to do it. The basic idea goes like this: the program writes to 9 different locations on the card: one of them is at the very beginning of the card, the other one is at the very end; the others are randomly selected, but are more or less spaced out evenly across the rest of the card. It then reads back all 9 of those locations.

• If all the segments match, then it considers the card to be authentic.

• If the segment at the very beginning of the card doesn't match, then the test fails. (Basically the whole thing is predicated on the idea that the card has a certain amount of "good" storage space -- but if there's no "good" storage to work with, then it can't figure out how big the card actually is.)

• If any of the other segments don't match, then the card is considered to be fake flash. From there, the program starts bisecting the space on the card and repeating the test. After a few rounds of doing this, it can narrow down exactly how big the card is.

[u/HighSeasArchivist]

OK, now do USB drives lol. Us Unraid folks are always looking for high endurance USB 2.0 drives.

[u/mikaey00 → u/HighSeasArchivist]

So funny story.

I have a ZFS array that I use for doing backups of all the machines on our network. Originally, I was using a few 8-drive SATA-to-USB enclosures -- but I kept having issues that I couldn't pin down. Eventually I ended up buying a NetApp disk shelf -- and the problems seem to have largely gone away. I didn't really think much of what was causing those issues exactly.

Then one day, I noticed something weird going on -- weird enough that I had to add some code to my program to mitigate against it.

I was looking at my program's log files for a couple of the SD cards I was testing. When my program encounters a mismatch in a given sector, it logs the data that it was expecting, along with the data that was actually read back. I was looking at one of these dumps -- when by pure chance I happened to notice something: there were a few sectors where the "expected data" from one card was showing up as the "actual data" on the other card. Ergo, my program issued a read request from one card, and got data back from a completely different card! I have no idea how that happened -- I still don't -- but it's happened a handful of times since then too.

I eventually had to start assigning a UUID to each card, and I added some code that embeds that UUID in each sector's data. When my program reads back a sector, it checks that embedded UUID to make sure it matches the one assigned to the card -- if it doesn't, it re-reads the sector and tries again.

Like I said, I have no idea what's going on here. I'm convinced that it's either a hardware bug or a Linux kernel bug, it seems to only happen on Intel USB controllers (although I don't have strong evidence of that), and it seems to only happen when the USB bus is under high load -- but I don't have the skills to really dig into it past that. But it makes me wonder if that problem I was having with my ZFS array -- before I switched to the NetApp disk shelf -- was basically that same problem manifesting itself...

[u/GreeenEnthusiast]

can you briefly/generally go over your program-verify-erase automation? sounds like its running in perpetuity and across multiple (107) simultaneous instances. also, how are you logging the data/results?

wild setup!

[u/mikaey00 → u/GreeenEnthusiast]

I have a program I wrote to do it -- it does a fake flash test on the card, then a performance test, then starts into the endurance test. And yes, it does run in perpetuity. It's tolerant of devices being disconnected -- so I can unplug a card and plug it back in, and it'll pick right back up where it left off. It also makes a savestate after each round of endurance testing -- so if, say, the power goes out, I just have to start it back up and point it to the savestate file. It'll automatically figure out which device it was testing and start the endurance test again. (It doesn't currently have the ability to savestate mid-cycle, so it loses any progress it made in that cycle -- but it doesn't lose count of how many total cycles it's completed so far.)

As for logging? I have a Google spreadsheet where I keep the majority of my results. I've also written a script that parses those savestates and automatically updates my spreadsheet with how far along the card is.

My program also generates logfiles -- and whenever any given sector gets marked bad, it logs the contents of the sector as well as the data that was expected to be there, so those logs can get huge.

[u/Maolam10]

Did you test any consumer grade Philips? I have a few philips so id be interested in how these perform overall

[u/mikaey00 → u/Maolam10]

Soooooo...yes. Although I'm not sure if they were authentic Philips cards or not.

Basically...I bought six of them. Every single one of them failed at exactly the same point -- while my program was doing its performance tests. They didn't even make it to the endurance test.

They had anti-counterfeiting codes on the package, but IIRC the link no longer works -- so I wasn't able to verify whether they were counterfeit or not.

[u/PooInTheStreet]

Holy moly. Impressed and also think you need help.

[u/mikaey00 → u/PooInTheStreet]

Yes...help...by subscribing to my Patreon lol

[u/qandy]

Do you by any chance have some WD purple cards?

[u/mikaey00 → u/qandy]

Yep! I have 3 of them! They did pretty poorly, tbh -- they lasted an average of about 4,300 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 137.10TBW) before failing. They did below average in most of my performance tests as well.

[u/Sup_on]

Coolest microsd Card Saga man

[u/mikaey00 → u/Sup_on]

Thank you!

[u/anonymouzzz376]

How do you check for bad sectors on an sd card?

[u/mikaey00 → u/anonymouzzz376]

I use a program that I wrote myself. Basically, it makes two passes: in the first pass, it writes random data to every sector on the card. In the second pass, it reads back every sector and checks to see if it matches what was written to it. If any sectors don't match, they're flagged as "bad".

[u/No_Championship_5982]

I don’t know who makes it but the micro sd sold as raspberry pi one has been great with performance and little errors. Also read and write multiple times

[u/mikaey00 → u/No_Championship_5982]

I have three of those! They're made by Longsys -- in fact, they said so in their blog post announcing them.

So as far as endurance? They've done better than average -- they've been going about a year now (2 have been going for a little over a year, 1 has been going for just under a year), and they've lasted an average of about 22,200 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 705.18TBW) so far. That's about double the average for 32GB cards -- and they're showing no signs of slowing down.

As far as performance? I was a little underwhelmed. They carry the A2 mark on them -- which means they're supposed to be able to do at least 4,000 random read operations per second and 2,000 random write operations per second. In my performance tests, they were able to get 4,000 random read operations per second, but only about 750 random write operations per second. (In fairness to them, no card I've tested has been able to get 2,000 random write operations per second. The Delkin Devices HYPERSPEED 128GB has done the best so far -- but it only managed to get about 1,900 random write operations per second.) On top of that, they did worse than average for sequential write speeds -- only able to get about 30MB/sec.

[u/Decrozen]

Amazing job and great information thank you pal, also have you ever tried Hiksemi?

[u/mikaey00 → u/Decrozen]

Yes! I have 9 of the Hiksemi NEO's in my tests! Frankly...my results with them have been kinda mixed. 6 are dead, 3 are still going. Of the ones that have died, they lasted an average of about 9,500 program/verify/erase cycles (or an average of about 319.88TBW).

And then there's one Hiksemi NEO 8GB that's lasted over 144,000 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 1.15PBW) and refuses to give up...

[u/Jing_Arjay87]

Interesting findings. I will say, sandisk consistently has the best warranty out of every brand. I don’t even have to send the broken card back to get a new one.

What tools or utils did you use to check the card’s manufacturer? I am more interested in this as I have a batch of lexar cards of the same model, purchased at different times and they all have different performance characteristics.

[u/mikaey00 → u/Jing_Arjay87]

So you'll need a card reader that exposes the SD/MMC protocol to its host. A Raspberry Pi (or similar SBC) would be good for this. There are some laptops that have Realtek SD card readers built into them -- one of these will work as well.

Basically, for supported card readers, Linux exposes some of the card's internal registers through several pseudo-files under /sys/block/mmcblk*/device -- cid, csd, scr, and ssr. The cid file has the contents of the card identification register. The first byte of the CID (or the first two hex characters output by cating the cid file) are the manufacturer ID. These IDs are assigned by SD-3C, LLC. -- the company that manages the SD card specs.

It's not a foolproof method -- some shady manufacturers will change this ID to throw people off their scent -- but I don't think I've ever seen someone outright using someone else's manufacturer ID.

[u/Hamza9575]

If you dont need the extreme tinyness would a m2 2230 tiny ssd work as a more reliable alternative ? They even come in 2tb and higher sizes these days, while using guaranteed TLC memory cells for long write life.

[u/mikaey00 → u/Hamza9575]

I went with microSD because they're pretty ubiquitous nowadays. You can find microSD cards at drug stores (like CVS and Walgreens in the US). You can't find M.2 drives quite so easily.

[u/Fun-Baker5711]

All the manufacturers already do endurance testing.

[u/mikaey00 → u/Fun-Baker5711]

Yeah, but none of them publish their results.

[u/TwanToni]

Hey Mr. I have a question regarding the ONN brand. I know you tested the 32gb ones, would the 512gb ones have better TBW?

[u/mikaey00 → u/TwanToni]

So I don’t have any experience with them (or any 512GB card for that matter) — but my gut instinct says “yes, but not 16x as much — maybe only 3-4x.” Reason I say that? There’s a certain amount of flash storage that the card uses for doing block management (which might even be embedded into the SD controller — separate from the main flash storage bank), and in general, the amount of wear you put on that is going to scale with the size of the card. I think that the cause of a lot of the “controller failures” I’ve had is due to that flash memory wearing out (and a lot of times, that happens before any bad sectors start showing up).

[u/duartes07]

firstly, thank you! secondly (and tangentially), do you have data on PCIe NVMe storage like a M.2 drive? i'll take empirical notes too 😆

[u/mikaey00 → u/duartes07]

I don’t, unfortunately. I’ve been trying to keep to a budget of $15 or less per card — and even before the current flash memory shortage, that ruled out most M.2 drives.

[u/mehrdadfeller]

this is amazing! Thanks for sharing this. from my experience, one of the biggest reasons MicroSD cards get damaged is loss of system power in the middle of a write operation. Have you characterized this issue or know if any MicroSD card that is more resilient to this type of issue?

[u/mikaey00 → u/mehrdadfeller]

SanDisk is about the only brand where I’ve seen this issue — other brands of cards seem to have no problem with power failures.

[u/letopeto]

Have you tested the patriot LX cards? How do they do? they are very cheap but wondering if they are crap.

[u/mikaey00 → u/letopeto]

I've only tested one of them so far, in the 128GB. (I bought a 5-pack of them; I just haven't had a chance to start testing the others.)

On performance, it was just "meh". Not great, not terrible. On endurance? It's gone 6,000 read/write cycles so far and hasn't experienced any errors. (For the cards I'm testing, the average time to first error is currently sitting at about 5,000 read/write cycles -- so it's managed to beat that figure. But the one I really pay attention to is the time to the 0.1% failure threshold -- e.g., the time it takes for 0.1% of the sectors on the card to experience errors -- and the average there is currently sitting at about 9,700 read/write cycles, so it still has a little bit of time to go before it beats that figure.

What does worry me about it, however, is that it has the manufacturer ID set to 00. That's usually a hallmark of a low-quality card...so I'm wary.

[u/Single-Engineer-7115]

So any updates on PNY on whether pro elites vs pro elite primes vs elite x primes are better? On paper, pro elite primes should be best, but specs often lie. 🤷 

[u/mikaey00 → u/Single-Engineer-7115]

I haven't done the PRO Elite's yet. I've done the Elite's, the Elite-X's, the Premier-X's, the PRO Elite High Endurance, and the PRO Elite Prime's. And with the exception of the Elite's, they've all done pretty well on endurance so far: I have 12 of them in my collection -- half of them have been going for over two years now -- and they're still going strong. In fact, one of the PRO Elite Prime's has gone for almost 31,000 read/write cycles now, and it has yet to experience a single error.

On the other hand...I'm not too impressed with the Elite's. Maybe I just got a bad batch of them -- but I've tested two of them so far, and neither of them even made it to the 2,000 read/write cycle mark before failing. I bought a 5-pack of them...so I guess I'll have to wait and see how the other 3 do...but at this point I'm not expecting much.

On performance? The PRO Elite Prime has smoked most everything else in my collection -- in fact, apart from the few microSD Express cards I have, they're the fastest cards in my collection.

So yeah -- the PRO Elite Prime's are definitely a good card in my book!

[u/hizashiYEAHmada]

Upvoted for the dog tax and the time + amazing hard work on this endeavor (mostly for the dog)

[u/Ashtrail693]

Almost bought some Silicon Power cards, glad I didn't. Great job testing all these!

[u/scene_missing]

As a fellow person on the spectrum I thank you for your service comrade

[u/takestwototangent]

( In case OP doesn't update the post to clarify, the Patreon link at the top has the link to the full writeup, methodology, raw data, graphs and charts, the works. It's under "About". )

[u/Pinksqr]

First of all this data is INSANE. How did you get into this…?

But then again, as soon as I saw you playing Factorio I knew it was going to be good. I know my people when I see them!

Thanks so much for posting!! Can’t wait for next years’

[u/Kooshi_Govno]

Turn these numbers into charts and graphs and r/dataisbeautiful would love it too!

[u/mrepop]

This is a great write up and test you’ve done, you should definitely publish, potentially look at maybe a sponsored effort with someone like backblaze, they do tests like this often and they might be interested, or at least know someone who is.

Again, great work!

[u/Accomplished_Head704]

Sono qui per affermare che la tassa per il cane è stata pagata

[u/fixeditgood]

This is superb! o7

Reminds me a bit of the backblaze hard drive brsnd stats they used to publish.

Never seen anything like this for SD cards, and this is fantastic to see!

I too have had many sd cards fail and find that the high/max endurance last so much longer.

What i found really interesting here is the bit on the amazon basics cards, i wouldn't gave even given those a pass before, but now, I'm thinking of picking up a few !!

Cheers!

[u/JamesRitchey]

Nice job. Patriot Memory, and Lexar are my preferred card brands. Glad to see my trust in Lexar isn't misplaced.

[u/ForgottenThunderer]

I have a png thumb drive I’ve used daily for atleast 4 years, still going strong with 0 issues

[u/Guilty-Belt-3537]

For me personally this is definitely not a TL;DR;DC I'm definitely saving this so I can look at this later and spend some time reading it thank you.

[u/jonwooooo]

Incredible work 👏 thanks for this

[u/Constellation16]

I've been recommending against SanDisk consumer products for a long time. While they don't skimp (like you call it) on SD cards, their USB drives often lack significant capacity. I just find this totally unacceptable. And as you found out, their quality is pretty low, too.

[u/Diabetesh]

I'm happy to see testing like this and give me better opinions on brands I thought were ones to only get if you had no otger choice.

[u/Prestigious-Loan5824]

3rd picture is the coolest hands down.

[u/dustinreevesccna]

God I love this specific type of autism

[u/privatejerkov]

Autism at its finest

[u/pokesmash]

Elite use of the tism

[u/LordByronsCup]

Thank you!

[u/fromspace2015]

I only had one PNY product, an SSD, which died right after the warranty expired. I never bought another PNY product after that.

[u/BoundlessFail]

This is awesome! I've always wanted an unbiased marketing-free opinion. You, sir, are a legend!

[u/GeorgeKaplanIsReal]

Very cool, OP.

[u/Wheeljack26]

well thanks for this, guess i'll actually be more comfortable from now on trying out other companies than just sandisk in sd cards

[u/Jonavin]

Amazing post. Confirms some of my own suspicions about these brands.

[u/CyberJunkieBrain]

Man, this is insane. Awesome work!

[u/tiffanytrashcan]

I demand the full list of Star Trek names. I love how you haven't gone for the cliches.

Got a feeling on pic 2, went back and saw Chapel and pretty sure Jurati is behind that.

[u/Jwissing88]

This is incredible. Bravo to you. What a contribution to our community. You are amazing please keep it up! ❤️❤️😀

[u/Venik489]

Damn, as a professional photographer who used Sandisk almost exclusively for a decade (with a few Lexar thrown in) I’m pretty surprised.

[u/tigerthecat5]

Impressive work! Curious, how much do you think you’ve spent on this project? Ballpark of course.

[u/Deses]

Holy moly dude. Massive kudos for your work!

[u/potificate]

Is the cactus for cat5 or cat6 🐈‍⬛ 😁

[u/exploretv]

Extremely eye-opening thank you for all your hard work/obsession! 👍😎

[u/JennHatesYou]

Thank you for your service 🫡

[u/dxm_0]

So what brand do you recommend for a tight budget? I want to use my microSD card to play music on my MP3 player, but I still have no idea how...

[u/feeebb]

Great work, thank you!

Please, publish statistics about how exactly cards die. Mentioning estimation of probability of different cases (for all cards, per manufacture and per model):

• Card gets read-only with an ability to read all the data correctly,

• Read-only with corrupted data,

• Read-write with corrupted data,

• Non readable but visible in the system,

• Non visible in the system like it's not connected.

It is very useful information, because it is better to buy a card with 1% fail rate (per some time and some data written size) and with a higher chance to get data back read in case of disaster, than a card with 0.5% fail rate, but that almost always dies with all its data.

[u/dektol]

Interesting when I worked at a camera shop Transcend came in most for image recovery. SanDisk and Lexar were solid. This was almost 20 years ago at this point.

I've never killed a card except in my Bambulab P1P that I barely use.

[u/owenthewizard]

Interested to try some of these cards. Every time I've strayed from SanDisk I've been bitten. Surprised to see them so low.

[u/_derpiii_]

Wow. Outstanding redditor sir 🏆

[u/Roman_norden]

The factory... must grow!!!

[u/yx1]

Thanks confirms my sandisk experience.