Conclusions and final remarks

The first conclusion anyone can take from all the metrics we have results from is that there isn’t one single winner, one microSD card to rule them all. Depending on what makes you tick you’ll have a favourite card which suits your needs. So, maybe it makes sense to declare one winner per use case, and then maybe, an overall winner which in average will fit most use cases without many constraints, or that wins most individual benchmarks. As for the use cases, we’ll detail them in an upcoming post.

However, feel free to take you own conclusions for you use case based on the benchmarks that are relevant.

Best microSD card for Smartphones and compact cameras

If your goal is to extend your smartphone’s storage or to use it as the main storage for your compact camera, then your best choice is hand’s down Netac. It has a decent read performance matched with the best storage/price ratio, which are the only two things that matter. No matter what any electronic store tech advisor tells you, unless you have a laptop equipped with UHS-II SD card adapter, you won’t get a better deal with any other branded product. Nor will you be able to take more photos, nor transfer them faster to your laptop. And then, it’s unbeatable on the capacity to price ratio.

Best microSD card for High End cameras

High end cameras, both DSLR or mirrorless are a completely different kind of beast.There will be photos you’ll actually not be able to take if you don’t get the right SD card. Having said this, none of those microSD cards are the best choice for a high end camera. However, if you’re a price conscious consumer some of those cards will suit most needs. In this case, either the Samsung or Transcend cards will give you the best results, but you need to consider the tradeoffs. Samsung will give the absolute best write performance, cheap and around 5% better than Transcend, but transcend offers almost double the read performance and more user capacity, albeit for a higher price. However, either cards will give you the best results as far as low end microSD cards are concerned.

Best microSD card for Storage Extension

Laptop storage expansion is a very tough use case, which includes having a balance between read and write performance, plus the actual user available capacity. Here, on the low end microSD cards, we have one single winner: Transcend. Unbeatable capacity and read performance and fast write performance makes this card a solid proposition. It’s not the cheapest you’ll find but will ofter decent performance for a decent price.

Best overal microSD card

All things considered, there is one microSD card which is almost always in the top on performance and near the bottom when it comes to price. The Samsung microSD card. Actually it shouldn’t be a surprise that the single brand and actually manufacturers flash devices.

First cards, from the bottom

Almost as important as knowing which cards to choose is to know which to avoid. There is one card which is always near the bottom. The Mixza microSD card. Low read and write performance, capacity, and a price not worth writing home about. However, it’s not alone. The Kingston card is also on our black list, due to the high price, low user capacity and lacklustre performance.

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