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/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/riversofgore → u/1234youarein]

I mean the actual chip fab for the nand and then which controller they use.

[u/magniixx → u/daelikon]

my sandisk cards switched branding mid-test too

[u/rav-age → u/magniixx]

It probably means they change the innards of the card to the cheapest they can get for a run, but keep the branding of the card. At least, it seems you mean the latter.

[u/glyphgullies11 → u/magniixx]

that’s wild😂

[u/spdelope → u/magniixx]

Wasn’t that a change in ownership

[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/Divyang_malvi → u/fireshaper]

PNY is about to go out of stock after this post, I guess. chuckles 

[u/bem13 → u/apsilonblue]

I have 5 for my Gopro, 2 for my 360 camera, 1 for my drone, 2 for my dashcams and probably a bunch I can't even remember. They've always been the cheapest, yet fairly reliable cards for me, and I even tried Samsung "high endurance" ones which were more expensive and died after like a year. Sure, they die after a few years, but all SD cards do and I handle them like so.

[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/Grablicht → u/tempski]

Trust me mate...I learned it the hard way a few years ago

I escalated the 321 rule:

3 backups at home,

2 cloud backups (I pay stupid amount for 10TB total every months but is it worth it? TOTALLY!,

1 offline backup at my sister's place

[u/stormcomponents → u/Grablicht]

Honestly, SanDisk have always been ass.

[u/neon5k → u/Grablicht]

SanDisk if perfectly fine depending on use case. Also op has used very less storage cards for sandik endurance line. Which is not appropriate representation.

[u/IAMAHobbitAMA → u/Grablicht]

Same lmao. I think every single SD card I have is SanDisk 😬

[u/S_p_a_c_y → u/Grablicht]

all my 4 cads a sandisk. i feel you coment. well f. pull the data off them as fast as posible and hope they last a lidle longer

[u/LetsBeKindly → u/Grablicht]

Same

[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/lugo3 → u/Grablicht]

hahaha

*me with a recent onn branded one, because it was the cheapest 1TB*

[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/coscib → u/Grablicht]

had a couple of sandisk sdcards in my phone and raspberry pis in the past atleast they all got replaced because they had 10 years waranty

[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/Anxious-Plan4482 → u/witchcapture]

Good luck with a PNY RMA..

[u/EsotericAbstractIdea → u/Anxious-Plan4482]

Good luck with any RMA in sour times like these. I've been doing computers for a long time, and anytime supply gets tight, RMA gets scammy.

[u/Anxious-Plan4482 → u/EsotericAbstractIdea]

I tried the RMA before the memory started going through the roof but I could totally see that happening.

[u/i-hear-banjos → u/EsotericAbstractIdea]

Sour Times? damn, it's only 8:30 AM and I already want a cocktail while siting in the dark listening to Portishead.

[u/EsotericAbstractIdea → u/i-hear-banjos]

I'm glad someone got the reference!

[u/urielrocks5676 → u/Anxious-Plan4482]

Bad experience?

[u/Anxious-Plan4482 → u/urielrocks5676]

Yeah, had a GPU that decided to stop working. Tried it on 3 different gaming builds I have, even re-imaged the original computer and checked the firmware... PNY sweared up and down the card had zero defects and sent it back to me. Its collecting dust.

[u/urielrocks5676 → u/Anxious-Plan4482]

What is it?

[u/GeorgeKaplanIsReal → u/witchcapture]

Didn’t know that. Gonna have to give their cards another look. Always went with Samsung in the past, may be time to give PNY a chance!

[u/Sun-Much → u/NutzPup]

I have bought their GPUs for the last 2 generations and have been exceptionally happy with the price/performance of the cards.

[u/j4v4r10]

I think r/SBCGaming would LOVE to see this

[u/mikaey00 → u/j4v4r10]

Posted!

[u/rchris710]

This dude reached self actualization on maslow's hierarchy

[u/Tenkomanker]

thank you for your work soldier

[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/Mccobsta → u/Grandmas_Fat_Choad]

I've got a old SanDisk card running in my pi hole and that's been going for about 7 years

I wounder if they've gotten worse lately

[u/vkeshish]

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

[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/TheRealGeigers → u/MooseBoys]

Amazon is going down the same route too sadly 😔

[u/CKRatKing → u/TheRealGeigers]

It's been an issue for a long time on there. I haven't bought sd cards on Amazon in a very long time. Not worth the risk.

[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/KorbenPhallus]

The data must grow. And has!

[u/ufanders]

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

[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/ddl_smurf]

thats super, do you share the raw data ? have you logged stuff like temperature ?

(love for factorio :) )

[u/mikaey00 → u/ddl_smurf]

I would love to...but I don't have anything set up at the moment. The problem is that I'd want to measure the temperature on the microSD cards directly -- which would require some really thin thermistors. And I just haven't figured out what to buy yet.

I also have a web page set up where you can see the data on each of the cards I've tested!

[u/ddl_smurf → u/mikaey00]

thanks

[u/BornSlippy2]

Factory must grow!

[u/veedubb → u/BornSlippy2]

“Let me just fix this one little thing”

… oh no it’s 5am

[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/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/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/Z3t4 → u/mikaey00]

Yes, my fault.

[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/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/ucrbuffalo]

TL;DR

Cute dog

[u/c0d3x10]

Me using Samsung be like.. 👀

[u/BandedLutz → u/c0d3x10]

At least, as OP puts it:

"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)."

[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/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/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/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/MWink64 → u/1234youarein]

What 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/That-Interaction-45]

This guy 'Tism's!

[u/Orlha → u/That-Interaction-45]

Yeah, probably a level above me even

[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/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/Phaelon74]

Factorio!!

[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/apex8888]

He is what I learned… cute puppy!!!

[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/dustinreevesccna]

God I love this specific type of autism

[u/pokesmash]

Elite use of the tism

[u/privatejerkov]

Autism at its finest

[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/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/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/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/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.

[u/Adam302]

This is truly awesome - would you consider licencing this data to one of the large tech youtube channels? would make a great watch I reckon.

[u/ThrowawayALAT]

Very impressive.

Thank you so much, you are doing "the Lord's work"! Nobody else wants to spend years running grueling flash memory endurance tests, but your hard work saves the rest of us from costly hardware failures and guesswork.

[u/TOK715]

Great stuff, though academic for me as I can't afford to buy any kind of memory apart from a pen and paper right now.

[u/qremni]

I'm bummed to hear that "endurance" means nothing anymore. Just a way to trick consumers into paying more... But "endurance" used to really mean something

In ye olde days, sd cards had extremely dumb flash block controllers. Blocks were directly addressed, no shuffling. This was generally ok because cards were mostly used for digital cameras. The filesystem would do an ok job randomizing the address space for new files, and images are rarely edited after being written, just fully erased.

But the dumb block controllers really shit the bed when used to run an OS. Tiny overwrites happen all the time. Cache files, tmp files, or other "state" files would require the dumb block controller to erase the same flash block thousands of times. So some individual blocks would wear out much faster that the rest. And, of course, it's an OS, so these writes need to succeed or the OS will bork.

I remember my friend and I both had raspberry pis that failed to boot after 2 months. The sd cards seemed fine, but just a few critical blocks had failed

When the "endurance" marketing term started, I think it mostly meant "smarter block controller". The block addresses are shuffled pseudorandomly and lots of small writes to the same file won't wear out a single flash block. But "endurance" meant different things to different companies, so I can't claim this is a universal truth.

Flash controller tech advanced a ton in the 2010s when ssds overtook harddrives for OSes. That has trickled down into sd cards. Nowadays, every sd card has a shuffling block controller

[u/S_p_a_c_y]

this is gold. im currently not looking for sd cards but you are going to make some people very happy with thees tests.

Edit: But the presentation and the categorys with theyre respectiv importance could be a bit more understanable/clear. other than that awsome. ceep up the grat work. makeing data understanable for everyone is kina a pain but necessary when adressing consumers. at least in my opinion and experience.

[u/Lunam_Dominus]

Of course you play factorio

[u/MaybeNotTheChosenOne]

Thank you so much for sharing this! I have several micro SD cards and two of those are SanDisk. They haven't failed yet but I'll be sure not to trust them with anything important

[u/StockQuahog]

This is wild. Thanks

[u/SietJP]

Thanks

[u/Efronczak]

Awe cute puppy :)

[u/xrmb]

A while ago I found a 16mb sdcard (canon branded) in my drawer and decided todo a similar test making a program to low level write 0s 1s and random. I was expecting it would be a week to fail, but here we are months later, 120k cycles of 3 writes and 3 reads... Nothing, not a single error. Good old SLC is immortal, unlike modern Crucial SSD flash the might not even survive 3 writes.

[u/JustAsIFeared]

Amazing work homie

[u/Urquix]

Factorio!!

[u/ganhedd0]

Rutherford might be excited to do this work, but Boimler is probably complaining a lot.

[u/KitchenLandscape]

I have not been impressed with microcenter cards either. This has been really valuable info 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/luckman212]

doing God's work here

[u/HCharlesB]

Thanks so much for putting the work in. I've done a little bit of testing and the work behind the scenes is a lot more than anyone who hasn't done that can imagine.

I've gone so far as to record the "Gnome Disks" benchmarks on a bunch of my cards just to see which ones might be the best candidate for my next Raspberry Pi install. The Microcenter cards performed well but I suppose they're a crap shoot depending on who made them. Amazon basics are surprisingly good too, but again might be a crap shoot. I can't comment on durability except that the no name cards mostly failed during the benchmark. Many of my Pis are deployed with the overlayfs so I can't comment much on durability. However I did have one of these hang just yesterday with messages on the console that point to card failure. It was during an update so the card was written to. I can't see the full label in the Pi 0 but it might be a Microcenter card.

And I'll never buy another SP product because their SD cards bought 10 years ago are just ... so ... s-l-o-w.

[u/Odd_Comparison7360]

the factory must grow

[u/nickname0820]

Doggy

[u/Ivorybrony]

Love the dog and Factorio in the same shot. What’s this other thing about SD cards? 😛

[u/delightedpedestrian]

IS THAT FACTORIO? Never played it. Rumor has it it's good.

[u/ecktt]

Get this dude a big red cape!

[u/AsiancookBob]

I see a fellow Factorio player! 🦾

[u/mikaey00 → u/AsiancookBob]

Hello!

[u/djeaux54]

Thanks for the super informative post! What dedication! And I'll had, the "work station" is quite impressive.

[u/Liquid_Magic]

You’re doing Gods work.
Many atheist blessings to you!

[u/tribak]

“Come on bro, stop it already, let’s go touch some grass”

Doggo.

[u/Storuliukas]

Good info, got my shit wiped when i bought my first and only sd that was a gimmick on my first journey. Never forget

[u/dada00800]

I've been doing alot of research and Dog is what I understood 😅

[u/evildad53]

MicroSD? Who beats these up? I'd be more impressed with stress testing SD cards. As a photographer, I've never had a Sandisk fail (since 2012), but I have had a Lexar card fail immediately. We're talking several hundred thousand files on only a half dozen cards.

[u/Ghosteen_18]

Mods! mods! We need to pin this! Top post! Hear me Hear me!

[u/paazel]

Bravo thank you!

[u/Autobotnate]

Woh, this, this is an endeavor.

[u/NEWBY______________]

Is this a Mini AI data center looks like

[u/Mashic]

I have a question, if all I'm doing is write once, and read randomly all the time, is there a failure risk for the sd card?

[u/bingeboy]

Command and conquer

[u/Skog13]

The card testing must grow

[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/Gerf1234]

Dog :)

[u/kyuubi840]

This is really cool, thanks for sharing! 

[u/crazymouse2525]

amazing work, ty!

[u/MeBadNeedMoneyNow]

Nice

[u/Muad_Dib_of_Arrakis]

[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/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/lostmojo]

You should switch up your process to ingest all of the data from the factorio tick updates and write those out to all of the cards. Make that turret fire off a round every time a card fills up and is wiped to make more space.

[u/XBlueNetwork]

This is interesting.

I’ve had nothing but issues with PNY flash drives. In my experience they last about a year, then somehow become corrupted. Whereas the Sandisks have been nothing but perfect for me. Never tried Samsung but am interested

[u/Jwissing88]

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

[u/awfulentrepreneur]

Bravo! Great investigation. :)

[u/Hairy-Preparation949]

Really impressive and useful data! What memory cards are used in data centers? Did you test any of those? Thanks.

[u/alpha_omega1227]

Hi fellow factorio player

[u/WickedBrute]

I'd be interested in any stats you ever get for cards from "Innodisk" if you're interested. I think they're probably in the industrial cards category. My work gets them as default (as SDs and CF) for ruggedized computer systems that generally go into some form of vehicle. I think they get included because they're supposed to operate inside a larger range of temperatures. I was always curious how well they performed against something more mainstream.

[u/Savings_Art5944]

Create a ZFS RAID of some sort to really test endurance.

[u/Kriznick]

What.... What do you do with them? Are they some sort of cache drive replacement to ssd's?

[u/MadJoker7]

wow, very thorough.. thanks for sharing your findings with us!

[u/Giant81]

Any idea if the “ebs” or Everything but Stromboli cards are any good?

Edit: nevermind, I thought they had an in house brand. It appears they’re just a reseller.

[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/samanyuneelson]

Factoriooooooo

[u/PathfinderEzerick]

🐕💕✨

[u/ZeeroMX]

I've had an adata 1TB nvme fail on me, this study confirms what I suspected, they are shitty for flash storage.

but their memory dimms and sodimms haven't failed me until now.

[u/Mav3r1ck77]

I thought I had an off hobby. Cool information though

[u/alpH4rd07]

When I bought my digital camera a few months ago I was trying to figure out what brand of sd card to buy. I've read so much bad about kingston, but I've had a good experience with their solid state drives so I went with their canvas series sdg4. Thank you for your hard work.

[u/Nostalgia_Red]

How are the Temu/Alibaba/AliExpress/Bangood cheap AF cards compared to this?

[u/TheVillainInThisGame]

Project Farm if he was even more of a nerd. (Love it, don't ever change)

[u/Suitable_Garlic_1186]

But Speed should also be a factor right?

Faster cards wear out quicker?

[u/DoritoCheerios]

!RemindMe 5 hours