Samsung Pro Plus 1TB microSDXC Performance
Despite its small physical size, this drive stores a lot.
As a quick capacity check, we can see our exFAT formatted microSDXC card is 954GB.
Like the 1.5TB Ultra drive, we tried it in the Insta360 X4 an 8K 360 degree camera.
Unlike the 1.5TB SanDisk Ultra drive, this Samsung 1TB V30 drive does not give us a warning at 8K 30fps. Instead, the camera reports it is ready to go with just under 13.75 hours of recording capacity.
Copying data from an internal SSD to the card, we got a maximum of 111MB/s but the copies would hit valleys of 77MB/s.
Just for some context, here is the SanDisk Ultra 1.5TB card, and you will immediately see the difference in the speed.
Likewise, here is the PNY 1.5TB drive. It was not as fast as Samsung’s at the top-end, but the PNY was more consistent.
On the return trip, copying the 8K video back to the SSD (the folder was called SanDisk 1.5TB ha!) The speed was very consistent and fast at about the same as the PNY. It was not 180MB/s.
The bigger use for this is perhaps as a storage device for smaller systems like the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano or Raspberry Pi where space is at a premium. The A2 rating tells us this is designed to run applications.
This is not fast enough for faster applications that need SSDs, nor even fast 8K cameras that require at least V90 cards. Still it is hard to argue with the performance.
Final Words
This card costs about the same $99 as the SanDisk 1.5TB Ultra V10 A1 card. You get better performance, but only 1TB versus 1.5TB. To me, the real pressure comes from the PNY 1.5TB PRO Elite Prime. For $10 more, you get comparable performance, but 50% more capacity. 1.5TB or even 1TB on low-cost NAND like this is a big blast radius for a small device. Still, having 50% more capacity for $10 is a trade-off many will take.
If you are a Samsung fan, then perhaps this is the best option we have looked at so far. If you are more brand agnostic, then other options are on the table. We were planning to focus more on cards with greater than 1TB of capacity, but Samsung is a big player and we wanted to cover their offerings.
Where to Buy
We purchased our 1TB card on Amazon. Here is the affiliate link.
Samsung has a definite advantage over PNY: distribution. The PNY is not available on UK Amazon and they don’t even ship to the UK from their US Amazon store.
Vendors should start shipping a flash information file inside the new cards. We could use this info to format them in various ways that would make them more reliable.
On Linux there is F2FS and BTRFS and it would be helpful to know exactly what is going on instead of trying to guess from the exFAT factory format.
You should test SanDisk Extreme A2s, as I’ve found these to be much better than regular Ultra.
Kudos to both PNY and Samsung for making actually decent microSD cards.
Did not find a mention of how many bits per cell are used in the flash memory, nor the rated endurance in TBW. An Amazon review remarked that Samsung’s website had disclaimed the 10 year warranty if this SD card were used in a dashcam, security camera, or other write-intensive use – even though several kinds of cameras are shown on the packaging. There is also a claim of “wearout-proof”, which the fine print says applies to the gold contact fingers having 10,000 ‘swipes’ lifetime. Not a typical failure mode, just like the rest of their ‘-proof’ claims.