Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Posted

vp3VtsdrjVTPcfxnmjaniC-970-80.jpg.webp

 

Unlike most other modern computing devices, Raspberry Pis have no internal storage, relying instead on removable microSD cards as their primary boot drives. While it’s true that you can boot a Raspberry Pi 4 off of an USB SSD or Flash Drive, most of the time, it’s easier, more affordable and an overall better idea to stick with a microSD card.

But which microSD card should you buy for your Raspberry Pi? To help find the answer, we tested ten different 32GB cards on a Raspberry Pi 4, a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and a Raspberry Pi Zero W to see which offers the best performance for the money. 

We chose the 32GB capacity because it offers more than enough room for most use cases while not being appreciably more expensive than 16 or 8GB cards. Raspberry Pi OS can run on a card that’s as small as 8GB (see how to set up a Raspberry Pi), but that leaves you very little extra space. With every update and release slowly using more and more of your card, 8GB will soon become too small for a typical setup. Even if you are running a game emulation system with lots of ROMs, you are unlikely to exceed 32GB (though some have). 
We’re honestly shocked that the best performing Raspberry Pi microSD card in our roundup is also the cheapest one and comes from a lesser-known brand. It’s also rated UHS Speed 1 rather than 3, although these ratings are largely meaningless (at least for Pi owners).  In fact, we were so surprised at this card's performance that we tested a second unit to make sure the first one wasn’t a fluke. 

Tom's Hardware is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more
Home Best-picks
Best microSD Cards for Raspberry Pi
By Avram Piltch 21 hours ago

Improve your Pi performance with the right microSD card
Best Raspberry Pi microSD cards
Unlike most other modern computing devices, Raspberry Pis have no internal storage, relying instead on removable microSD cards as their primary boot drives. While it’s true that you can boot a Raspberry Pi 4 off of an USB SSD or Flash Drive, most of the time, it’s easier, more affordable and an overall better idea to stick with a microSD card.

But which microSD card should you buy for your Raspberry Pi? To help find the answer, we tested ten different 32GB cards on a Raspberry Pi 4, a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and a Raspberry Pi Zero W to see which offers the best performance for the money. 

We chose the 32GB capacity because it offers more than enough room for most use cases while not being appreciably more expensive than 16 or 8GB cards. Raspberry Pi OS can run on a card that’s as small as 8GB (see how to set up a Raspberry Pi), but that leaves you very little extra space. With every update and release slowly using more and more of your card, 8GB will soon become too small for a typical setup. Even if you are running a game emulation system with lots of ROMs, you are unlikely to exceed 32GB (though some have). 

The Best microSD Cards for Raspberry Pi 
Silicon Power 3D NAND

(Image credit: Silicon Power)
1. Silicon Power 3D NAND
Best Overall

Capacity: 32GB | UHS Speed Class: 1 | Speed Class: 10

$6.99
VIEW AT AMAZON
Strongest Raspberry Pi 4 performanceGood performance overallLow priceWhite surface for labelingSlow boot timesLesser-known brand
We’re honestly shocked that the best performing Raspberry Pi microSD card in our roundup is also the cheapest one and comes from a lesser-known brand. It’s also rated UHS Speed 1 rather than 3, although these ratings are largely meaningless (at least for Pi owners).  In fact, we were so surprised at this card's performance that we tested a second unit to make sure the first one wasn’t a fluke. 

RECOMMENDED VIDEOS FOR YOU...

vidéo en coursThe Tom's Hardware Show (May 28): Raspberry Pi 8GB, Intel Code Names, New VR
The Tom's Hardware Show (May 21, 2020): Comet...
22/05/20The Tom's Hardware Show (May 21, 2020): Comet Lake-S Tested, Gaming Chairs, Pi-PoweredRadio
The Tom's Hardware Show 9/24: Best Streaming...
18/09/20The Tom's Hardware Show 9/24: Best Streaming Platforms, RTX 3090 Tested
The Tom's Hardware Show 9/17: Laptop Mag Editor...
14/09/20The Tom's Hardware Show 9/17: Laptop Mag Editor-in-Chief Sherri Smith Visits, RTX 3080 AIB Cards
The Tom's Hardware Show (Jun 4): Intel's New Core...
05/06/20The Tom's Hardware Show (Jun 4): Intel's New Core i5, Picking the Right Switch, Top Pi Projects
The Tom's Hardware Show: AMD vs Intel,...
08/05/20The Tom's Hardware Show: AMD vs Intel, Arrowless Keyboards, Pi Projects
For a price of just $6.99 (£5.99) at publishing time, the Silicon Power 3D NAND achieved the highest speeds on the Raspberry Pi 4 in almost all the IOzone tests, especially with 4K random writes. It also, by a hair, loaded all of our apps fastest on the Pi 4, though its boot time was second slowest. The Silicon Power NAND 3D card also performed well on Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and Pi Zero W, though it didn’t lead in as many categories.  

In addition to its performance, the card has one huge advantage over most of its competitors: the ability to physically write on it. Because the surface is partially white, you can scribble on it with a Sharpie marker. That helps immensely when you have multiple cards in a drawer and don’t know which is which.

Selling for a modest $8.51 (£7.29) at publication time, the Samsung Evo Plus offers solid performance from a highly-trusted brand at a very reasonable price. Samsung backs the Evo Plus with a 10 year warranty and claims that the card can survive X-rays, magnetic radiation and even 72 hours in seawater. Most of us probably aren’t worried about submerging a card in water, but it’s nice to know that if you waterproof your Raspberry Pi, the card will be fine too.

In our tests on the Raspberry Pi 4, the Samsung Evo Plus offered consistently strong application opens, coming within 0.2 to 0.3 seconds of the leader. It also booted in a speedy 24.7 seconds, only 0.7 seconds slower than the Kingston Canvas React. The card had solid transfer rates in IOzone, though its 4K random writes were a little disappointing (rates were much higher in the Raspberry Pi Diagnostic test). On the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, the Evo Plus got really good application open times and slightly better 4K writes.

Other Raspberry Pi microSD Cards We Tested 
Not every product deserves to be listed as one of the best Raspberry Pi microSD cards. Here are some other cards we tested and our brief take on each. 

SanDisk Extreme: This card really was not bad, offering solid all-around performance for, at press time, a little more than $10 or £10. 
PNY Performance Turbo: The most expensive card we tested at $14.90 (UK price N/A), this card did not live up to its name or its price tag. The Raspberry Pi Diagnostic tool gave the Performance Turbo a failing grade, thanks to an awful 4K random write speed of 0.8 MBps. Its sequential numbers were also subpar. 
Lexar 633x: The second least expensive card we tested, the Lexar 633x isn’t all bad. Its app open and boot times were good, but its 4K random write speed and its sequential write speed were poor enough for it to flunk the Raspberry Pi Diagnostic test. 
Silicon Power Elite: This card costs a few dollars more than the Silicon Power 3D NAND and yet it performs so much worse. It was the slowest card to boot by far, taking more than twice as long as the fastest booting card on both the Pi 4 and Pi 3 B+, the Kingston Canvas React. It had the slowest app open times and also failed the Raspberry Pi Diagnostic Test. 
Fatty Dove: You wouldn’t expect much of a no-name brand like Fatty Dove so you won’t be disappointed. This card was rated UHS 3, proving how meaningless these speed numbers are. It failed the Raspberry Pi Diagnostic test, thanks to really poor 4K random writes and overall sequential writes.  
MicroSD Speed Ratings and Types: What Do They Mean? 
Advertisement

When you’re shopping for a microSD card, whether it’s for Raspberry Pi, a phone, a camera or a Nintendo Switch, you’ll see as many as four different types of speed ratings listed, the first three of which measure minimum sequential write speed in MBps. The SD Association provides a detailed explanation by to keep it simple, here’s a brief list: 

Speed Class: The oldest class system appears with a circle around the number. The highest class, class 10, is a mere 10 MBps so any new card will meet this standard. 
UHS Speed Class: This is the most common spec and appears as either a 1 or a 3 inside of a U symbol. The 1 promises 10 MBps and the 3 offers 30 MBps. However, in practice, we’ve tested cards rated as UHS 1 that were just as fast as 3s. 
Video Speed Class: This is shown as a V with a number after it and is commonly shown as V30 (30 MBps), V60 (60 MBps) or V90 (90 MBps). 
Application Speed Class: This is a newish metric that measures IOPS rather than sequential throughput. Cards can be rated either A1 (1,500 IOPS random read / 500 IOPS random write) or A2 (4,000 IOPS random read / 2,000 IOPS random write). Few of the cards we tested were rated for A1 (and none for A2) as 32GB cards don’t tend to have this classification. However, several users in the Pi community report that the A2 cards make no difference in Pi performance. Jeff Greeling has a comprehensive article comparing A2 and A1 microSD card performance on Raspberry Pi where he finds zero benefit. 
Almost all cards are marked with the UHS rating or 1 or 3, fewer have the Video Speed and only a few high-end cards are marked with the Application Speed. In addition to labeling their cards with some of these classes, vendors will offer their own estimates that are much more generous. For example, Samsung claims that its Pro Endurance card can get up to 100 MBps reads and 30 MBps writes, even though it is only labeled as UHS class 1 (10 Mbps). In practice, these classes meant nothing, because cards with UHS class 1 often outperformed those with class 3.

You’ll also see that some cards are listed as microSDHC while others are specked as microSDXC. These standards mean nothing for performance and only tell you something about the capacity that you already know from the number of GB. microSDHC (high capacity) cards are those that go up to 32GB and microSDXC cards support higher capacities (but could also be 32GB). Either type works fine in a Raspberry Pi.

How We Tested Raspberry Pi microSD Cards 
We used a combination of synthetic and timed tests to measure microSD card performance on Raspberry Pi. Because it has the highest possible transfer speeds, we ran the full suite of tests on the Raspberry Pi 4, including FIO (Flexible Input / Output tester), which usually took more than five hours to complete. On the Pi 3 B+, we ran just IOZone and the application and boot time tests and, on the Pi Zero W, which is slow to open every app, we used IOZone alone. 

IOZone Results on Raspberry Pi microSD Cards 
IOzone is a po[CENSORED]r Linux storage benchmark that measures read and write speeds. We owe a huge hat tip to Jeff Geerling whose excellent article on microSD card benchmarks inspired us to use IOzone in our testing.  We configured it to test both random and sequential reads of 4K and 1,024K blocks with a total file size of 100MB. We also enabled the direct I/O option that bypasses the operating system’s cache so we’re getting a better idea of the card’s performance on its own.


When we tested on the Raspberry Pi 4, the Silicon Power 3D NAND card, which coincidentally is listed as UHS Speed 1,  comes out on top in the all-important 4K random write, 4K sequential write, 4K sequential read, 1,024K random read and 1,024K sequential read tests. The SanDisk Extreme Pro, Samsung Pro Endurance and Kingston Canvas React all put in strong showings as well. The Silicon Power Elite, while more expensive than the company’s 3D NAND did very poorly as did the Lexar 633x, the PNY Performance Turbo  and the Fatty Dove 32GB card.
 

  • I love it 1
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.