29th June 2025 6th July 2025 By Bzzz In storage benchmarkcomparisonmicrosdpro plussamsungsd cardsdxc

MicroSD speed comparison addition – Samsung Pro Plus 512GG MB-MD512SA/EU (WHL #96F1)

Small addition to the pool of WHL #96 and WHL #100 MicroSD card tests – a new 512GB whopper, called the Samsung Pro Plus.

Unlike with the last purchase of a new largest-ever card for me, the 256GB Samsung EVO Plus, this time I’m not running out of space on the largest disk (used for backups). Instead, it’s more down the usage chain for older ones. Specifically, in my camera – ever since I started filming my runs on Tesla Beach Buggy racing, I’ve had the problem of full memory cards at the end of the day, or worse – during the day. More than once have I either stopped filming entirely or tried moving data over to a laptop, and both are terrible options. The camera records at 21-22 Megabit/s, meaning one GB lasts for a bit over six minutes, or the entire card holds six hours (and a bit) of footage. That’s entirely doable on a single day of in-car gaming.

So I got a 512GB disk for 40.90€ with shipping (Amazon…), did some benchmarks and cloned over the 256GB backup card. That one is not handed down to the current owner of the 128GB disk, the Raspberry Pi4, but instead is directly transferred to the camera. The 128GB is also a Pro Plus and roughly equal (if not better) in performance to the 256GB Evo+, so it’ll stay that way. So the 64GB device gets the 256GB card instead – quadrupling video storage to a full day of video, maybe even 25 hours. That should never leave me stranded if I have the chance to move data to a computer overnight.

So here are the old top contenders plus the Tomlov card (so that I don’t have to mention this side adventure in future updates anymore), plus the new 512GB Pro Plus:

After all that stagnant 2MB/s-ish writes on a lot of cards before, this one truly impresses me: Sure, it was advertised as up to™ 180MB/s read, 130MB/s write (which it isn’t all that far off), and that write performance is like 4-5x compared to the old champions. But the true performance kicker is the 3x random read improvement to now over 6MB/s or 1500 IO/s.
Funnily enough, it still misses the advertised A2 performance mark that requires, aside from some very low sequential numbers, 4000 IO/s in 4k random reads, as well as 2000 IO/s in 4k random writes. That’s 16MB/s and 8MB/s in old money – and those 10 and 6 MB/s are still below that, like all the cards that came before. But we’re slowly getting there!

Maybe the 1TB card will finally deliver the advertised A2 figures – but I don’t see myself buying a (true, non-Aliexpress) terabyte memory card anytime soon…