Samsung SD cards?

[Anton Largiader]

Time for a few new cards. I've stuck to Sandisk Extreme Pros in the past, but when I walked through Best Buy they only had 32s and something massive like a terabyte, while I was looking for maybe 64s or 128s. Old/small sizes, I know, 256 would have been fine as well. But they did have some Samsung cards in other sizes. I didn't need the cards badly enough to buy them on the spot, but I wondered if they had a good reputation or not, Has anyone here used them?

 

[Mike_d]

I use their microSD cards in security cameras. No failures so far after several years. Samsung is one of the biggest flash memory makers in the world and their SSDs are excellent, so I'm sure their SD cards are good too as long as the speeds are what you want.

 

[Kuma5]

I've been curious to try them as well for SDXC. I have them in the micro SDXC variants for electronic devices which I look to for that size. The last batch of micro SDXC cards were the Kingston Canvas versions at 256G. Have not had to RMA a micro SDXC yet. The Sandisk in the dash cam is nearing the MTBF edge so I expect a failure at some point. Well out of warranty as well.

For the regular SDXC Sandisk. I've RMA'd more than a handful and I know I can count on the process being painless. Returned a 4G CF Extreme card and they did not have the 4G sizes anymore. I said I'd pay for the next size and they said effectively we'll upgrade and sent a 32G Extreme. I was more than happy. That level of service has kept me loyal and will continue with them.

 

[Anton Largiader]

I ended up getting two Sandisks. Our local shop (unfortunately vintage-only) had some 300mb/s cards on the rack so I bought two 64GB ones. The price was competitive, but wow they are a lot more expensive than the slower cards.

Tim Mayo over at RFShooters has a lot of test info about card performance in various Canon models and for the R3 especially it's worth having a fast card. I have a Delkin Black CFexpress card in it, which - as luck would have it - he found to be among the fastest. Card 2 is for writing JPEGs to but I see no reason why I shouldn't have a fast card there in case I end up writing RAWs to it for some reason. The camera writes well over 200 mb/s to it if the card can keep up. He found that it writes 214 to this 300 card, which is more than enough for 30 fps JPEG bursts.

The R7 (which I use much less) had a slow 170 mb/s card in it. Now, the camera only writes at something like 185 mb/s but he found that it wrote faster to fast cards than to slow cards, even if it didn't reach the card's rating. For instance it only wrote 74 mb/s to the 170 mb/s UHS-1 card, while it wrote 166 to the 300 UHS-2 card. I will put the new card in as #1 (RAWs) and leave the slower one as #2 for JPEGs.

 

[Kuma5]

Good choice!

The other brand I was curious about back when was Lexar. Reading Reddit of RMA processing from the various brands is interesting which influences in some part buying of tech items.

 

[Anton Largiader]

There are all sorts of reviews and tests out there but the same brands seem to always rise to the surface. Lexar is one of them. Kingston is another. Delkin is a new name to me, but it seems to be very credible. And, of course, Sandisk although it is probably the most counterfeited card out there.

 

[Kuma5]

My local shop sold Delkiin memory products which seemed to do ok, they sold far more Sandisk. The counterfeit issue is concerning for sure especially the high performance $ ones.