Bencmarks
Benchmarks such as the open source KDiskMark utility help provide an insight into the performance of the direct-attached storage device. The results translate to the instantaneous performance numbers that consumers can expect for specific workloads, but make no reference to changes in behaviour when the unit is subject to long-term conditioning and/or thermal throttling.
KDiskMark uses four different access traces for reads and writes over a configurable region size. Two of the traces are sequential accesses, while two are 4K random accesses.
I’ve reproduced the results with sequential reads and writes.
I obtained similar results testing the microSD card under both Linux and Windows (using CrystalDiskMark).
Summary
If you are looking for an extremely fast and large capacity microSD card, the TEAMGROUP ULTRA Micro SDXC A2 V30 1TB gets my firm recommendation. It offers very fast large sequential read and writes. The TEAMGROUP microSD card is just the ticket if you are a keen photographer or a video enthusiasts who generates large media files and wants to download them quickly.
While random reads and writes are very low in comparison to sequential reads and writes, they are still better than other cards I’ve tested. That’s useful if you’re planning to boot a single-board computer from a microSD card given that’s the only convenient option for some boards.
I couldn’t reproduce the advertised 200 MB/s reads but I get fairly close with TEAMGROUP’s own readers. Like other fast cards from other manufactures you need to pair the card with one of TEAMGROUP’s own readers to get optimum results.
With other manufacturers’ memory card readers, performance will be significantly lower. For example, the UHS-I card reader I used has a maximum read/write speed of 170 MB/s, yet it only delivered around half that speed. This demonstrates the importance of using a TEAMGROUP card reader. Fortunately, their Ultra CR I MicroSD memory card reader is amazingly good value at $7.99.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – Benchmarks and Summary