Samsung is a pretty well known name in the electronics industry, and flash memory is no exception — they’re one of the few companies that owns and operates their own silicon foundries.
One thing of consequence that I’ll note: of the brands I’ve evaluated so far, Samsung is the name brand whose flash was consistently neither fake nor skimpy. It seems that if you buy a 32GB Samsung card, you get at least 32GB of space. Many of the other name brands — including Kingston, Kioxia, Lexar, and SanDisk — provided cards that were all skimpy, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that Samsung’s cards were not.
On the performance testing front: this card’s strength was definitely random read speeds — sample #1 scored in the top 1% of cards for random read speeds — but other scores were just…average.
These cards bear the U1 and V10 marks. (The package also shows the Class 10 mark; however, this mark does not appear on the cards themselves.) Performance was good enough, across all three samples, to qualify for all of these marks.
On the endurance testing front:
- Sample #1 has survived 17,203 read/write cycles so far. It experienced data verification failures earlier on, but I was able to chalk those errors up to issues with my code. The first errors that I wasn’t able to attribute to code issues happened during round 3,688.
- Sample #2 has survived 6,918 read/write cycles so far and has not yet experienced any errors.
- Sample #3 has survived 11,472 read/write cycles so far and has not yet experienced any errors.
Since this card is marketed as a high endurance card, we have to ask the question: just how long should this card last? If we look at Samsung’s product page for this card, they have a footnote where they list the rated endurance 17,520 hours of Full HD video at 26Mb/sec, which translates to about 205TBW, or 6,397 read/write cycles. This is a pretty strong offering, considering that the only other “high endurance” cards in my collection that make specific claims to their longevity (as of the time of this writing) are the SanDisk High Endurance and the SanDisk MAX ENDURANCE — and between them, they only offer a maximum rating of about 5,500 read/write cycles.
Overall? This is not a bad card. It suffers in sequential write performance — and sequential read and random write speeds could stand to be better — but it did very well in random read performance, which would make it suitable to something like a gaming console or a Raspberry Pi. I also like that Samsung provides you with at least 32GB of space. As far as endurance, it’s too early to make any judgment calls — results are looking good so far, but sample #2 still needs more time in endurance testing before I can make a decision on it.
June 23, 2025 (current number of read/write cycles is updated automatically every hour)