Silicon Power is a name that I wasn’t very familiar with going into this project. However, they’re a member of the SD Card Association, and they seem to have their own manufacturer ID assigned to them, so I’ve decided to lump them in with the “name brand” cards.
I purchased these after the disappointing endurance test results on the SP Elites — I wanted to see if the issue was more to do with 3D NAND in general, or if it was more to do with SP as a brand — so I picked up some (what turned out to be) SP Superior’s and SP Superior Pro’s.
In terms of performance, this card does perform better than the SP Elite — about 40% better in sequential write speeds and about 80% better in random read speeds. This makes it good, but not great — its random read speeds put it at about the 68th percentile (as of the time of this writing). Its overall performance, however, was only about average.
These cards carry the U3, V30, and A2 marks. Two of the three samples scored just barely above the threshold required for the U3 and V30 marks; however, the average of all three wasn’t high enough to qualify for either one. On top of that, none of the three cards scored high enough to qualify for the A2 mark. I’ll throw in my standard disclaimer here: my performance testing methods don’t align with those prescribed by the SD specification; it’s possible that these cards would have qualified had they been tested under proper conditions.
On the endurance testing front:
- Sample #1 was doing just fine until it got to round 2,031, when it began experiencing a couple of I/O errors. After just the second reset attempt, it stopped responding to commands altogether.
- Sample #2 was also doing just fine until it got to round 2,192, when it suddenly stopped responding to commands altogether.
- Sample #3 has not yet reached the 2,000 read/write cycle mark. It is currently expected to get there sometime in October 2025.
July 13, 2025 (current number of read/write cycles updates automatically every hour)