Gigastone is a brand that seems to show up frequently in Amazon searches — and there’s at least some evidence that they’re trying to work their way into the American retail market as well. And since they have multiple lines of cards, I thought it would be a good idea to test out more than just one. (As of this writing, I’ve also tested the Gigastone Full HD Video 32GB.)
It turns out that this one is decent in terms of performance: with the exception of sequential write speeds, all performance metrics were at least a little above average. This card bears the U3, V30, and A2 marks; unfortunately, my results seem to indicate that it doesn’t qualify for any of them. I’ll throw in my standard disclaimer here: my performance tests don’t align with the ones prescribed by the SD standard; it’s possible that these cards would have done better had they been tested under proper conditions.
On the endurance front:
- Sample #1 was doing just fine up until round 4,666, when the “permanently write protected” bit in the CSD register got flipped — exactly why it got flipped, I don’t know. However, I decided to declare the card “dead” at that point.
- Sample #2’s first error was a write failure, affecting 8 contiguous sectors, during round 949. It went for another couple thousand read/write cycles without any additional issues; but then, during round 3,684, a couple hundred thousand sectors more failed to validate correctly. It only lasted until round 3,725, when the card made itself read-only. By the time it got to that point, only about 0.4% of the card’s sectors had been flagged as “bad”.
- Sample #3 has not yet hit the 2,000 read/write cycle mark. It is currently expected to get there sometime in July 2025.
- Samples #4 and #5 are still in the package, waiting to be tested.
June 11, 2025