Hiksemi is a brand that I discovered while browsing through microSD cards on AliExpress. Upon doing further research, I discovered that they’re the storage technology division of Hikvision. (Ok, cool — we have a major manufacturer on our hands.) I discovered this particular card by sorting my search results from lowest price to highest price — at the time, they were selling their 8GB cards for just $0.01 (before shipping) — which caused these cards to bubble up directly to the top of my search results.
Performance on these cards was actually decent, with sequential write speeds being their strongest suit. Most performance metrics were above average — the exceptions being random read scores on two samples, and random write scores on one sample. These cards only bear the Class 10 mark, and performance was good enough to qualify for that mark.
On the endurance front:
- Sample #1 has survived 95,183 read/write cycles so far and has not yet experienced any errors. It has not only completed more read/write cycles than any of the other cards in my collection (so far), but it has also completed more read/write cycles without errors than any other card in my collection. As of this writing (June 2025), it’s gone almost non-stop for the last 664 days and has racked up over 680TB of data written and verified.
Sample #2’s first error was a 32-sector wide corrupted data error during round 3. However, it did not experience any further errors until round 5,918, when it began to experience a large number of missing data errors. It reached the 50% failure threshold during this round, and the test was considered complete at that point. Below is a graph showing this sample’s progression:
Sample #3’s first error was a two-sector wide data verification error that occurred during round 15,935. It continued to do well until round 19,852, when a large number of sectors just started to return all
ff‘s. It crossed the 50% failure threshold during round 19,886. Here’s the graph of this card’s progression:
Overall? These cards did above average on sequential read/write speeds, and random read/write speeds were sometimes above average (and when they were below average, they weren’t that far below average). Two of the three samples also did well in endurance tests — with the third doing not terrible, but below average. I’d say that this is not a terrible card; the only downside is that it seems that they’re no longer available at the price point I bought them at. There are other sellers on AliExpress that are selling (what appears to be) the same card, but by the time you add in shipping, the price ends up being between 3-6x what I paid.
June 12, 2025 (current number of read/write cycles is updated automatically every hour)