- Ordered from: Amazon UK
- Price paid: £10.52 (about $13.82)
- Advertised capacity: 32GB
- Logical capacity: 31,058,821,120 bytes
- Physical capacity: 31,058,821,120 bytes
- Fake/skimpy flash: Skimpy (2.94% skimp)
- Protected area: 83,886,080 bytes (inaccessible)
- Speed class markings: Class 10, U1*, V1
- CID data:
- Manufacturer ID:
0x27** - OEM ID:
0x5048(ASCII:PH)** - Product name:
0x5344333247(ASCII:SD32G) - Product revision:
0x60
- Manufacturer ID:
| Sample # | 1 | 2 | 3 | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacture date | Nov 2023 | Aug 2023 | Aug 2023 | N/A |
| Serial number | 0xdad636b6 | 0xda80583a | 0xda800487 | N/A |
| Sequential read speed (MB/sec) | 92.62 | 91.24 | 93.25 | 92.37 |
| Sequential write speed (MB/sec) | 32.05 | 27.89 | 32.07 | 30.67 |
| Random read speed (IOPS/sec) | 2,615.50 | 2,269.66 | 2,597.46 | 2,494.21 |
| Random write speed (IOPS/sec) | 649.10 | 624.10 | 652.16 | 641.79 |
| Read/write cycles to first error | 4,331 | 6,656 | 5,680 | 5,556 |
| Read/write cycles to 0.1% failure threshold | 4,332 | 6,656 | 5,715 | 5,568 |
| Read/write cycles to complete failure | 4,332 | 6,656 | 5,715 | 5,568 |
| Total days to complete failure | 75 | 127 | 99 | 100 |
| Card reader used | JJC UTC-4AC | JJC UTC-4AC | JJC UTC-4AC | N/A |
| Package front |  |  |  | N/A |
| Package back |  |  |  | N/A |
| Card front |  |  |  | N/A |
| Card back |  |  |  | N/A |
* The U1 marking appears on the package, but does not appear on the card itself.
** This manufacturer ID/OEM ID is pretty well known to belong to Phison.
Discussion
This particular brand is one that I found thanks to an online survey I found, where someone was asking which microSD card had the highest endurance. One of Integral Memory’s cards was listed as one of the options. Neither Amazon nor AliExpress had them available for sale — but Amazon UK did, and for a price that was within my parameters.
Looking at the CID data reveals that this is likely produced for Integral by Phison. So far, Phison’s cards have performed decently well, so I’m expecting good things out of this card.
All performance metrics were above average, with random read speeds being more than one standard deviation above average. In fact, this card did well enough on random I/O performance that it would have qualified for the A1 marking. Alas, Integral chose not to put this label on the card. Sequential write speeds were only just slightly above average — in fact, as far as sequential write speeds go, this card is the worst performing Phison card that I’ve tested so far. However, these results are only based off the results from a single card — so we’ll have to wait until I’m able to test the other two to see how they do.
As far as endurance testing goes:
- Sample #1 was doing quite well for the first 4,331 read/write cycles; but during round 4,332, it experienced a…strange sort of data verification failure: the same 16 sectors’ worth of data was repeated over and over again — 526 times, to be exact. I’m not sure where the data came from either, as it failed CRC checks (meaning that it wasn’t the data my program wrote to the card). However, during round 4,333, it decided to stop responding to commands altogether.
- Sample #2 was chugging along just fine — with no errors whatsoever — until round 6,657, when it decided to simply stop responding to commands.
- Sample #3’s first error was a series of bit flips that affected 1,024 non-contiguous sectors during round 5,681. It chugged along for only another 35 read/write cycles before it stopped responding to commands altogether.
Overall? This card offered sequential I/O speeds that were just average, but random I/O speeds that were above average. This would make it more suited to a tablet or gaming console use case rather than, say, video recording — which is what the package seems to imply. However, it has a couple of things working against it:
- Time to first error was above average; however, time to complete failure was — as of the time of this writing — below average.
- The price per gigabyte ended up being about $0.45 — which is pretty high compared to many of the other cards I tested.
So…is it a bad card? No, I wouldn’t say it is. But is it a great card? No, I wouldn’t say that either.
April 22, 2025