Lenovo became a well-known computer manufacturer — at least, in my mind — after they acquired IBM’s PC manufacturing business in 2005, which included IBM’s ThinkPad line of laptops. Being that they are a major brand name, they are a frequent target for counterfeiters — AliExpress searches reveal a wide array of fake flash bearing the Lenovo brand name.
This card, however, doesn’t seem to bear any of the hallmarks of fake flash: branding is present and on-point, color schemes match the brand’s color scheme, the card’s capacity is printed on the packaging, there are disclaimers printed on the package about the definitions of a kilobyte/megabyte/gigabyte, and there is contact information printed on the package. While none of these factors individually would be enough to convince me that a product is genuine, the combination of all of them tells me that this product is most likely genuine. And on top of all that…the card is not fake flash.
I picked these cards up from AliExpress’s Dollar Express section. I paid $9.99 a piece — which, after accounting for skimp, works out to about $0.04 per gigabyte. For comparison — as of the time of this writing, a new WD Blue 2TB 3.5″ hard drive can be had for around $60, which works out to about $0.03 per gigabyte. So, while still more expensive than a mechanical hard drive, prices here are starting to rival those of traditional hard drives.
Performance on this card was mixed: sequential read and write speeds were above average, but random read and write speeds were below average. These cards carry the Class 10, U3, V30, and A2 marks; performance was good enough to qualify for the Class 10, U3, and V30 marks, but not enough for the A2 mark. However, I’ll throw in my standard disclaimer: my performance testing methods do not align with those 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 testing front:
- Sample #1’s first error1 was a six-sector wide address decoding error during round 247. It has survived 1,840 read/write cycles in total so far.
- Sample #2’s first error1 was an eight-sector wide address decoding error during round 309. It has survived 1,933 read/write cycles in total so far.
- Sample #3’s first error was a two-sector wide address decoding error during round 321. It has survived 1,948 read/write cycles in total so far.
Overall? I was a little disappointed by how these cards did on performance — especially considering that they did worse, across the board, compared to their Lenovo thinkplus 128GB siblings. (You’d think that having “Pro” in the name would imply that they’re the better version…but in this case, it appears that they’re not.) And as far as endurance goes, it’s unfortunately far too early to say how they are for endurance — despite the fact that they’ve been in testing now for over a year. However, if you go solely off of the size and the price point I picked them up at, they were an excellent deal — so if you can find them at a similar price point to what I paid, and performance isn’t the most important thing to you, then I’d say “go ahead and grab them”.
1Samples #1 and #2 did technically experience errors earlier on, but I’m almost positive that they were device mangling errors and thus not the card’s fault. Therefore, I’ve decided to discard those errors.
June 17, 2025 (current number of read/write cycles updates automatically every hour)