Patriot Memory is a name that I’ve been aware of since the early days of this project. I think I came across them thanks to CameraMemorySpeed.com’s page of manufacturer and OEM IDs. They make a variety of memory products, including DRAM, SSDs, flash drives, and SD/microSD cards.
I bought these cards as a 5-pack. As you can see by the pictures, they didn’t bother with trying to put these in retail packaging — they just put them in a cardboard envelope. Inside were two hard plastic microSD holders: one with 4 cards, and one with a single card. (I guess nobody makes a cheap plastic holder that will hold 5 microSD cards?)
I’ve only tested one of these cards so far — so the information below is going to talk about the results that I got from that one card. (I’ll come back and update this once I’ve had a chance to test the others.)
Looking at this card’s CID information reveals something a little odd — the manufacturer ID is set to hex 00, and the OEM ID is set to hex 3432. I don’t believe for a minute that the SD Association assigned this to Patriot Memory…or anyone else for that matter.
I was originally going to consider these to be name-brand cards…but if I go strictly off of the criteria that I set out for determining what’s considered a name-brand card, it fails for a few reasons:
- It didn’t come in retail packaging
- The manufacturer can’t be easily determined by looking at the manufacturer ID/OEM ID
- The CID register bears signs that they were attempting to conceal the card’s true origin (e.g., the manufacturer ID being set to hex
00and the OEM ID being set to hex3432)
If anyone from Patriot Memory is reading this…sorry. Do better next time.
These cards were fairly skimpy, coming in at 3.33%. That means that for a 128GB card, you’re only getting 123.7GB of usable space. While not the highest figure I’ve ever gotten, it does put this card in the bottom 15% of all cards I’ve tested so far. But on the other hand, these cards did rather well on price — coming in at $0.053 per gigabyte, which is far below average (which is at $0.252 per gigabyte as of the time I’m writing this) — so just in terms of space, they’re a good value.
How did they do on performance? Again, I’ve only tested a single card so far — so this may be subject to change in the future:
- Sequential read speeds were slightly above average, coming in at the 40th percentile.
- Sequential write speeds were just a tiny bit below average, coming in at the 55th percentile.
- Random read speeds were below average, coming in at the 36th percentile.
- Random write speeds were below average, coming in at the 34th percentile.
So…yeah, this card’s performance was nothing to write home about. It ended up scoring a -0.18 on my scoring system. (My scoring system has the “perfectly average” card at 0 — so anything above zero represents an above average card, and a negative score represents a below average card.)
These cards carry the Class 10 and U1 performance marks. Performance was good enough to qualify for both of them. (The card’s internal data indicates that it supports the U3 and A1 performance classes. Performance measurements were good enough to qualify for the U3 mark, but not good enough for the A1 mark. However, since the card doesn’t carry the A1 mark, I won’t penalize it for not meeting that mark.)
How did this card do on endurance?
- Sample #1 has not yet hit the 2,000 read/write cycle mark. It is currently expected to get there sometime in January 2026.
- Samples #2-#5 are still in the package, waiting to be tested.
September 18, 2025