PNY is a brand that I’ve long been aware of. Founded in New York in 1985, they were originally a memory chip vendor; they have since expanded into flash memory, graphics cards, HDMI cables, and even battery chargers. It took me a while to realize that PNY wasn’t being represented in my project — and that’s probably due to the fact that, being an American company, you won’t usually come across their products being sold on AliExpress. But even outside of AliExpress, I was able to find some of their products that fell within my price range.
This particular card came to my attention after a Redditor had asked if I had tested PNY’s 1.5TB card. They didn’t say which one specifically, but browsing through PNY’s website revealed that they only made one model of 1.5TB microSD card — the PNY PRO Elite Prime. And while that card was out of my price range, the 64GB version wasn’t. It also appears that the only way PNY offers the 64GB version is as part of a 3-pack, so I picked up a single 3-pack — the price you see above represents the price of 1/3 of the 3-pack. So, here you go random Redditor — this one is dedicated to you!
The CID data would indicate that these are simply a relabeled version of the PNY Elite-X; however, performance tells quite a different story: these cards managed to weasel their way into the #2 spot in my top 10 with their impressive scores across all metrics. Sequential write scores, in particular, were the highest out of any card I’ve tested so far — even beating out my previous favorite, the Kingston Canvas Go! Plus. Its worst metric was random read speeds — but even these were still above average and are nothing to balk at.
These cards carry the U3, V30, and A2 markings. (The Class 10 marking appears on the package, but does not appear on the card itself.) Performance was more than enough to qualify for the Class 10, U3, and V30 markings; however, it wasn’t good enough to qualify for the A2 marking. However, my standard disclaimer will be important here: my performance testing methods do not align with those prescribed by the SD specification — it’s possible (very possible, in this card’s case) that they would have done better if they had been tested under proper conditions.
On the endurance testing front:
- Sample #1 has survived 4,921 read/write cycles and has not yet experienced any errors.
- Sample #2’s first error was a write failure, affecting 128 contiguous sectors, during round 535. It has survived 4,782 read/write cycles in total so far.
- Sample #3 has survived 4,885 read/write cycles and has not yet experienced any errors.
Overall? These cards absolutely smoke when it comes to performance. Price per gigabyte is decent — I’ve seen better, but these cards still came in below average. Skimp is also a little high, but is also not the worst I’ve seen. As far as endurance — it’s too early to make any judgment calls there. But so far? Yeah, these are a good card to go with if you need a good all-around microSD card!
June 19, 2025 (current number of read/write cycles updates automatically every hour)