Samsung is a pretty well known name in the electronics industry, and flash memory is no exception — they’re one of the few companies that owns and operates their own silicon foundries.
These cards met all of the criteria that I set out for determining what’s considered a name-brand card, so these cards will go into the name-brand bucket.
One thing of consequence that I’ll note: of the brands I’ve evaluated so far, Samsung is the name brand whose flash was consistently neither fake nor skimpy. It seems that if you buy a 128GB Samsung card, you get at least 128GB of space. Many of the other name brands — including Kingston, Kioxia, Lexar, and SanDisk — provided cards that were all skimpy, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that Samsung’s cards were not.
Performance results have been pretty impressive: every metric scored in the top 10% of all cards I’ve tested so far. Sequential write speeds have been this card’s strongest suit, with sample #2 scoring in the top 1% of all cards I’ve tested.
These cards bear U3, V30, and A2 performance marks. Additionally, the Class 10 mark appears on the package, but does not appear on the card itself. Performance was good enough to qualify for the U3, V30, and A2 performance marks, but not good enough to qualify 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 Physical Layer Specification; it’s entirely possible that these cards would have done better had they been tested under proper conditions. (Additionally, no card I’ve tested has met the threshold for the A2 mark — and that’s probably more because I don’t have the proper equipment to test them with, rather than a failure on the card’s part.)
On the endurance testing front:
- Sample #1 has survived 6,464 read/write cycles so far and has not yet experienced any errors.
- Sample #2 has has survived 3,667 read/write cycles so far.
- Sample #3 has not yet reached the 2,000 read/write cycle mark. It is currently expected to get there sometime in March 2026.
March 8, 2026 (current number of read/write cycles updates automatically every hour)