SanDisk is a well-known name in the flash memory industry. Founded in 1988, they developed the first flash-based SSD. They were later acquired by Western Digital in 2016, before being spun off as a public company in early 2025.
SanDisk is a name I’ve long been aware of, and one that — prior to this project — I was biased in favor of. I have a number of single-board computers that take microSD cards, and I typically defaulted to the SanDisk Ultra 16GB for their storage — and most of the time, had no issues with them. And since they’re such a major brand, I wanted to make sure they were properly represented in this project.
At one point in time, I decided that I wanted to try out some “high endurance” cards to see if they really held up better on the endurance tests than other cards. Initially, I got both this card and the Samsung PRO Endurance. I only bought one of each at first; however, I later decided that I should try to get at least three of each model — at which point I went back and purchased two more of both.
These cards met all the criteria that I set out for determining what’s considered a name brand card, so their results will be included in the name brand bucket in my results.
On performance tests, this card’s strong suit was sequential write speeds, where it speeds were pretty solidly above average. This makes sense — as these cards are intended for use in things like dashcams and security cameras, where they will be almost constantly written to. Overall, however, results were mixed:
- Sequential read speeds were just slightly above average.
- Sequential write speeds were pretty solidly above average
- Random read speeds were pretty solidly below average.
- Random write speeds were mixed: sample #1 scored pretty well below average, while the other two were just average.
These cards bear the Class 10, U3, and V30 marks — and performance on all three samples was good enough to qualify for all of them.
On the endurance testing front:
- Sample #1’s first error was a 32-sector wide write failure during round 5,402. It survived 13,694 read/write cycles before it stopped responding to commands.
- Sample #2’s first error was a six-sector wide address decoding error during round 1,547. I then started using this card to experiment with altering the pattern of how my program writes to the card; it lasted just two more read/write cycles after I started that experiment. During round 9,406, it stopped responding to commands altogether.
- Sample #3 suffered an 8-sector wide address decoding error after only 159 read/write cycles. Like sample #2, I used this card to experiment with altering the pattern of how my program writes to the card; it lasted just 8 more read/write cycles after I started that experiment. During round 9,366, it stopped responding to commands altogether.
The card’s packaging (as well as the product brief on Western Digital’s website) offers up some information on how long this card should be expected to last: it shows “up to 5,000 hours of continuous video recording”. A footnote on the back of the package indicates that this measurement assumes video encoded at 26Mbps — which would come out to 93,600Mb/hour (or 11,700MB/hour). Thus, 5,000 hours of video would consume 58,500,000MB (or 58.5TB) of space. Given the capacity of this device, this comes out to just 916 read/write cycles. This is less than half of the 2,000 read/write cycle target we’re going for (oof). However, on the bright side, all three made it well past that point (by a factor of 10 or more).
Overall, this is not a bad card. It’s better than average in skimp, price per gigabyte was better than average, and endurance was better than average. (I had previously said that I was disappointed by the fact that it experienced its first error before hitting the 2,000 read/write cycle mark — but as time has gone on, I’ve realized that not all of the errors I’m getting are the card’s fault. This is why I switched to using the “time to the 0.1% failure threshold” as my primary endurance metric — and these cards have done pretty well in that regard.) The main downside is performance — it was just average overall in terms of performance. So are there better cards out there? Sure. But is this a bad card? Nope. I’ll give this one my seal of approval.
November 9, 2025