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.
These cards were sent to me (via my Amazon wish list) by an anonymous donor. Thank you, anonymous donor!
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 the performance testing front: all metrics were above average — but not by much. Sequential write speeds were this card’s strong suit, with the average between the three samples I’ve tested so far putting it in the 69th percentile (as of the time of this writing). Overall, this card’s performance is just a little above average.
These cards carry the Class 10, U3, and V30 marks. Performance was good enough to qualify for all three of these marks.
On the endurance testing front:
- Sample #1 has completed 12,003 read/write cycles and has not yet experienced any errors.
- Sample #2 has completed 10,670 read/write cycles and has not yet experienced any errors.
- Sample #3 has not yet hit the 2,000 read/write cycle mark; it is currently expected to get there sometime in November 2025.
- Sample #4 has not yet hit the 2,000 read/write cycle mark. It is currently expected to get there sometime in December 2025.
Overall? I’d say it’s too soon to draw any conclusions yet — I need to wait for more data to come in before I can draw any conclusions.
November 15, 2025 (current number of read/write cycles is updated automatically every hour)