For anyone who remembers the era of floppy disks and early hard drives, the idea of getting gigabytes and gigabytes of data onto something smaller than a fingernail still feels like something out of sci-fi stories, but Micro SD cards can make that idea a reality.
These ubiquitous cards can be used in phones, tablets, laptops, Chromebooks, game consoles, cameras, and a huge selection of other devices. Today these cards are readily available at huge capacities, even at reasonable prices. Modern Micro SD cards are big enough to store your entire music collection, a massive volume of photographs, lots of high-resolution videos, massive modern games, and countless other types of large file storage.
Here’s our selection of the best Micro SD cards available today, that offer you fast and reliable storage at reasonable prices.
Products at a Glance
How We Picked
We’ve looked at memory cards from reputable manufacturers, known for producing reliable Micro SD cards. All the options here include extensive manufacturer warranties.
We’ve also tried to find a balance between, speed, capacity, and price, with a selection of cards to suit various different needs.
How We Tested
We’ve compared how the different cards available match up against each other in terms of capacity, speed, and price, and picked out a selection of cards that stand above the rest.
Best Micro SD card
Capacity: 256GB
Read: 550MB/s
Write: 520MB/s
Great speeds
Excellent price
Robust warranty included
Not the largest capacity
Cheaper cards are available
Speed might be overkill for some uses
This is the sweet spot for a balance between speed, capacity, and value at today’s prices. This is a reasonably large capacity memory card, with speeds rated at 550MB/s for reading and 520MB/s for writing.
For many uses, like photo collections, a music library, or a decent collection of HD video, this will be more than enough, and the fast read and write speeds won’t leave you hanging around waiting for transfers to complete.
Samsung offers a 10-year warranty for standard usage on this memory card.
Capacity: 128GB
Read: 160MB/s
Write: 90MB/s
Great value
Decent speeds for the price
Lifetime warranty
Modest capacity
Speeds could be better
Worth spending a bit more for a better card
If you don’t need a massive amount of expanded storage, this card will be great for just adding a decent amount of extra storage. If you’re using this in a phone with limited internal storage capacity, or a laptop with a smaller SSD, this will be an extremely useful option to expand your storage capacity by a decent amount.
This is a great budget level memory card, with read speeds of up to /s, and write speeds of up to 90MB/s, decent enough for most uses except for tasks demanding high bandwidth like HD video recording. It also includes a lifetime warranty, for ultimate peace of mind.
Capacity: 1TB
Read: 160MB/s
Write: 90MB/s
Extreme high capacity
Decent speeds
Good value in terms of dollar per gigabytes
Expensive
Speed could be more impressive
Smaller card would suit many users
This is a beast of a memory card, leaving behind the gigabytes and moving on up into the territory of the terabytes. Here you get one entire terabyte, bigger than many laptops internal storage, that can store huge amounts of data. This will be great for anyone looking for a memory card that they can fill with lots of HD videos, someone looking for a card to extend the storage of a laptop, or anyone with a massive collection of high bitrate digital audio.
This volume of storage will be overkill for many users, but for a power user looking to carry huge amounts of data in the palm of their hands, this is a great choice.
The read speed here is up to 160MB/s, and write speed is up to 90MB/s. Not recommended for anyone needing very fast transfer rates, this card is optimized for size above speed.
Capacity: 64GB
Read: 100MB/s
Write: 70MB/s
Budget-friendly price
Sensible choice for modest storage needs
10 year warranty
Low capacity
Slowest card in the lineup
You can pay a little more for a much better memory card
This is a basic entry-level card, you can get them slightly cheaper, but it’s not much of a saving, so this is probably the cheapest option to seriously consider.
The 64GB storage makes it good decent for use in any kind of device with very limited internal storage. This would be plenty of use in a camera simply taking photos, or keeping a modest collection of music and videos on.
Despite the budget price, it’s still decently quick, with read speeds of up to 100MB/s, and write speeds of up to 70MB/s, but it is the slowest card in our lineup. It still comes with a 10-year warranty.
Things To Consider
FAQs
Our Verdict
Capacity: 256GB
Read: 550MB/s
Write: 520MB/s
We went with the Samsung 256GB EVO Select MicroSDXC as our top pick because it’s a great all-round card that offers plenty of storage capacity for the majority of uses, has really impressive read and write speeds, and comes in at a very reasonable price. It’s the obvious choice for anyone after a MicroSD who is just after a good deal on a card with good performance.