If you own a DSLR camera or camcorder, you’re likely to need an SD card to store photos and video. Many smaller cameras, drones, and gaming consoles have switched over to microSD cards for the sake of size, so make sure your camera needs an SD card and that it doesn’t already include one that works well enough. SD cards can also serve to add portable storage to laptops, especially for people who have workflows that require using multiple machines.
Although cards with high storage capacities may seem useful, we recommend having multiple 64 GB cards on hand rather than spending more money on a 128 GB card. A 64 GB card offers plenty of space for even professional photographers, and we think it’s best to remove, upload, and clear your SD card on a regular basis to avoid the chore of sifting through hundreds of images. After all, if the card just sits in your camera untouched, how can you enjoy all those beautiful photos?
If you already have an SD card that gets the job done, you shouldn’t upgrade. Our pick isn’t leaps and bounds better than anything that has been available for the past couple of years. But if you need another SD card, or if you’re having issues with the speed of your card—maybe you burst shoot photos in raw format, for example, or you want to shoot 4K and it can’t keep up—consider our picks.
How to avoid counterfeit cards
Fake memory cards continue to be a big problem for shoppers. Because they look nearly identical to the real thing, you can easily buy a counterfeit by mistake only to discover that your supposedly speedy 32 GB card is actually a slow 8 GB card without a warranty. The key to avoiding these counterfeit cards is to buy only from reputable sellers. Third-party vendors are especially suspect, so look for “Ships from and sold by Amazon” or purchase directly from a reputable seller like Best Buy or Adorama. If you get your card from Amazon or any other retailer that provides packaging choices, be sure to select the original packaging (not Amazon’s “Frustration-Free” packaging, for example).
Still, some Amazon customers have reported receiving fake cards directly from Amazon. If you suspect your card is a fake—look for strange packaging, or test the card with CrystalDiskMark to check its speeds—contact Amazon customer support for an exchange.
How we picked
Several SD Cards we tested.
Photo: Sarah Kobos
The most important features of an SD card are speed, reliability, price, and warranty.
SD cards are most commonly used in cameras for storing image and video files as you shoot them. Because most cameras can take photos faster than they can write them to storage, cameras first save images to a small but speedy buffer. Once the buffer is full, the camera must write the images to the SD card before you can shoot any more. The faster the camera can write data to the card—the card’s write speed—the faster this buffer clears and the sooner you can shoot more photos. So write speed is the most important spec for SD cards that you use in cameras.
If you use burst mode a lot, it’s important to know how fast a card needs to be to keep up with your continuous raw shooting. We did some back-of-the-napkin math to find out, multiplying the burst frames per second of Wirecutter’s camera recommendations in that regard by their average raw-image size to figure out a ballpark image bit rate in megabytes per second.
Our mirrorless camera upgrade pick, the Fujifilm X-T3, has a burst-shooting image bit rate of about 638 MB/s, which slows after 36 shots until the camera’s processor clears the images to the SD card. Our point-and-shoot recommendation, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX10, isn’t nearly as demanding: It has an image bit rate of about 100 MB/s. Bit rate varies by camera, generally getting faster as cameras get better. Since an SD card can last you a decade, it’s worth spending the extra $10 now to ensure you aren’t stuck with a slow card.
Read speed is important when you’re copying data from the card to a computer and when you’re reviewing photos on the camera. Read speed is not as important for cameras as write speed, but because read speed is often faster, manufacturers like to brag about it on the label. Read speed is more useful for SD cards used for expanded storage in, say, a laptop, since in that case you’re mostly accessing media you’ve already put on the card or copying photos from the card to the laptop’s storage. There isn’t much of a difference in read speeds among the best SD cards, though: All of the UHS-I cards we tested for this update had an average read speed of around 93 MB/s.
This is what you should look for in an SD card:
Class 10 rating: This rating guarantees the card has a minimum sustained sequential write speed of least 10 MB/s—the bare minimum for shooting 1080p video. (The other speed classes are 2, 4, and 6, which also denote the minimum write speed in megabytes per second.)
U3 rating: Since most cards now have speeds faster than 10 MB/s, Ultra High Speed classes further differentiate their performance. U3 is required for 4K video and designates a minimum write speed of 30 MB/s. Unless your device shoots only 1080p video, it’s worth confirming that a card has a U3 rating, which gives you the option to shoot 4K.
UHS-I bus mode: Bus mode is a standard that dictates how different generations of SD cards work. All the point-and-shoot cameras we recommend support at least UHS-I bus cards. The standard is backward-compatible, meaning you can use a faster UHS-II card with a UHS-I camera, or a UHS-I card with a UHS-II camera. But you don’t get the full speed of UHS-II unless both camera and card support UHS-II, because it requires an additional row of physical pins to achieve its extra speed.
64 GB capacity: A 64 GB SD card should be spacious enough for most uses, and such cards are less expensive per gigabyte than 32 GB cards. If you need more room to store your media, many 128 GB SD cards cost about the same per gigabyte as their 64 GB counterparts. Check your device to confirm it supports SDXC (extended capacity) cards (meaning cards 64 GB and higher) before buying one. If not, stick with 32 GB to ensure that your card works with your device.
Reliability: An SD card holds the only copy of a photo between the time you take it and when you copy it to a computer for editing, so it’s important to get a reliable card from a reputable manufacturer—such as SanDisk, Transcend, or Lexar—to minimize the chances of something going wrong. Many SD cards come with a lifetime or 10-year warranty, and the SD Card Association says most SD cards have a lifespan of about 10 years with “normal usage.”
Video Speed Class: The V6, V10, V30, V60, and V90 ratings guarantee minimum levels of performance for recording video and indicate the write speeds, in MB/s, for video. Most cards now have their Video Speed Class rating included on the label. The SD cards we tested ranged from V30 to V90.
In 2020, we researched 20 SD card models that met the above criteria and chose models that were new or were updates of any of the five models we tested in 2017. This group included newer generations from brands such as Lexar, Transcend, and SanDisk. We found five updated UHS-I models worth testing: the 64 GB SanDisk Extreme Pro, a new generation of the 64 GB SanDisk Extreme and 64 GB SanDisk Ultra, the 64 GB Transcend High Speed, and the 64 GB Lexar Professional 633x. We also tested three UHS-II models: the 64 GB SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-II, the 64 GB Lexar Professional 2000x, and the 64 GB Transcend 700S.
How we tested
A Verbatim SD Card reader with a card in it.
Photo: Sarah Kobos
We tested the in-camera burst-shooting performance of these SD cards in a full-frame mirrorless camera, the Sony α7 III.
We then plugged each card into a Verbatim USB-C Pocket Card Reader and ran CrystalDiskMark, a benchmarking program designed to test sequential and random read and write speeds on solid-state storage. Between each test, we cleared the cards and reformatted them using the recommended utility from the SD Association to stabilize performance.
The Verbatim USB-C Pocket Card Reader can accommodate the speeds of UHS-II SD cards and is our pick for high-speed card readers. We wanted to ensure consistency in our testing of both UHS-I and UHS-II cards to paint a clear picture of how the UHS-II rating improves read and write times.
These are the same methods we’ve used to test SD cards for the past six years, but the cameras, card reader, and laptop we used during our 2020 testing are different from the equipment we used in previous years. This means that although our 2017 test results are still useful, they’re not directly comparable to this year’s benchmarks.
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