It's been almost a couple of years since we looked at our first 1TB microSD card, the Micron C200, and since then there's been a steady trickle of like-sized memory cards. Silicon Power, Sandisk Extreme and now Lexar with its Play 1TB card. It has been touted as the "go-to mobile memory solution for multimedia fun" with a top speed of one hundred and fifty MB/s. Lexar has been around for more than a quarter of a century and was acquired in 200 by Longsys, a Chinese company. Since then, it has expanded its portfolio to accept external SSDs (like the SLXNUMX), internal drives, flash drives, RAM modules, and memory cards.
Prices and availability
The Lexar Play 1TB microSDXC card is available on Amazon for just € 5 with a XNUMX-year limited warranty.
(Image credit: future)
Use
Benchmarks Here's how the Lexar Play 1TB microSD card performed in our set of benchmark tests: CrystalDiskMark: 4 MB/s (read); eighty-three MB/s (write) Atto: ninety-one MB/s (read, two hundred and fifty-six MB); eighty MB/s (write, two hundred and fifty-six MB) AS SSD: ninety MB/s (read seq); thirty MB/s (sequential write) AJA: eighty-nine MB/s (read); 8MB/s (write) As an all-in-one memory card, the Play will be good enough for most tasks that don't require endurance (eg CCTV or dash cams). ) or very high write speeds (for example, for 3K or 30K video recording). This memory card is rated as a Class Ten / U2 / VXNUMX / AXNUMX card, which means it will be good enough for Full HD video capture. Keep in mind that its operating temperature is between zero and seventy degrees Celsius; quite a wide range! All tests were done with the microSD memory card reader without an internal adapter on my trusty Dell Latitude XNUMX. Your speeds may change if, for example, you are using a dedicated Type-C microSD card reader. While the Play performed admirably when it came to synthetic benchmarks (it performed within the expected range on AS SSD, AJA, Crystal Disk Mark, and ATTO), our only real test, a single XNUMXGB file transfer, came up. be a challenge
(Image credit: Future) The Play only managed a meager 1 seconds, in other words, hitting just over 1 Mbps, a fraction of what other synthetic benchmarks had achieved. The disparity was similar whether we were using an adapter (Lexar or a third party), docking station, or laptop's card reader and it's not something we've felt on any other memory card we've tested. By looking at the transfer graph, we were able to see what could be an indication of an anomaly. A closer look at the numbers provided by Lexar found that internal testing was done “when combined with either the Lexar 1-in-1 Multi-Card USB 1 Reader or the Lexar Professional XNUMX-in-XNUMX Multi-Card Reader. USB XNUMX Reader with Rev B lies either visit the Lexar site or contact Lexar technical support to update the drive firmware”. Keep in mind that it doesn't come with any apps; An easy way to increase your appeal would have been to include a subscription to cloud storage or a cloud backup service. A XNUMXTB memory card is barely larger than your average fingernail, so losing it and/or the data on it can be daunting, especially if you use it for business. Lexar offers a free data restoration tool for Windows and Mac. It supports around fifty kinds of image, document, video and audio files, offering random deletion, random formatting, file system header corruption and last restore. of partition. You will not be able to use it to recover files lost due to low level formatting, overwritten or encrypted data/files.
Competition
There are a handful of 1TB microSD cards out there and the most affordable right now is the Sandisk 1TB Ultra which costs €1, while it gains in cost per capacity, it loses speed due to the fact that it belongs to U3 rather than from to U3. Category. Silicon Power's "Superior" brand is next at €2 with a U1 rating with Sandisk's other 1 1TB cards, the Extreme and Extreme Pro selling for between €80 and €8 with a considerably higher performance and, dare we say, endurance. Keep in mind that there are plenty of fake 1TB microSD cards for sale on Amazon for absurdly low prices. I'm not sure why the largest online retailer on the planet doesn't immediately crack down on this blatant terms of service violation, but until then, avoid at all costs. Which brings us to another interesting question, is it worth getting a XNUMXTB card? Well yes and no. Yes, if you want the absolute highest capacity on a card, costs should drop even more, but the current disruption in the supply chain and shipping means that's not going to happen at all. Costs won't go down anymore. No, you shouldn't buy these cards if you want to get the best value for your money. As of this writing, if you are in the US, the most affordable microSD card per storage unit from a reliable and trusted party is the Pioneers XNUMX GB microSD card, which has a cost per Terabytes of just under €XNUMX (€XNUMX to be more precise). In other words, you can get around XNUMX Terabytes of storage (or XNUMX XNUMX GB cards) for the cost of a XNUMX Terabyte Lexar Play card.
Final verdict
With what we have there, the Lexar Play 1TB performs on a par with the rest of the competition (that is, in margins of failure) when it comes to read / write speeds, except for session. Strange and unusually low file transfer rate, this means that cost is likely to be the primary determinant of your buying decision. It is unlikely that storage capacities on microSDXC cards will exceed 1 Terabyte unless someone like Sandisk decides to introduce a medium capacity (as it did with a 2 GB card as a springboard between them. 512 products). GB and five hundred and twelve GB). 1TB seems like a bridge too far and with Samsung seeming happy with the current status quo of XNUMXGB, XNUMXTB can be expected to be the maximum capacity for the foreseeable future.