Some products on the market like the sports cameras (Go Pro) where you need a card capable of handling high bit rates when you are shooting in 1080P at 60fps or 4K (3840×2160) at 30 fps.
Leading cameras like the GoPro HERO4 Black Edition require the use of a Class 10 memory card. Not all Class 10 microSD cards have the same data write speeds, so you really need to watch what card you buy as you might be stuck with something that doesn’t work properly.
That’s where the Lexar with their 633x high speed class microSD memory cards come in for ultimate performance.
First about Lexar:
Lexar Media, Inc. is an American manufacturer of digital media products based in Fremont, CA. Products manufactured by Lexar include SD cards, Memory Sticks, keydrives, CompactFlash cards and card readers.
Once a division of Cirrus Logic, Lexar leveraged its parent company’s experience in building ATA controllers in developing its own flash controllers.
Lexar was acquired by Micron Technology in 2006, and subsequently merged with Crucial Technology under the name Lexar Media, a subsidiary of Micron. In September 2007, Lexar extended its agreement with Eastman Kodak Company to develop and market Kodak-branded flash memory products worldwide.
Price when reviewed: £23.60 – via Amazon.co.uk
Presentation and Specification
– Premium memory solution for sports camcorders, tablets, and smartphones
– Quickly captures, stores, plays back, and transfers media files, including 1080p full-HD, 3D, and 4K video
– Leverages UHS-I technology for a transfer speed up to 633x (95MB/s)
– Stores more than 15 hours of HD video; 33,000 photos; or 28,000 songs
– Includes high-speed, Class 10 card and USB 3.0 reader
– Limited lifetime warranty for card and one-year limited warranty for USB 3.0 reader
– microSDHC (16GB,32GB) & microSDXC (64GB,128GB)
Packaging
Comes in a protection envelope type but well protected.
You can clearly see the products especially the included USB 3.0 microSD card reader/adapter.
On the back more we see besides the multilingual presentation, the highlighted speeds up to 95 MB/s write and 20 MB/s write.
Inside, we have the memory card nested in its own shell.
Very nice to have this included USB 3.0 reader from Lexar, not all will supply such an extra feature as stock.
Testing methodology
Synthetic tests and some real life file transfers on both our test computer and smartphone.
Hardware used:
Processor: Intel i7 2700k
CPU heatsink: Thermalright AXP-100R
Case: NCase M1
Storage: Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB
Motherboard: MSI B75IA-E33 mITX
PSU: Silverstone SX-600G SFX
Video card: MSI GTX 780 Ti OC TwinFrozr Gaming
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone
Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate X64 SP1
Crystal Disk Mark v3.0.2
A1 SD Bench (Android)
Results
As you can see the numbers are very close (5 MB/s on each side) to the maximum theoretical limit.
Then we ran the A1 SD Bench on the Samsung Note 4 and got 19.36MB/s read speeds and 16.28MB/s write speeds.
To put into perspective the needs for video recording in a top end smartphone needs.
1080p30fps video recording takes ~ 17 Mbps – that’s 2.13 MB/s
4k30fps takes up to 50 Mbps – which is barely 6.25 MB/s
So there is a lot of headroom even with a very demanding device.
And for another real life test, we copied on the card a file of 4.5 GB from the hard drive which took 3 minutes and 56 seconds which is an average of 21 MB/s. Again excellent numbers.
Conclusion
The good:
+ High performance as quoted
+ Quality product
+ Excellent design
+ Good price
+ Top points for the included USB 3.0 card adapter/reader
The Bad:
– Maybe they should increase the write speeds in future models but that’s being to picky
Glob3trotters “High Performance” Award – 4.5 out 5
A lot of thanks to LEXAR for supplying us with this test sample !
