Some of the microSD cards I used in my benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi
Some of the microSD cards I used in my benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 / Photo (C) Jean Georges Perrin

The Raspberry Pi is a nano-computer which only option is the storage – the CPU, memory, and network are soldered to the board. The storage is done through a small SD card called a microSD card. There are a lot a lot of those cards with quite a few manufacturers (and integrators). I tested several dozens of them, I already published some results… and then the Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi 3) came out. What influence does the new RPi 3 has over the Raspberry Pi 2 (RPi 2) when it comes to storage? Here are the results and the winners might not be who you think.

The links in the table are pointing to goods being sold and shipped by Amazon, LLC (when possible). You may find other vendors cheaper but I suspect there is some weird things going on in the supply chain: I have experienced very strange variation of performance for some of the memory card.

Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi 3)

 Price Readingg Writing
(USD) KB/s IOPS KB/s IOPS
Lexar High-Performance 633x33x 29.47 6507.6 1626 113.9 26
Lexar Professional 1000x 46.92 8928.2 2232 930.8 232
Patriot EP Pro 29.99 9236.8 2308 785.4 196
PNY High Performance 19.99 7878.0 1968 408.1 102
PNY Turbo Performance 24.99 6764.2 1686 364.4 90
Samsung EVO 19.99 11247.6 2810 1773.4 443
Samsung Pro 39.53 9445.8 2360 1654.3 413
Samsung Pro+ 49.99 9164.7 2291 1578.5 394
SanDisk Ultra 19.99 6057.8 1514 418.9 104
SanDisk Ultra PLUS 23.94 8268.1 2066 1740.4 435
SanDisk Extreme 27.98 10232.7 2557 1283.4 320
SanDisk Extreme PLUS 46.95 10196.0 2545 1939.6 484
SanDisk Extreme PRO 52.94 10297.4 2574 1939.8 484
SP Elite 17.00 2977.2 744 467.0 116
Transcendd Premium 400x 17.99 5128.9 1282 115.7 27

Raspberry Pi 2 (RPi 2)

 Price Readingg Writing
(USD) KB/s IOPS KB/s IOPS
Lexar High-Performance 633x 29.47 5064.2 1266 113.4 26
Lexar Professional 1000x 46.92 7147.0 1782 833.2 208
Patriot EP Pro 29.99 8416.3 2102 794.6 198
PNY High Performance 19.99 6207.7 1548 393.9 98
PNY Turbo Performance 24.99 N/A N/A N/A N/A
Samsung EVO 19.99 9533.2 2382 1937.2 484
Samsung Pro 39.53 9836.8 2458 1630.9 407
Samsung Pro+ 49.99 9065.2 2266 1476.6 369
SanDisk Ultra 19.99 4299.1 1074 445.0 111
SanDisk Ultra PLUS 23.94 7265.9 1816 2218.6 554
SanDisk Extreme 27.98 8717.8 2177 1410.2 351
SanDisk Extreme PLUS 46.95 9118.3 2279 2217.7 554
SanDisk Extreme PRO 52.94 9720.3 2429 2549.1 637
SP Elite 17.00 N/A N/A N/A N/A
Transcendd Premium 400x 17.99 6277.2 1568 114.3 26

 

Updates

2016-04-03:

  • Big, monstrous typo corrected: units are KB/s and not anything else. Oops…

2016-03-25:

  • First version, replaces the previous blog entry. Results may differ as more cards of the same type may have been used and I am reporting the average.

 

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