Best Raspberry Pi 5 microSD cards: 23 tested and rated
bret.dk tests to know which are the best Raspberry Pi 5 microSD cards from a collection of 23.
I’m going to be using fio to run the usual sequential read, sequential write, random read, and random write tests with a 4KB block size to be able to compare with those I’ve done in other tests. These are all performed on an ext4 filesystem with a partition spanning the entirety of the disk.
Each test is then run 5 times, with the average of those 5 runs being the data (gathered). It’s worth remembering that the sequential read and write speeds are not the most important thing when it comes to everyday usage. The random reads/writes are going to be a better number to look at, though the sequential speeds don’t hurt, obviously!
Fastest microSD Cards for Raspberry Pi 5
And the winner of Bret’s Best Raspberry Pi 5 microSD Card is..
1st Place: Amazon Basics (64GB)
Our old friend, the Amazon Basics microSD card, sits at the top of yet another “Best Of” test, only falling behind on the sequential read speeds, where the Transcend (32GB) card hit an impressive 78.46MB/s. The 128GB model was very close, though I feel it’s a little unfair to put them both up here so based on value, I’ve selected the 64GB option as my number 1.
2nd Place: Intenso (64GB)
Taking an overall 2nd place thanks to great random read/write speeds, we have the Intenso (64GB) microSD card. It’s not the most well-known brand, but it’s holding its own here!
3rd Place: Transcend (32GB)
It was super close between the Transcend (32GB) and Samsung PRO Plus (128GB) for 3rd place but thanks to the Transcend’s slightly higher random write results, I’ll go with that. It was extremely close though and if you trust Samsung as a brand over Transcend, it may still be your choice.
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