The best microSD cards you can buy for your smartphone

By Jamie McKane - MyBroadband | 27 Oct 2018 at 14:54hrs
microSD
The amount of internal storage in smartphones is growing every year, but so is the amount of data we are storing on our devices.

Many smartphones include support for expandable storage via a microSD slot, which can be invaluable for users who prefer to store a large amount of media locally on their smartphone.

Large amounts of storage can also be important for mobile gamers, photographers, and streamers.

Capacity isn't the only consideration when buying microSD cards, however, as with any storage drive, read and write speeds can have a dramatic effect on performance.

Buying a cheap, slow microSD card and using it as a gaming drive within your smartphone could limit your performance in some games, while faster microSD cards would have no problem.

The same problem could be encountered when recording high-resolution video and saving it to your microSD card.

Luckily for consumers, the speed and capabilities of microSD cards are described according to a clearly defined system created by the SD Association.

According to this system, there are 10 standard speed classes, with Class 10 SD cards boasting sequential write speeds of 10MB/s or more.

There are numerous other categorisations of microSD card speed beyond this level, some of which are listed below:

U1, V10 – 10MB/s
U3, V30 – 30MB/s
V60 – 60MB/s
V90 – 90MB/s

Some of the microSD cards have an A1 Rating, which refers to Application Performance Class, signifying a minimum random read and write of 1,500 and 500 input/output operations per second (IOPS), respectively.

This translates directly to application performance, and can be very important for mobile gamers and Android users running demanding applications.

We compared the specifications of major microSD cards available locally, along with South African pricing taken from Takealot to compare the value of each.

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