Lexar 200GB microSD review
I recently received a Lexar 200gb microSD card for evaluation the packaging is a fairly standard blister pack but unlike some I’ve seen includes a nice USB3 to micro SD adapter in place of the more common and cheaper to produce micro SD to SD adapter roughly a 10 dollar add in on it’s own by my estimate. The capacity is a bit odd for the order of two sizes we’re used to seeing on memory devices. The reason for this appears to be due to the limits of the physical form factor for that generations memory density, meaning this is as many chips as Lexar could fit in a microSD card when they designed it, an impressive feat.
Testing
As before when I received the card I ran it through a few cursory benchmarks and have it here in comparison to the same set of comparison devices. The device posts impressive read speeds, surpassing that of the smaller Samsung card we reviewed but at a cost to write speed, however it is still approaching 24MB/s in a single threaded scenario leading to no visible difference when taking full RAW photos, the most strenuous situation that I can subject a card to naturally. A weakness shown by this card is abysmal random write performance but this is a non-issue for use as a media device in a phone although I would look towards something else if you’re hoping to use one as a bootable OS partition.
I decided to check the card in the USB3 reader as well since one was included although as all other cards were evaluated using my thinkpads built in SD card reader it’s not the number used in the charts above, however it does read at slightly higher speeds than the built in reader is reporting.
Installation was quick and painless, and android adopted the microSD card without issue merging it with my phones internal storage. Overall I’m very impressed, the card offers decent speed and absolutely astounding capacity without being prohibitively expensive, price does bounce around a bit but it appears to be holding at 79.99 on amazon making this an easy decision if you need the absolute highest capacity. I would like to see the card at a lower price point without the USB3 reader as nice as it is for some like myself it’s an added unnecessary expense.
You can grab one here on amazon
