Sandisk is no stranger in the flash storage industry and they have been leading the pack in many ways. From the world’s first 128gb microSD card recently, released under the ‘Ultra’ series, to the world’s fastest memory card under the extreme pro line, the SanDisk Ultra is Sandisk’s lowest end offering for the 64GB and above capacities. That said, today’s review will focus on this series, however, last month, Sandisk did a refresh on their product lineup, and the SanDisk Ultra microSDHC UHS-I has been updated, as such, this is the older model.

There are 2 primary packaging for the memory cards, with the white colour packaging being more common as compared to the grey. With a rating of up to 30MB/s, the card is aimed at mobile users, and comes with a microSD to SD card adapter.

The newer variant will come with a rating of up to 48MB/s rather than the 30MB/s. However, as the refreshment only came into effect last month, we can still expect plenty of these older models to be floating around the stores in this few months.

The SanDisk Ultra microSD comes in its iconic grey and deep red design. With the text printed on it in white, the front prints the brand, name and capacity, as well as its rating.

On the reverse, we have the model, serial number as well as manufacturing location printed on it. Surprisingly, the card was not made in the usual locations such as Taiwan or Korea. The card, in this case, is made in China. Also, the back of the card features a small little square box that is protruding out, which again, is unlike any other cards we have seen. Previously, I do recall seeing a lighter shade of grey, but recent batches have seemed to come with a darker shade of grey.

As seen above, this card is UHS-I and class 10 rated which tells us we can expect a minimum performance of 10MB/s for read and write speed.

So let the test begin!

Our first test here is the h2testw:

Next, we will run the CrystalDiskMark in various capacities. The first capacity we run it on was 4000MB or 4GB. The result can be seen below:

The next test, we ran the smallest test – 50MB:

And finally, we run the middle sized test, taking the average of 5 attempts:

When compiled into a graph:

Overall, as we can see, the card has a pretty fast burst speed but after the burst speed, it has a varying speed in writing. On the other hand, we have a very very consistent read speed. The performance in the random category, however, is pretty consistent and pretty fast for the write, and this is a big challenger to the Samsung Evo. Overall, the speed are:

READ – 44467 KB/s
WRITE – 14583 KB/s

The write speed is clearly not the best, in any means, however, the random speeds are better than most of the other cards. There is not doubt that the card is definitely targeted at mobile users, however, for sequential use such as transferring of block files or for the use in the camera, one might want to reconsider this. As far as we tried to research, we weren’t able to find out whether if this card was TLC or MLC based, although we are inclined to believe that this is TLC based. With a price availability of about $45, and a 10years (Vector Magnetics) or lifetime warranty (Kiara), this is indeed recommended for mobile use!

Note: Model reviewed here is SDSDQUA-064G