SanDisk Extreme and Extreme PRO Memory Cards Review

Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

Readers are often interested in the type of flash being used inside the memory cards. While manufacturers such as ADATA are quite open about the type of flash used, most are not. SanDisk falls in the latter category, and it is not clear whether the cards that we have reviewed carry MLC or TLC flash.

In addition to raw performance and consistency, pricing is also an important aspect. This is particularly important in the casual user and semi-professional markets, where the value for money metric often trumps benchmark numbers. The table below presents the relevant data for the various memory cards we have evaluated so far. The cards are ordered by the $/GB metric.

Considering the UHS-II cards alone, the SanDisk Extreme PRO has the worst pricing of all. The ADATA Premier ONE deliver comparable performance at a much better price point.

Consumers considering the SanDisk Extreme UHS-I card can rest easy. Amongst the UHS-I cards, it has the most consistent performance and also the lowest pricing (in terms of USD/GB). On the UHS-II front, the Extreme PRO delivers similar performance to the Lexar 1800x card, and is more consistent compared to the ADATA Premier ONE (despite losing out on a number of benchmarks to it). At $1.61/GB, the Extreme PRO represents the right balance of performance and cost.

The SanDisk Extreme PRO CF card does not perform as well as the Lexar equivalent, and it costs significantly more. The Lexard card is the more sensible choice here, while users looking for higher capacity cards might find the FreeTail offerings more attractive.

CFast cards tend to be priced quite high despite just being SATA SSDs in a different form factor. The firmware is obviously more optimized for real-time multimedia recording use-cases. Our pool of evaluated CFast cards is small. Even though they are at different capacity points, and it is not exactly fair to make a comparison, we have to note that the Lexar CFast card offers much better performance and consistency compared to the SanDisk Extreme PRO 64GB version. The cost per GB metric is also in favor of the Lexar card.

SanDisk is one of the few vendors with a comprehensive memory card portfolio. We evaluated a number of their memory cards across different formats for their performance, consistency, and pricing aspects. All the evaluated cards emerged unscathed from our evaluation routine. Performance is acceptable for the speed classes targeted by the cards. In particular, the microSDXC offerings are very compelling and provide great value for money.