Remember microSD cards? While it’s pretty rare to find a modern smartphone that can take advantage of them, things like drones, action cameras, and handheld consoles like the Nintendo Switch still rely heavily on these cards for storage – and as always, the bigger and faster the card, the better.
Samsung is introducing new Pro Plus and Evo Plus microSD cards with capacities up to 1TB. The average Switch game is around 10GB, so you can store about 90 of them (keep in mind that there is some file system overhead), though some are larger. For example, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition is almost 40GB.
The new Samsung Pro Plus microSD card
These new cards use a new 28nm controller, which is more power efficient than the 55nm controllers used in older microSD cards. The new controller also supports Low Density Parity Check error correction code, which improves the card’s durability when it comes to write and erase cycles. The performance improvement is also attributed to the card’s use of 8th Generation V-NAND technology.
The new Samsung Pro Plus cards are quite fast, promising up to 180MB/s sequential read and up to 130MB/s sequential write speeds. The Evo Plus cards are a bit slower with 160MB/s read and 120MB/s write speeds. The cards are rated A2 for application storage, while U3 and V30 are rated for general file storage and 4K video recording.
The new Samsung Evo Plus microSD card
These come in several sizes: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. The Evo Plus model also has a 64GB version, but it’s much slower: 60MB/s read, 20MB/s write, and is only A1/U1/V10-rated. All cards come with a 10-year limited warranty. They are designed to withstand water, high temperatures, x-rays, and magnetic fields.
The new cards are already available worldwide. The faster Pro Plus models start at $25 for a 128GB card and go up to $154 for the 1TB model. The Evo Plus is cheaper, with the 1TB model costing $132 (and the 64GB costs $13, but as mentioned above, it’s much slower).