Since I ordered my Olympus E-M1II, I’ve felt the need to buy new SD memory cards as well, just to keep up with the data rates it can produce. But of course, cards’ labeled speeds aren’t necessarily all that accurate (“your mileage may vary,” as car ads used to say), so I took advantage of discounts and gift certificates to pick up one each of four name-brand cards, and tested their read / write speeds. What’s common among them:
- 32 GB capacity
- UHS-II / U-3 ratings
- Fastest SDHC card for their brand
For comparison, I also included one card that until recently *was* the fastest memory card I owned. So here are the contenders, in no particular order, with their current price at Amazon (just because Amazon sells all of them, so this keeps pricing somewhat consistent between them):
- Lexar Professional 1000x — advertised speed 150 MB/s (read), available at Amazon for $22.48. My “old standby.”
- Lexar Professional 2000x — advertised speed 300 MB/s (read), $54.95 at Amazon
- Delkin UHS-II — advertised speeds 250 MB/s (write) / 280 MB/s (read), $53.90 at Amazon
- Transcend — advertised speeds 180 MB/s (write) / 285 MB/s (read), $44.99 at Amazon
- SanDisk Extreme PRO — advertised speed 280 MB/s (read), $57.69 at Amazon