Samsung has been marketing SD and microSD cards for a few years now under the PRO Plus lineup in the UHS-I category. We looked at the 2020 lineup in detail a few years back. In 2021, the company updated this product line with increased read/write speeds of 160 MBps / 120 MBps. Today, the company is announcing new updates to the lineup with increased speeds of up to 180 MBps reads and 130 MBps writes. The new cards come with a V30 video speed class rating, guaranteeing a minimum write speed of 30 MBps even under worst-case conditions.

On the microSD front, Samsung is touting A2 application performance class for the new cards. These cards guarantee a minimum of 4000 random read IOPS and 2000 random write IOPS under all conditions. Given the increase in number of use-cases for microSD cards over SD cards - mobile devices, game consoles, drones, and action cameras, the PRO Plus microSD lineup includes a 512GB SKU for the new speeds. The PRO Plus SD lineup with the new speeds tops out at 256GB.

Samsung 2023 PRO Plus SD and microSD Lineup
  microSD SD
Capacity 512GB 256GB 128GB 256GB 128GB 64GB
Launch Pricing (Card) $60 $30 $19 $38 $22 $13
Launch Pricing (Card + Reader) $65 $38 $26 $50 $30 -
Interface UHS-I
SD Standard SDXC
Performance 180 MBps (R) / 130 MBps (W)
Speed Class U3, V30, A2, Class 10

The company is also having select SKUs available with a bundled USB 3.0 card reader. Note that UHS-I officially goes up to 104 MBps only. The higher speeds that make an appearance in the new SKUs' packaging is enabled by proprietary extensions (other manufacturers such as SanDisk and Lexar also adopt a similar strategy). Standard UHS-I card readers may not ingest from / write data to the new cards at the higher speeds.

The PRO Plus lineup continues with its promise of durability (ability to withstand extreme handling and storage conditions). Combined with the 10-year warranty, Samsung continues to target professional users with the lineup updates.

Source: Samsung

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  • ballsystemlord - Tuesday, April 11, 2023 - link

    They nuked the comments section?
  • Threska - Tuesday, April 11, 2023 - link

    Previous comments about why someone didn't like Samsung. Irrelevant to the article itself.
  • meacupla - Tuesday, April 11, 2023 - link

    No, I am pretty sure it's because those comments were generated by chatGPT, and just spamming. Like all the replies it gave were just repeating the comments, except long winded.
    And to think some people actually replied to it, hilarious.
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, April 11, 2023 - link

    "No, I am pretty sure it's because those comments were generated by chatGPT, and just spamming."

    Bingo. Just a spammer that was purged.

    All of the comments were in reply to their original comment, so all of those responses became unanchored when the parent comment was deleted.
  • ballsystemlord - Wednesday, April 12, 2023 - link

    So an AI knows more about to to speak your mind than you do? How are we supposed to resolve anything in our time if we cannot communicate without AIs?
  • Silver5urfer - Wednesday, April 12, 2023 - link

    Makes sense, I replied somewhat useful content to that OP on why Samsung smartphones are no more innovating by highlighting Apple, unfortunate that it's gone.
  • LiKenun - Wednesday, April 12, 2023 - link

    The consistency with which manufacturers release MicroSD cards with larger capacities than their full-sized counterparts puzzles me. Why is there any development of full-sized SD cards anymore if the MicroSD cards have higher capacities? Their entire full-sized SD card line-up might as well be MicroSD cards with permanently attached full-size adapters.
  • ZeDestructor - Wednesday, April 12, 2023 - link

    Mostly because most things (mainly small GoPro-style cameras, dashcams and portable consoles) still using SD and needing space use the microSD form factor.

    Most other things (larger cameras, basically) have moved to or are moving to CFExpress instead
  • LiKenun - Wednesday, April 12, 2023 - link

    That doesn’t shed any light into why a form factor with 9 times the volume only gets releases with half the capacity. The full-sized SD cards max out at 256GB, but the MicroSD cards go up to 512GB.

    In the case of Micron, they’ve gotten MicroSD cards to 1.5TB and Kioxia has demoed 2TB MicroSD cards. They literally could have done this for full-sized SD cards when they had 512GB MicroSD cards out in the market.
  • R7 - Friday, April 14, 2023 - link

    No they dont. SD cards are available at 1TB capacities - the same as MicroSDXC. And for those that need speed and have SD Express support a 512GB models offer nearly 1GB/s speeds: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=sm_sdhc&xf=15024_stan...

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