We track 128 in-stock microSD cards across 8 established brands, priced from $0.1367 per gigabyte. The speed marks that matter are U3 and V30 for video and A2 for apps; everything quoted in MB/s is a manufacturer claim rather than a certified minimum. Cards are the most counterfeited storage product sold, so we publish a live price floor per capacity below.
Live prices updated ยท 14 microSD Express cards tracked ยท 14 Nintendo-licensed variants
A memory card carries a small crowd of symbols and most buyers read none of them. They are worth two minutes, because they are the only performance figures on the packaging that mean anything definite. Each is a certification mark issued against the SD Association's published specifications, and each guarantees a MINIMUM rather than describing a peak [source: SD Association].
| Class 10 | Guarantees at least 10MB/s sustained write. The oldest mark still in use, and the weakest. |
| U1 | UHS Speed Class 1 - at least 10MB/s sustained write. Same floor as Class 10, expressed on the UHS bus. |
| U3 | UHS Speed Class 3 - at least 30MB/s sustained write. The practical minimum for 4K video. |
| V10 | Video Speed Class 10 - at least 10MB/s sustained write, intended for HD recording. |
| V30 | At least 30MB/s sustained write. The mark most 4K cameras and action cams ask for. |
| V60 | At least 60MB/s sustained write. Needed for high-bitrate 4K and entry 8K. |
| V90 | At least 90MB/s sustained write. Professional 8K and high-frame-rate capture. |
| A1 | App Performance Class 1 - a minimum random read/write rate, which is what matters when a card runs apps rather than stores video. |
| A2 | App Performance Class 2 - a higher random-access floor than A1. Relevant to handhelds and phones, not to cameras. |
The practical reading: for video, find the V mark and ignore the rest. For a device that runs applications from the card - a handheld console, a phone using adoptable storage - the A mark is the one that changes how the device feels, and it is unrelated to the V mark. A card can be excellent at one and ordinary at the other, because they measure different operations.
Almost every microSD card sold in the last decade runs on the UHS-I bus, which the SD specification defines with an interface ceiling of 104MB/s. That number is the reason for a persistent piece of confusion: cards are routinely advertised at 150, 190 or 200MB/s read, and those figures are real measurements taken with the manufacturer's own reader hardware rather than the standard bus.
Figures above roughly 104MB/s on a UHS-I card are the manufacturer's own claim and depend on a proprietary reader: the UHS-I bus itself is specified to 104MB/s, so a standard card reader or a camera will not reach them.
microSD Express is a genuinely different bus. It carries PCIe and NVMe over additional contact rows on the back of the card - the same protocols an internal SSD uses - which lifts the ceiling by an order of magnitude rather than a percentage [source: SD Association]. It has existed on paper since 2018 and almost nothing used it, which is why you have probably never seen one.
That changed with the Nintendo Switch 2, which requires microSD Express for game storage and will not accept an ordinary UHS-I card for it [source: Nintendo]. A single console has created the format's first mass market, and the price reflects exactly that.
Cheapest in-stock card per gigabyte at each capacity, UHS-I against Express, from our own catalogue. Matched at capacity deliberately - see the note below the table.
| Capacity | UHS-I floor | Express floor | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| 256GB | $0.1484/GB | $0.1953/GB | +32% |
| 512GB | $0.1367/GB | $0.1976/GB | +45% |
| 1TB | $0.166/GB | $0.3418/GB | +106% |
Averaged across the capacities where we hold both, Express costs 61% more per gigabyte than UHS-I. That is the generation tax on Switch 2 storage, and it is the number the launch coverage did not put a figure on.
Why capacity-matched: comparing the plain average of all Express cards against the plain average of all UHS-I cards on our catalogue returns MINUS 9% - Express appearing cheaper. It is not. Every Express card on the market is 256GB or larger, while UHS-I includes a tail of small cards that are expensive per gigabyte, so the unmatched average measures the mix of capacities rather than the cost of the bus. Matched at the same capacity, the premium is real and large.
Memory cards are the most counterfeited storage product on the market, and the reason is structural rather than incidental: the product is small, the packaging is easy to imitate, the capacity is invisible until you fill it, and the controller inside can simply be told to lie. The classic fake is a small card - often 32 or 64GB of real flash - reflashed to report 1TB to the operating system. It mounts, it formats, it shows the right size, and it silently discards everything written past its real capacity. Owners typically discover it months later when the photos they trusted it with will not open.
Price is the tell that works before purchase. A seller shipping 64GB of flash while charging for 1TB can undercut the genuine market by a margin no legitimate supply chain can match. So we compute a plausibility floor per capacity from the established-brand listings we track and reject anything sitting far beneath it at the point of seeding, before it reaches a page.
Recomputed from current prices, not hardcoded. A listing beneath the floor for its capacity is not proven counterfeit - it is priced where a fake-capacity card would be priced, which is a reason to check rather than a verdict.
| Capacity | Median $/GB | Floor | Based on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 64GB | $0.4959 | $0.2231 | 6 listings |
| 128GB | $0.3124 | $0.1406 | 32 listings |
| 256GB | $0.2656 | $0.1195 | 46 listings |
| 512GB | $0.2265 | $0.1019 | 28 listings |
| 1TB | $0.2617 | $0.1178 | 14 listings |
The full method, the tells that do not involve price, and the community-standard tools for verifying a card after it arrives are on our spot-the-fake page, along with the rejection statistics from building this catalogue.
The honest answer for most buyers is that the requirement is set by the device, not by the card, and paying above that requirement buys nothing. A dashcam rewriting the same card every day needs endurance rather than speed. A Switch 2 needs a bus that most cards do not have. An action camera needs a sustained-write floor and does not care about random access. The Switch 2 page below states the platform's documented requirement with Nintendo's own citation attached; per-device pages for the original Switch, action cameras and dashcams follow the same pattern and are in progress.
Every major manufacturer sells a good, better and best ladder, and the names carry across product types in a way that causes real confusion. SanDisk's Ultra, Extreme and Extreme Pro exist as microSD cards, as full-size SD cards, as USB sticks and as portable SSDs, and the specifications behind the same word are different in each. Our SanDisk hub lays that out as a matrix, because it is the single most common way a buyer ends up with the wrong product.
Across brands the tiers line up roughly: an entry line certified to U1 or Class 10 for general storage, a mid line at U3 and V30 for video, and a premium line whose certification usually matches the mid line while claiming a higher peak read speed. Where a manufacturer publishes an endurance rating rather than a speed rating - the dashcam and security-camera lines - that is a different axis entirely and the one that matters for continuous recording.
They are SD Association certification marks, not marketing. U3 and V30 both guarantee a minimum sustained write of 30MB/s, which is the practical floor for 4K video. A2 is a random-access rating and matters when a card runs apps rather than records video - a handheld console or a phone cares about it; a dashcam does not. A card can carry several marks at once because they measure different things.
For the thing most buyers care about - sustained write, which is what determines whether video recording drops frames - the certification mark is the answer, and two cards carrying V30 are both guaranteed the same 30MB/s floor regardless of price. What the premium usually buys is a higher advertised peak READ speed, which is the manufacturer's own claim rather than a certified minimum, and on a UHS-I card those headline figures need a proprietary reader to reach.
It is a different bus. Standard microSD runs on UHS-I, which is specified to 104MB/s; SD Express carries PCIe and NVMe over the card's extra pin rows and is dramatically faster. You need it only if your device requires it. The Nintendo Switch 2 does for game storage, which is the reason the format suddenly matters. For a camera, a phone or a dashcam it buys nothing today.
Different technology on a different cost curve. A hard drive stores data on spinning platters and reaches single-digit dollars per terabyte at the cheap end; a memory card is NAND flash in a package the size of a fingernail. Our own catalogue currently puts the cheapest tracked microSD near $0.1367 per gigabyte, which is roughly a hundred times the cost per unit of capacity of a bulk hard drive. You are paying for physical size and portability, not storage.
Price is the most reliable tell available before purchase. The dominant scam in this category is a small card reflashed to report a large capacity, and it is sold far below what the flash inside a genuine card costs. We compute a plausibility floor per capacity from the established-brand listings we track and publish it live - see the counterfeit section below, and our spot-the-fake page for the full method and the tools that verify a card after it arrives.
Sometimes, and our tables make it checkable rather than assumed. Cards genuinely retail in 2- and 5-packs, so every price in our tables is the PER-CARD price and the pack size is shown alongside it. That means the cost-per-gigabyte column compares a single card against a card from a five-pack honestly, which a listing page does not do for you.
It matters more here than in most storage categories, and not mainly for performance. Memory cards are the most counterfeited storage product sold, and the counterfeits cluster around the best-known names because that is what people search for. Buying an established brand from a listing that survives a price sanity check is the practical defence; the flash inside a genuine card of any major brand will meet its certification marks.