Prime Big Deal Days microSD Deals, Measured

The counterfeit floor, by capacity (computed live)

Floor = 45% of the median price per GB among cards at that capacity, recomputed on every load. A card below it is priced where a fake-capacity card would be - a reason to check, not proof. Capacity-matched, microSD Express costs about 71% more per GB than UHS-I today. How to spot a fake.

What to watch in microSD this event

microSD cards are cheap, small, and bought in volume during events - for consoles, cameras, dashcams and phones. That combination makes them the storage category most exposed to fake-capacity cards: a card that reports a large capacity to the device and silently loses data once a much smaller real capacity fills. A deep event discount on an unfamiliar listing is exactly how those cards are sold.

Every row above is one card, shown once, as its cheapest in-stock offer, with the condition of that offer in its own column. That is newer than it sounds: until September 2026 a card carrying both a new and a used offer appeared twice in our tables at two prices with nothing to say why. The fix now lives at the source query, and a site-wide check fails the build if any table repeats a product.

Speed marks on microSD are certification marks, and they are the part you can rely on: U1/U3, V10/V30/V60/V90 and A1/A2 are SD Association classes with defined minimums. Megabyte-per-second figures on the packaging are the manufacturer's own claim. SanDisk's higher UHS-I read figures depend on its own reader and exceed what the UHS-I bus is specified to carry; our microSD hub explains that in full.

Buy by the mark your device asks for, then by price per gigabyte at the capacity you need. A V30 card is what most 4K cameras need; A2 matters to handhelds and phones, not to cameras. Paying for a mark your device does not use buys nothing.

The counterfeit floor is the event-week defence

Our plausibility floor is computed live, never typed in: for each capacity it is 45% of the median price per gigabyte among established-brand cards at that capacity. A card priced beneath it is priced where a fake-capacity card would be priced. That does not prove it is counterfeit - it is a reason to check the seller and the listing before buying, not a verdict.

We are also honest about what the floor has done so far: in our seed run, the brand and shape gates rejected the suspicious listings before the floor had to, and the floor itself rejected none. Our spot-the-fake page says the same thing rather than implying the floor caught fakes. During an event, with new listings appearing daily, it is the gate most likely to matter.

The strongest defence remains the dull one: buy a brand that opens the listing title, from a seller you can identify, at a price that sits among the other established cards of that capacity - and test the card's real capacity when it arrives.

Match the card to the device before you match the price

The cheapest card per gigabyte is only a bargain if the device can use it. The Nintendo Switch 2 is the sharpest example: it accepts microSD Express cards only, and a UHS-I card of any speed class will not work for its games. Our Switch 2 page lists only cards that meet that requirement, with Nintendo's own support page as the source. Express cards cost more per gigabyte than UHS-I at the same capacity, and that premium is measured capacity-matched on this page rather than as a raw average that would say the opposite.

For cameras, the certification mark to read is the video speed class: V30 is what most 4K cameras and action cameras ask for, and paying for V60 or V90 buys nothing a V30 device uses. For phones, tablets and handhelds that run apps from the card, the app performance class - A1 or A2 - matters more than the video class. Dashcams and security cameras rewrite the card constantly, which is why endurance-rated lines exist; the endurance figure is the maker's own rating, not something we measure.

Capacity follows the device's own limit. Older devices may not address the largest cards, and the device maker's documentation is the place to check. Once the mark and the capacity are settled, the table above is the price answer - one row per card, condition shown, badge against its own record.

The trap: the too-cheap big card

The event trap in microSD is a 1TB or 512GB card at a price that looks like a lightning deal and is actually below what any genuine card of that size costs. Fake-capacity cards do not fail on day one; they fail when the real, much smaller capacity fills, and the photos or footage written past that point are gone.

Check the floor for the capacity, check that an established brand opens the title rather than appearing in it as 'compatible with', and test the card on arrival. None of that is slower than the checkout.

Frequently asked questions