PNY Elite Performance SD Card

I’ve eyed some of PNY SD cards and SSDs on Amazon for some time. They are very affordably priced. But I’ve always been concerned if they are really all that good. So recently, after getting myself a new camera, and thus have a legit need for new high speed SD cards, I thought I’d give this PNY SD card a try.

The price for this PNY Elite Performance 64GB High Speed SDXC Class 10 UHS-1 Up to 90MB/sec Flash Card was only US$29.99 (US$34.95 at this time of writing), with free shipping to Singapore under the AmazonGlobal Saver program. Apart from SDXC Class 10 speed rating, it also supports UHS-I Speed Class 1.

PNY claims up to 90 MB/s transfer rate, which seems plenty fast. It’s far more than the SanDisk Extreme 45 MB/s that I’ve been using.

Naturally, I had to test this out myself. Here’s some Bonnie++ benchmark numbers for this PNY card, compared against the SanDisk Extreme 45 MB/s 32GB SD card I have.

	PNY Elite Performance 90 MB/s	SanDisk Extreme 45 MB/s
Sequential Write (MB/s)	65	42
Sequential Rewrite (MB/s)	38	22
Sequential Read (MB/s)	89	45
Random Seeks per second	1028	797

PNY’s speed claims seem to hold true, at least for reads. It’s practically double the sequential read speeds of the SanDisk Extreme.

Many people use SD cards for their DSLR cameras, and the write speeds are often more important to ensure that the camera can flush the image buffer quick enough to storage. PNY’s write performance, unfortunately, fell far short of 90 MB/s, but at 65 MB/s, it’s still pretty good.

I came across a comment on Amazon about how a “Card Full” error showed up even though the card was only 10% full. Just to test, I wrote about 39GB of stuff to the PNY card. The write was successful, the files appear to be intact, and my camera was still able to use the card. I’m guessing that Amazon commenter was just unlucky to receive a defective piece.

High speed SD cards are typically of most interest to DSLR users, or those with other kinds of digital cameras that need to write lots of image data awfully quickly to storage.

The full speed of this PNY Elite Performance SD Card is probably achievable only with the UHS-I bus interface. Therefore, you may want to check if your gadget supports UHS-I before getting this SD card.

Conclusion

The PNY Elite Performance 64GB High Speed SDXC Class 10 UHS-1 Up to 90MB/sec Flash Card seems to deliver great performance at low budget.

Pros:

• Read performance up to 90 MB/s

Cons:

• Write is slower at 65 MB/s

Amazon link: PNY Elite Performance 64GB High Speed SDXC Class 10 UHS-1 Up to 90MB/sec Flash Card