Microdrive is a brand name that comes up fairly frequently in my AliExpress searches. This is a card that I bought during my first round of SD card purchases from AliExpress, and I very clearly remember the thing that stood out to me about these cards: Bart Simpson peeking in from the side of the card. I’m sure Fox would love to hear about this.
Now, a disclaimer: I think these were sold by Microdrive, but I’m not 100% certain. For the longest time, I had these in my list as simply “Unbranded Simpsons card” because I wasn’t sure they were Microdrive cards. The card itself doesn’t have any brand name on it, and neither does the package it came in — it came in a generic red package that had no brand name, no indication of the size of the card in the package, no speed markings, and no manufacturer information. It’s substantially identical to the packaging that several other off-brand/knockoff/fake cards came in. (What’s funny to me is that the package has a telephone icon that says “tech support” above it, but there’s no indication of where to go to get said tech support — there are no websites, no phone numbers, no mailing addresses…nothing.) However, these cards came from an AliExpress store called “MD Factory Promotional Store”, and many of the other products they sell are Microdrive branded — so I’m choosing to believe that these cards were made by Microdrive as well.
Curiously, sample #2’s CID data indicated a manufacturing date of January 2013 — which would have been more than 10 years before I purchased it — while samples #1 and #3 had more recent dates of May 2023 and June 2023, respectively. When I noticed this, I went back and re-read the CID from the card to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake (such as transcribing the CID value to my spreadsheet by hand and mistyping something) — but alas, I had it correct the first time. Given that sample #2’s packaging didn’t make it look like it had been sitting around for 10 years, I’m inclined to think that its manufacture date was a mistake, and that it was actually made more recently.
Performance measurements on these cards were pretty inconsistent — but overall, were just “meh”:
- Sequential read: Measurements ran the gamut from “slightly below average” to “slightly above average”. The worst of the three scores would put it into the 28th percentile (as of the time of this writing), while the best would put it into the 55th percentile.
- Sequential write: Measurements ran the gamut to “below average” to “more than one standard deviation above average”. The lowest of the three measurements scored in the 22nd percentile, while the highest scored in 82nd percentile.
- Random read: Measurements here were clustered more closely together — with all three coming in just slightly below average. The worst of the three measurements scored in the 39th percentile, while the best scored in the 49th percentile.
- Random write: Measurements here ran the gamut from “below average” to “above average”. The worst of the three measurements scored in 24th percentile, while the best scored in the 74th percentile.
These cards carry the U1 and Class 10 markings; performance on all three samples was good enough to qualify for both of these markings.
On the endurance front:
I don’t remember what Sample #1’s first error was — primarily because most of the endurance testing was done using an early version of my program that didn’t keep logs of that stuff. However, I know that during round 8,571, a large number of sectors started returning all
ff‘s, and it surpassed the 50% error threshold. I only have stats for the last 2,500 or so read/write cycles, so the graph of this card’s progression is going to be truncated to just those rounds:Sample #2’s first true1 error was a data loss error (where the sectors simply read back as all
ff‘s), during round 10,758, that affected about 10% of the sectors on the device. It then went another 80 read/write cycles with only a few errors. During round 10,839, however, 76% of the sectors on the device started returning allff‘s; at that point, the endurance test was declared “complete”. The endurance test graph for this one is going to be pretty boring, but here it is regardless:- Sample #3’s first error was a missing data error that affected around 1.6 million sectors (or about 5.22% of the total sectors on the card) during round 6,974. It has survived 37,715 read/write cycles in total so far.
Overall, I think I’m forced to conclude that these are decent cards. They’re not the best performers in terms of read/write speeds (although sample #3 bucked that trend), but so far they seem to have endured pretty well: as of the time of this writing, the average number of read/write cycles to the 0.1% failure threshold is sitting at about 7,400, and the average of these three was well above that mark. Of the 16GB cards that I’ve tested, this one has done the best (in terms of both performance and endurance) — but if you can handle something bigger than 16GB in your use case, there are plenty of other options out there that performed way better than this one did.
1Sample #2 did technically have an error during round 216; however, this was attributable to the code I was using at the time that handles device disconnects and reconnects. This issue has since been fixed.
June 18, 2025 (current number of read/write cycles is updated automatically every hour)