Going into this project, I didn’t know anything about OV — they were a brand I came across while browsing through microSD cards on AliExpress. I appreciated that they put at least a little bit of work in designing the artwork for both the packaging and the card, although the two designs seem to be completely different — almost as if two different people were working on the designs, and they weren’t coordinating with each other. It appears that this particular manufacturer has their own line of memory products — including not only microSD cards, but also USB flash drives, SSDs (both internal and external), and RAM.
The package and card bear a strange combination of conflicting speed class marks: the cards bear the Class 10, U3, V30, and A2 marks; the package has the Class 10, U1, U3, V10, V30, and A1 marks. (This would support my theory that the card artwork and the packaging were designed by two different people.) Despite the disagreement, none of the three samples performed well enough to meet the threshold for the U3, V30, A1, and A2 marks, though they did perform well enough to qualify for the Class 10 and U1 marks. The single best measurement was only good enough to put it in the 44th percentile. Random read speeds were particularly atrocious, scoring in the bottom 2% of all cards. I’ll throw in my standard disclaimer here: my performance testing methods do not align with those prescribed by the SD standard; it’s possible that they would have done better had they been tested under proper conditions — but somehow, I doubt they would have.
On the endurance front, however, these cards have actually been doing fairly well:
- Sample #1’s first error was an I/O error during round 405; however, it then took another 16,500 read/write cycles to hit the 0.1% failure threshold. It’s still chugging along, and has completed 17,325 read/write cycles in total so far.
- Sample #2’s first error was an address decoding error during round 2,203. It has completed 14,881 read/write cycles total so far.
- Sample #3’s first error was a four-sector wide address decoding error during round 2,538. It has survived 12,149 read/write cycles so far.
Overall? On the upside, they seem to be above average in terms of skimp and endurance…but on the downside, read/write performance was pretty terrible. I think my recommendation would be “don’t buy these — there are better options out there”. (For example, the Lexar Blue 633x 32GB has been just as reliable so far, and has outperformed this card in pretty much every respect.)
June 19, 2025 (current number of read/write cycles is updated automatically every hour)