PNY 1.5TB PRO Elite Prime microSDXC Performance
Despite its small physical size, this drive stores a lot.
As a quick capacity check, we can see our exFAT formatted microSDXC card is 1.35TB.
Like the 1.5TB Ultra drive, we tried it in the Insta360 X4 an 8K 360 degree camera.
Unlike the 1.5TB SanDisk Ultra drive, this PNY 1.5TB V30 drive does not give us a warning at 8K 30fps. Instead, the camera reports it is ready to go with just under 20 hours of recording capacity.
Copying data from an internal SSD to the PNY Pro Elite Prime 1.5TB, we got 103MB/s.
Compare that to the SanDisk Ultra 1.5TB card, and you will immediately see the difference in consistency and speed.
On the return trip, copying the 8K video back to the SSD (the folder was called SanDisk 1.5TB ha!) The speed was very consistent and fast.
The bigger use for this is perhaps as a storage device for smaller systems like the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano or Raspberry Pi where space is at a premium. The A2 rating tells us this is designed to run applications.
This is not fast enough for faster applications that need SSDs, nor even fast 8K cameras that require at least V90 cards. Still it is hard to argue with the performance.
Final Words
The obvious point here is that the naming might be the silliest we have seen. If you have to call your card the “PRO Elite Prime” then it makes you wonder what are the other options out there, especially since this is not a V60 nor a V90 card. Still, it is only about $10 more than the SanDisk 1.5TB Ultra V10 A1 card so you are getting a lot more performance for the jump from $99 to $109. At the same time, the price per TB is considerably better than the SanDisk 2TB Extreme V30 A2 card which adds 33% more capacity, but at around an 80% higher cost. PNY certainly feels like it is a better value unless you solely need capacity per dollar.
There are so many devices out there that use microSDXC cards for storage that seeing these capacity points that rival many M.2 SSDs is great to see. Finally these small systems can access lots of storage and the PNY card certainly brings us one step closer to having big capacity in small systems and cameras.
Where to Buy
We purchased our 1.5TB card on Amazon. Here is the affiliate link.
No way I would buy another PNY SD card. Everyone I’ve had has died within a couple of years of infrequent use. I’ve never had that problem with Sandisk or Samsung.
What is the unpowered data retention spec on these things? I have a feeling it is somewhere between a shrug and dont ask…
I wouldn’t trust PNY with with 1.5TB unless I had it in some sort or RAID array
@Pete Mitchell: Every Samsung card I’ve used in a Raspberry Pi (running 24/7) has died within a year too (well they fall back to read-only mode) so even a big brand name is no guarantee. At least with Samsung though you can send them back and they’ll replace them.
I think at this point anybody only storing one copy of their data is just asking for trouble, regardless of device or brand.
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