The Samsung 64GB EVO Select microSD Card is one of the best SD cards available and an extremely competitive storage option that buyers should consider whether or not they were initially looking for an SD card in the microSD format. It offers consistent and fast performance at a price that should get anyone’s attention. There are a lot of flashier looking options out there that make bolder marketing claims, but the EVO Select is still the right pick for most shoppers. Let’s take a look at why.
Design: Fairly generic
The Samsung 64GB EVO Select microSD Card features a white and green design, and also includes a full-sized SD card adapter in the packaging. The card displays a U3 speed rating, good for at least 30 MB/s of sequential write performance. Samsung also claims “Transfer Speed up to 100 MB/s”, which if you read the fine print is describing read speeds, not write speeds. Samsung might not have reached this exact figure in our tests, but the results are still impressive, as you will see later.
Setup Process: No sweat
The Samsung 64GB EVO Select microSD Card requires about as much setup as you would expect from an SD card. Remove it from the package and begin using it right away. If you need to use it in a device with a full-size SD slot, make use of the included adapter.
Performance: Very Consistent
The Samsung 64GB EVO Select microSD Card features a U3 rating, which means you will see sequential write speeds of no less than 30 MB/s. This is only a minimum, however, and you can expect to see better speeds on average from this card. The EVO Select consistently achieved 65 MB/s write speeds in both CrystalDiskMark’s 1 GiB sequential write speed test and Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test. We noticed a lot more variation in speeds on other cards, which is less desirable. Read speeds were similarly consistent at 88 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark and 92 MB/s in Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test. We haven’t seen read speeds vary too much between the UHS-I cards that we have tested, so there were no surprises here. Overall, these results are great news for most buyers. These speeds will be more than suitable to record 4K and beyond—at least at the bitrates that most mirrorless cameras use. The only scenario in which the EVO Select’s 65 MB/s write speed will come up short is when trying to record ProRes or Raw footage on more demanding cameras like the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K. This camera requires speeds of up to 483 MB/s on the most demanding codec, outstripping even the theoretical limit of UHS-II SD cards, let alone a UHS-I card like the EVO Select.
Price: Dominantly priced
The Samsung 64GB EVO Select microSD Card can be found for $12, with little variation in price over the past 3 months. This makes it one of the best deals on the market, at $0.18 per GB. Any way you look at it, the EVO Select is really great deal.
Samsung 64GB EVO Select vs. SanDisk Ultra 32GB SDHC
The SanDisk Ultra performs significantly worse (~20 MB/s vs 65 MB/s write speed) and costs more per GB than the EVO Select. We can confidently recommend it over this card. The Samsung 64GB EVO Select is the best overall UHS-I SD card that we tested. It offers the best performance per dollar by any metric, and showed consistently reliable performance across every test. Buyers that don’t need speeds that reach into UHS-II territory should definitely consider this card.
