When I was asked by Kioxia to review one of their new Exceria Plus MicroSDXC cards I was wondering if there still was any innovation in MicroSD cards. They have been around for a long time, and by now most of you probably have used or at least seen them once. The MicroSD cards keep amazing me with their small size, as you can see in the photo below it is smaller than a Euro coin.
Some time ago I reviewed an extra durable MicroSD card by Kioxia, I was impressed by the cards performance and durability. But what amazed me most was the memory size, 128GB in such a small package. I still can’t wrap my head around have so much storage in such a small card. Today I was amazed even more by Kioxia as the Exceria Plus MicroSDXC card I’m using for this review offers a whopping 1 TB of storage! Yes, you read that correctly 1 TB or 1000 GB or 833.333 high density floppy disks!
The Exceria Plus MicroSDXC card
The card itself is just an other MicroSD card. It lacks the flashy colours some other manufacturers use and is just plain black. And it doesn’t come with a lot of information on the card itself (there isn’t any place to write a lot to be honest). The packaging offers a little more information. The card is certified SDXC I, V30, U3, class10 and A1. If you are wondering what that all means: it’s fast enough for almost any application. So writing 4K high quality video to the card shouldn’t be a problem, given your device can write fast enough. The card is rated at 100 MB/s for reading and up to 85 MB/s writing.
Besides its impressive speed the Exceria Plus MicroSDXC card is IPX7 rated waterproof. Meaning that it will at least withstand submerging in 1 meter of water for 30 minutes. It is also shock-, and röntgen proof and has built-in overheating protection. Operation temperatures range from -25 up to 85 degrees Celsius. It is supplied with a SD adapter. Oh and of course it comes with a 5 year limited warranty if anything should go wrong with it despite all its durability ratings.
Performance
Of course I’ve tested the claimed speed rating of the Kioxia card. I used a M1 Mac and put the card in my USB-C connected Satechi dock. Using the BlackMagic Disk Speed test it almost reached the promised speeds as you can see in the image below. Write speed went all the way up to 83,5 MB/s. Read speed reached a very impressive 90,5 MB/s, but to be honest that is a little short of the promised 100 MB/s.
Because I’ve come to expect Kioxia memory products to reach at least the promised speeds I’ve also tested the card in a Windows 11 laptop. In that test I’ve reached about the same write speed and a little higher read speed of 98 MB/s. That is well within the margin of error. So I have no problem believing Kioxia that the Exceria Plus MicroSDXC card is capable of reaching the promised speeds.
Torture test
Of course a MicroSD card like this is perfect to be used in a GoPro or Drone for high resolution video or images. With such a big capacity you can record a whole vacation on one card and still have more than enough room to spare. I’ve tried recording 4K video on the card with my Sony A7RIII using the supplied SD-adapter, but as expected the card didn’t break a sweat. So I thought about the best way to torture test the card, and decided to use it as the ‘TimeMachine’ drive for my Mac. My TimeMachine backup is about 890 GB big, writing all that data to a small MicroSD card is a real tough test.
As hoped the card didn’t have a problem with this. TimeMachine doesn’t use very high speed to fill the card, so the whole 1st back-up took about 5 hours to complete. That means 5 hours of continuous writing to the card to copy 890 GB of data. TimeMachine is definitely more demanding than shooting video, as that are short clips most of the time. So recording video shouldn’t be any problem for the Exceria Plus MicroSDXC card at all. The card did get very hot to the touch, but that never had any impact on performance. And of course it is equipped with overheating protection so when things get to hot it will safe itself and you data.
Conclusion
If you are looking for a durable and big MicroSDXC card I’d certainly look at the Kioxia Exceria Plus MicroSDXC UHS-I 1TB card. It is fast, has got a lot storage space and didn’t break a sweat when I tried to overload it. If you don’t need such 1 TB of storage it is good to know Exceria Plus cards are available in different sizes starting at 32 GB all the way up to the 1 TB version I’ve used for this review.