Pros & Cons
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- Extremely high speed rating.
- High video recording speeds.
- Comes with USB 3.0 adapter.
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- Not as fast at transferring files as other cards.
MicroSD memory cards can help make a cramped phone or tablet feel roomy. They're an affordable way to expand space, often costing less than the price of jumping up to the next level of internal memory. Many Android and Windows phones and tablets, especially models by Samsung and LG, have microSD slots, and many people swear by them.
Memory cards come in a perplexing, tiered set of speed levels and capacities. Mainstream cards currently run up to 128GB, with speed ratings from 10MBps up to the Lexar 633x's claimed 95MBps. That super-duper speed rating is part of why the 633x came with our GoPro Hero 3+ Silver Edition action camera. In ordinary PC and mobile use, though, we found the SanDisk Extreme 64GB card to offer better performance at a better price.
SD card list prices are nonsense. The Lexar 633x lists for $93.99, but you're likely to find it in the $60-70 range. Still, though, that's a little more expensive than the competing SanDisk Extreme and Leef Pro, at least in the real world. The 633x does come with a USB 3.0 adapter for your desktop PC, though, where the other cards just come with microSD-to-SD adapters.
We tested several recent microSD cards using the A1 SD Benchmark program on a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 , the XBench disk benchmark program on an Apple MacBook Pro, and by transferring a 2.4GB file to and from the card when it was plugged directly into the MacBook Pro's SD card slot.
The Lexar 633x came in just about as fast as the SanDisk Extreme, except in one relatively rare use case for mobile: random reads, where it guttered out on three successive tests.
In most mobile uses, sequential read and write speeds are a lot more important than random read and write speeds. Copying and playing photos, videos, and music all use sequential reads and writes, and that's what most people do with their microSD cards. Random reads and writes are done more often when running an OS or application off the card, a much less common use.
Looking more closely at the benchmark results, I noticed that the 633x is actually tuned for large, sequential writes—basically, what a GoPro does all day. The two tests where it outpaced the SanDisk Extreme were on part of our large file copy test and on the XBench Sequential 256KB Write test, where it got 26MBps to the SanDisk's 20MBps. That shows how much this card is focused on video recording.
For making movies, taking photos, and especially recording those GoPro videos, the Lexar 633x will do just fine. That said, the SanDisk Extreme 64GB is our Editors' Choice for having more balanced price and performance in a range of mobile use cases.
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