Pros & Cons
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- Most capacious microSD card ever.
- Fast enough for 4K video.
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- Expensive per gigabyte.
- Not fast compared with competition.
SanDisk Ultra MicroSDXC UHS-I 200GB Card Specs
| Capacity (Tested) | 200 |
The 200GB SanDisk Ultra MicroSDXC UHS-I is the most spacious microSD card in the universe. It's an amazing feat of engineering—this card can hold 200GB of data, and it can fit inside your nostril. (Don't inhale!) It isn't the fastest card out there, and you'll pay a premium ($249.99) to be on the bleeding edge of SD card capacity. But it's a great option for action cam or hi-res audio users, who know that every last drop of storage counts.
Who Needs 200GB?
Full-sized, 256GB SD cards have existed for years now, and they cost half of what this one does. They're what you should get for your D-SLR. The Ultra 200GB is for a smartphones, action cameras, or media players.
So why do you want a 200GB card? There are two big reasons I can think of: uncompressed music and 4K video.
If you like listening to high-quality, uncompressed music from HDTracks, those files take up about 20MB per one minute of music. With an average four-minute track, you can store about 800 tracks on a 64GB card. The 200GB card gets you up to 2,500 high-definition tracks.
One minute of 4K video recorded with the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge is 365MB, which means you can store slightly less than three hours of video on a 64GB card if you're doing absolutely nothing else. With the 200GB card, you're up to nine hours. This can make a big difference if you're, say, on a ski vacation and don't feel like downloading your video to your laptop until you get home.
Compatibility
While we've never seen a 200GB microSD card before, it's well within the existing SDXC spec which most phones from 2012 or later should support. We tried it in a Huawei Mate S, an LG G4 , a Moto X Pure , a Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime, a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, a Samsung Galaxy Note Edge, and a Samsung Galaxy S5 ; in all of them, the card read as having 183GB free. I also used it in a GoPro Hero 4 Session action camera, where it reported having more than 16 hours of recording capacity at1440p.
You might have trouble in some older devices, though. A 2011 MacBook Pro had issues reading the card, as did an HP Touchsmart 620 PC from the same year. A range of 2013-2015 laptops and desktops had no trouble at all. That makes sense, as SDXC compatibility really became widespread in 2011-2012.
Performance and Pricing
Performance is good, but not best-in-class. On benchmarks (below), the card's write speeds don't quite match up to the SanDisk Extreme lineup of products. Unless you're writing a lot of large files using a PC, though, I don't think that will matter. In practice, I had no problems recording 4K video with the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge, or 1440p video with the Hero4 Session. This card is UHS-I certified and is fast enough to work in your camera.
There's one major problem here, and it isn't anything SanDisk has done. Some major phone makers, most notably Samsung, are now moving away from microSD card slots entirely, leaving nowhere to put your tiny/gigantic bit of solid state memory. Of the current latest flagship phones in the U.S., the HTC One M9 , the LG G4, and the Moto X Pure still support microSD cards.
SanDisk tends to provide inflated list prices, so to compare the 200GB card with other SanDisk products, we used Amazon pricing. At $199.99, you're paying $1 per gigabyte here. That's a considerable premium over the 128GB and 64GB Ultra cards, which offer the same performance for 47 cents/GB, or the 64GB Extreme Pro card, which is even faster, at 76 cents/GB. In other words, if you buy this card, you better be prepared to fill it; otherwise you're wasting your money.
Our Editors' Choice remains the SanDisk Extreme 64GB , which offers a great balance of price, reliability, and performance at 62 cents per GB, and will probably satisfy the broadest range of buyers. Like the faster Extreme Pro lineup, the 200GB card is destined to thrill a passionate niche.