INTRODUCTION

   When out to get a brand new memory card for our digital cameras, smartphones, tablets, car stereos and even MP3/MP4 players most consumers don't really care much about performance and so price and capacity are usually the two decisive factors. Still demanding users and professionals alike almost always look to equip their brand new devices/equipment with the fastest possible memory cards and so for them price usually comes third after performance and capacity. Recently the SD Association announced their new standard called SD Express which according to them by adding PCI Express and NVMe interfaces can boost performance of SD cards to an impressive data transfer rate of up to 985MB/s (roughly 3 times faster compared to the fastest models available today) with a capacity of up to 128TB (64 times larger compared to what we have today - 2TB). Because of this we decided to start a whole new reviews section by doing a comparison between the latest Canvas series of cards released by Kingston and the latest Exceria series of cards released by Toshiba.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America.

   Toshiba Memory Europe GmbH (TME) is the European business of the Toshiba Memory Corporation (TMC). Our company offers a broad product line of high-end flash memory products, including SD Cards, USB sticks, micro SDs and embedded memory components, in addition to solid state drives (SSD). TME maintains offices in Germany, France, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

   For today’s comparison we got the Kingston Canvas Select, Go and React cards (both SD and Micro SD models - covered by a lifetime warranty) and the Toshiba M203, Exceria M303 and Exceria M402 Pro cards (micro SD with SD adapters - covered by a limited 5 year warranty). In order for our comparison to be as fair as it can possibly be we got the 128GB variants of all the cards mentioned and since some of you have asked in the past in order to check for possible performance differences between capacities we also got the 256GB variant of the Canvas Select micro SD card. These are currently the fastest cards both Kingston and Toshiba currently have in their product portfolio and although they are not the fastest ones around as you will also see later on the do very well and some of them can be easily used even for 4k recording (as advertised).

SPECIFICATIONS AND FEATURES

THE CANVAS AND EXCERIA CARDS

All of the cards arrived in blister packages (due to an error on our part the Canvas SD cards are not shown here - not with their packages).

The SD canvas cards by Kingston have different stickers on top with the model name and capacity but that's just about their only difference.

On the other hand due to their tiny size the micro SD Canvas cards have everything printed on their body.

The Toshiba micro SD cards are the same but as you can see Toshiba also bundles SD card adapters (the Pro model also comes with a 1 year subscription for the LC Technology Data Recovery Software).

To make things more interesting we will also be testing several other SD and micro SD cards we have in the office most of which are brand new (of course a couple of these date all the way back to 2015).

We wanted one of the latest memory card readers for this test so we'll be using the FCR-HS4 USB 3.0 High-Speed media reader by Kingston.

TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY

   Memory cards are pretty much identical to flash drives so to make things easier for everyone we'll be using roughly the same testing methodology to successfully record achieved read and write data transfer numbers. The benchmark suites we'll be using for our memory card tests are HD Tune Pro (Read - Write average and max speeds), AIDA 64 Engineer Edition (Average Linear Read / Random Read - Write performance), Crystal Disk Mark x64 (4GB Read / Write speeds) and ATTO (Average Read / Write speeds). Every test is repeated a total of 6 times after which the average performance numbers are recorded into our charts (0 = we were unable to complete that test).

   As with all our storage reviews all tests are performed on our main rig running Microsoft Windows 10 Pro installation on a HyperX Predator 480GB PCIe SSD with all updates installed up to the 29th of June 2018 (for ATTO and Crystal Disk Mark cards are formatted using the NTFS file system – however partitions need to be removed for the write tests of both AIDA 64 and HD Tune Pro).

TEST RESULTS – SD CARDS

TEST RESULTS – MICRO SD CARDS

CONCLUSION

   After receiving hundreds of emails and messages in social media over the past 3 years by many of you asking for SD and micro SD card reviews we decided it would be a nice step forward and so this is what today’s comparison is all about. Of course things are not as easy as we thought (when are they?) and so although the Exceria Pro and the Canvas React should easily surpass their lower-end counterparts in some performance tests that’s not the case. Overall however both the Exceria M402 Pro and the Canvas React series offer the best balance between read and write performance (they excel in write) and we expect that for most demanding consumers it's the one thing that will matter the most. Worth mentioning is that we saw no performance gains when benchmarking both the Canvas Select 128GB and 256GB variants and although this may not apply for every memory card out there (I’ve heard that there’s significant difference between different capacity models of some brands – haven’t seen it yet however, not with memory cards) it’s safe to assume that’s not the case for these lines. Also since both the Canvas React Micro SDXC 128GB and the Exceria M402 Pro Micro SDXC 128GB exchange blows in our tests (the score is precisely even) warranty and price will be the decisive factors (and Kingston clearly leads with their lifetime warranty).

   Right now the Kingston Canvas React 128GB SDXC model retails for USD55.19 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 55Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk) while the Micro SDXC model goes for USD64.36 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 81Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk). On the other hand the Toshiba Exceria M402 Pro 128GB Micro SDXC card may not be available in the USA (at least we were unable to find it) but it retails for around 60-70Euros inside the EU. At the end of the day whichever of these two cards you get you will not be disappointed and since they also exchange blows in warranty and price (Kingston gets the former while Toshiba gets the latter) we think it’s only fair to award both with our Golden Award.

PROS

- High Performance
- 128GB Capacity
- Durability
- Lifetime Warranty (Kingston Canvas React)
- 5 Year Warranty (Toshiba Exceria M402 Pro)
- LC Technology Data Recovery Software / 1 Year License (Toshiba Exceria M402 Pro)
- Included SD Adapter (Toshiba Exceria M402 Pro)
- Price (Toshiba Exceria M402 Pro)

CONS

- Availability (Toshiba Exceria M402 Pro)
- No SD Adapter (Kingston Canvas React)
- Price (Kingston Canvas React)