Kingston 64GB UHS-I U3 microSDXC Review

By Steven Kean

Benchmark Performance

Testing the speed of the Kingston UHS-I microSDXC card in a camera is difficult as it all comes down to how you perceive the speed is. So to test the speed of the card, we will use standard synthetic benchmarks to evaluate the Kingston card against a standard Kingston 32GB microSD and a Sandisk Extreme Pro 64GB, which is rated for similar speeds as the new Kingston.

All testing was completed using a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port on a Gigabyte Z97MX-Gaming 5 motherboard while running Windows 8.1 with Update 1 and all the latest drivers.

CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 is a good benchmark to gauge how well a drive will perform. Many of the drive manufacturers have used this benchmark to show off the performance of their drives. It provides a quick benchmark of Sequential and Random read/writes, and included a NCQ with a queue depth of 32.
Kingston-64GB-microSD-CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is showing that the Kingston SDCA3/64GB performs rather well overall considering it is a microSD card. One bit of concern is the writing of 512K blocks, the 0.852 MB/s score seems to be rather low.

Kingston UHS-I Class 3 CrystalDiskMark

Obviously the Kingston SDCA3 card is going to perform much better than a standard microSD card, and at Sequential read/write is matches the Sandisk card.

ATTO
ATTO is another benchmark that will provide results over any type of drive; hard drives, SSD, USB and RAID arrays. It allows the user to set various factors such as data transfer size, length of transfer, queue depth and several other options. ATTO provides a wide range of results across the various lengths, we will take a closer look at three of these, and see how the data compares for the read and write speed.
Kingston-64GB-microSD-ATTO

ATTO reports similar results to CrystalDiskMark at the higher transfer size. Receiving 75.5MB/s write and 94.5MB/s read speeds at the highest transfer sizes.

Kingston UHS-I Class 3 ATTO

ATTO favors the Sandisk card a little when it comes to read speed, but is 0.5MB/s difference enough to care about. The write test shows a big difference between the Kingston and Sandisk cards, with the Kingston performing 15MB/s.