You may wonder, is the Sandisk Extreme Pro worth it, and the simple answer is yes. This card can easily handle 4K video recording, along with bursts of photos, taking the longest of any memory card tested to hit buffering.

SanDisk Memory cards | Argos SanDisk Memory cards | Argos

One question. How did you test real world performance so the Extreme comes the same or a bit faster ? If you look at the read speeds for the Sandisk SD Ultra vs Extreme, you find that they show a similar story, at 116 – 153 MB / sec for the Extreme and 90 – 100 MB / sec for the Ultra. I'm that 5G guy. I've actually been here for every "G." I've reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also write a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsess about phones and networks. If you want to know whether to get the Sandisk Extreme or Ultra, you can directly compare the Sandisk Extreme vs Ultra in the table below. Looking at the stats, it’s clear that of the Sandisk Ultra vs Sandisk Extreme, the Extreme is the better card. Now that you know all about the specifications of each kind of card as well as the importance of the read and write speeds, you can move on to learning about each card, its features as well as its pros and cons.Bear in mind that quoted Maximum Read Speeds are likely to be about double the real world performance you will see. Although the Sandisk cards are widely considered to be the best brand of SD and Micro SD card, the new challenger PNY also makes very good memory cards, for a lower price. PNY Elite Performance Both SanDisk Extreme Pro and Extreme Plus features a 30 MB per second minimum write speeds which doesn’t separate them apart at least on video recording. SD Read Speed

SanDisk Extreme 256 GB microSDXC Memory Card + SD Adapter

SanDisk memory cards are among the most popular models of SD card and are often the preferred choice, particularly by photographers and videographers – I use them myself. This memory card offers faster and higher speeds when it comes to both writing and reading speeds. The writing speed for these is usually up to 90 MB/s while the reading speed is up to 170 MB/s, with even the 10 MB/s difference making a huge impact on how your data gets read and transferred. The sequential write speed for each memory card refers to the speed at which writing can be maintained over longer time lengths. This is a figure from testing in an R&D lab, and it is not clear from my research exactly what length of time the sequential write speed is measured over, but this is likely to be a few minutes. In this case, the SanDisk Extreme Pro is 5 MB per second faster which is rated at 95 MB per second compared to the SanDisk Extreme Plus that is rated at 90 MB per second. This may not be a lot of difference on paper but believe me, you would thank that extra 5 MB per second in the long run.This means that when comparing the Ultra vs Extreme SD cards, the Sandisk Extreme is about twice as fast when writing data as the Ultra, and means that your camera buffer will take longer to fill up with the Extreme. The SanDisk Extreme microSD card comes with rapid reading and writing speeds, the quoted speeds being 160 MB/s and 90 MB/s respectively, although real-world testing puts this at more like 94.6 MB/s read speed and 88.8 MB/s write speed.

SanDisk Extreme vs Extreme Plus FULL Comparison SanDisk Extreme vs Extreme Plus FULL Comparison

If you want to compare Sandisk Micro SD cards and SD cards, then the SD and MicroSD card specifications can be confusing. If you look at a card, like the one below, you see a number of different symbols (that I have highlighted inside the red box) that all mean different things. The PNY SD card is generally a very good performer, somewhere between the Sandisk Ultra Plus and Extreme. PNY do not state a maximum write speed, only that the maximum transfer speed is 95MB/s, although as in other cards, you may well see speeds slightly in excess of this in practice. If you use your camera for taking pictures, the data collected is stored on the camera’s buffer. Buffer is the temporary storage of the camera like RAM (Random Access Memory) on Computers. The camera then sends this data to the storage which is the SD Card. This is where SD Card’s write speeds are important. Faster write speeds mean the camera can capture another shot faster. The SanDisk Extreme Plus is another great choice for recording and storing high-resolution images and videos. There are various memory storage options that generally range from 64 GB to 1 TB, allowing you to opt for a capacity that can suit your requirements well.

I don’t have a UHS-II reader to hand so can’t test, but I wouldn’t be surprised if both cards got faster using one. Consider this: if you have been taking pictures with your camera for a while and it comes to a point where you would need to transfer the files to your computer, the SanDisk Extreme Pro’s faster read speeds would cut the waiting time while transferring large photo and video files to your computer. It’s clear from the specifications and from my testing, that the Sandisk Ultra is significantly below par when compared to the other two models. Although it is the cheapest of the three, it will struggle to cope with recording 4k video and any length of burst shooting. Choosing this model would be a mistake. As the only UHS-II card reviewed here, this is potentially a very fast SD card if your camera will support it. You will pay a premium though, with the 64GB model about as expensive as the 128GB Sandisk Extreme Pro. In practice, all the memory cards have very similar quoted read speeds, from the Sandisk Ultra of 100MB/sec (99.5MB/s in practice) to the Sandisk Extreme Pro of 170MB/sec (176.0MB/s in practice). Read speed will only matter if you are dealing with a large memory card (64GB or larger), as otherwise even with a full memory card, you are likely to only see a few tens of seconds difference in transfer speeds to your computer.