HTC 10 vs Galaxy S7 microSD Speed

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So here is something that a lot of people usually don’t think about when it comes to the performance of their phone. How fast is the microSD slot? We put two of this year’s biggest phones to the test to see what we would find.

So first off, we will find the fastest SD Card we can get. Even though two devices might have seemingly identical internal specs, one might read and write to the same SD Card faster than the other. That’s because not all microSD slots are built the same. So we decided to test he R/W speed, app launching speeds and in-game FPS performance of the SD card slots in the HTC 10 and the Galaxy S7 to see which is faster.

R/W Speed

These tests will be using a SanDisk 32GB UHS-1 card. We will use an android storage benchmark app called Androbench to test the R/W Speeds of a single file as well as the R/W speeds of a multiple files.

These tests indicate that the HTC has a slight advantage over the Galaxy S7. This is good information for moving files around from within your device, but what about pushing files to and from your device using a PC?

PC Transfer Speed

Using a 1GB file, we tested the speed of pushing files to and from the SD Card VIA a USB cable connected to a computer.

We timed the speed of the transfers using an old sundial and the HTC came out on top once again.

App Launching Speeds

Next we will test the app and game launching speeds from apps stored on the SD Card. We will be using an app called DiscoMark Benchmark that allows us to run a bunch of tests to see which is faster.

The HTC 10 pulls through in the lead once again by just barely a second. Not a massive difference but still consistently points to one device being faster than the other.

In-Game Performance

For the last test we will use GameBench to test the FPS performance of the games that we run from the SD Card. Here are the results of several different games that we tried out.

Here we can see that the in-game performance wasn’t massively affected by the speed of the SD Card slot. The two phones scored nearly identical other that a difference on 1FPS on Need for Speed.

So what does all of this tell us? Well if you know you’re going to be using the microSD a lot, sometimes going for a device with the fastest internal storage isn’t always the best option. Instead look for the device with the fastest SD Card reader and it may end up being much faster for what you’re going to be using it for.