I have purchased many Sony memory cards, including the

back in 2013. This product (

) claims to be the newest version with speed 'up to 70MB/s' verses just 40MB/s previously. So I'm eager to find out just how fast it really is.



Front of the package I received says "Up to 70MB/s", while fine print on the back says "Up to 70MB/s read speed; write speed slower". I inserted the card into a UHS-compatible card reader, the

, and benchmarked the card on both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports. Here are my results:

On USB2 port: Read=34.8MB/s, Write=21.3MB/s

On USB3 port: Read=92.6MB/s, Write=21.5MB/s

(See my uploaded images for benchmark details)



In comparison, my older Sony UHS1 card shows Read speed of 47.3MB/s and Write of 20.55MB/s under identical test setup. That means the new card is almost 2x faster in Read, but its Write speed remains nearly the same as before. By the way, a Write speed of 20-21MB/s is relatively slow compared to most other UHS-1 cards I purchased in the past two years. (See the comparison chart I uploaded)



[Bottom Line]

In most applications, the Write speed is always the most critical limiting factor. So you probably will not see any performance gain by 'upgrading' to this new card. On the other hand, currently the new card is priced cheaper than the old one, so it is still a better value.



If you need a memory card for recording HD video or for use in DSLR, look for one that bears the symbol 'U3' (A big 'U' with a '3' inside). I have tested the

and its Write speed is 57.2MB/s - almost 3 times faster than this U1 card.



[Other Notes]

- The new card I received is made in Taiwan, same as the old version.



- The reported capacity of this 32GB card, according to my computer, it only 30.0GB. This is normal because computer people count one 'Gig' as "2 to the power 30", which is 7.3% larger than one billion. So 30GB actually comes to about 32.2 billion bytes, which is called 32GB by marketing people.