A short guide to how to buy an SD card that's not junk

General
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This is a short guide on how to buy an SD card that not a piece of garbage.

To start, something to get out of the way:

The SD card that came with your device is unusable. Replace it immediately.

The cards that come with these devices are absolute trash.

How to find a good one?

The best place to look for a good SD card is a brick and mortar store. For the most part in most developed nations you have an almost zero percent chance to get a bogus card from a physical store.

The second best place is to buy them directly from the manufacturer’s website. This may not be available everywhere.

If you don’t live somewhere with affordable SD cards in brick and mortar stores (like I do, in Japan SD cards cost something like 3x MSRP) then your best bet is to buy from an online retailer with a quality guarantee such as Amazon so you can know that you can return it. Do not buy a card on AliExpress, Temu or any other Chinese retail site.

When in doubt about quality, stick to the following brands:

  • SanDisk
  • Samsung
  • Lexar
  • PNY
  • Kioxia
  • Kingston
  • Transcend
  • Sony

Be wary of any deals on SD cards. If you get something labeled as 1TB for less than $80 USD you should be very suspicious.

How do I test if my card is real?

If you’re experiencing any doubts about your SD card whatsoever, it’s very likely it’s not real. If something is off, you should trust that intuition.

Look at the manufacturer’s website to see pictures of the SD card and compare yours to what you see. Check the printing on the card and its packaging. Does it look high quality? Is there something off about it? Does it have all the right logos?

If you want to run a hardware check on it, I recommend using h2testw to check if it’s actually reporting the true volume.

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I’d thought Anbernic devices came with legit Kioxia cards these days. Is that not the case?

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Some do, sometimes. Most of the time they do not.

I wouldn’t trust it to be legit.

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Kioxia are pretty hit and miss sure, despite being leagues better than the old noname cards we used to have. But saying they’re absolutely trash is maybe a bit too extreme.

I had two of them, and one is happily running Ubuntu for my Steam Deck

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Yes Kioxia is a known sub-brand of Toshiba and is well established and reliable.

However that assumes the Kioxia card supplied with your Anbernic device is legitimate - which @razorbeamz rightly says is not always the case, and so you cannot trust it to be real and reliable.

In some newer Anbernic devices I have even seen some unbranded mSD cards with blue stripes on - made to imitate legitimate Kioxia mSD cards.

Always use a safe and legitimate mSD card and be sure to test it with h2testw as linked above.

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Feel free to create a new wiki style post in the User Insights FAQ subcategory.

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