This is a short guide on how to buy an SD card.
To start, the cards that usually come with these devices are not of great quality.
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 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.
My cheap MicroSD card works fine, can I keep using it?
Yes, but it eventually will fail.
Don’t Anbernic devices come with Kioxia cards now?
Some Anbernic devices may come with a card that says it’s a Kioxia. That card may be legitimate but it’s still possibly fake. I wouldn’t trust it.
I bought a card from AliExpress and it works fine!
I still don’t recommend to anyone doing so. There’s more fake cards than real ones out there.