microsd

I recently purchased an AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus to help record screens on devices I test at my desk.

It's claim to fame is being able to record to a microSD card standalone (at resolutions up to 1080p60), without having a separate computer attached.

For my 4K cameras, I typically use an Atomos Ninja V, since it can record in full 4K resolution, but that thing is $700—the Live Gamer Portable is $120, and runs a lot cooler (and quieter).

I don't enjoy dealing with microSD cards, but it's more convenient than having to use OBS or some other recording software on my main computer just to capture the HDMI output of another device. Especially since I can't pass through the HD or 4K signal through my little Elgato USB capture card (they do make a few models that do this, but I digress).

Anyway, what brings me to this post is the fact I spent way too long trying to figure out the magical microSD card format required to be able to record on the device.

For many years, I've maintained some scripts to do basic disk benchmarking for SBCs, to test 1M and 4K sequential and random access speeds, since those are the two most relevant tests for the Linux workloads I run on my Pis.

I've been using this script for years, and it uses fio and iozone to get the metrics I need.

And from time to time, I would test a number of microSD cards on the Pi, or run tests on NVMe SSDs on the Pi, Rock 5 model B, or other SBCs. But my results were usually geared towards a single blog post or a video project.

In 2021 James Chambers set up PiBenchmarks to move to a more community-driven testing dataset.

You can run the following command on your SBC to test the boot storage and upload results directly to PiBenchmarks.com:

Edit: There's an even easier way to install PhotoRec now, assuming you have installed Homebrew, and you're comfortable in the command line:

brew install testdisk
sudo photorec

Then follow the prompts to start recovering files.

As a photographer who's taken and processed at least 200,000 photos in the past couple decades, you'd think I have a solid workflow that results in zero lost files... but you'd be wrong. 99% of the time, I follow the workflow:

1. Import photos from memory card.
2. Make sure backup of imported photos completes (so I have two local copies—I also have one copy back up to a cloud storage provider, so two local and one cloud backup).
3. Format the memory card.

A lot of photographers shoot with two memory cards, and have photos written to both—that way the 2nd card would be a double-failsafe. But for most jobs, I don't do that. And one of my digital cameras doesn't even have two memory card slots, so this isn't an option!

Anyways, more often than I'd like to admit, I do something dumb, like:

 ____________________________________________
/ Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, \
\ prepare to die. (Klingon Proverb)          /
 --------------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

(Excerpt from Ansible for DevOps, chapter 12.)

The fallout from this year's microSD card performance comparison has turned into quite a rabbit hole; first I found that new 'A1' and 'A2' classifications were supposed to offer better performance than the not-Application-Performance-class-rated cards I have been testing. Then I found that A2 rated cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi—in fact they didn't even perform half as well as they were supposed to, for 4K random reads and writes, on any hardware I have in my possession.

Update: See follow-up post about A1 vs A2 performance, Raspberry Pi microSD follow-up, SD Association fools me twice?.

After I published my 2019 Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison, I received a lot of feedback about newer 'A2' Application Performance class microSD cards, and how they could produce even better performance for a Raspberry Pi.

None of these cards are fakes; grainy halftone printing is visible because I shot this with a macro lens.

Note: I also posted a separate review of some A2 'Application Performance' class cards, see this post: A2-class microSD cards offer no better performance for the Raspberry Pi.

As a part-time tinkerer and full-time developer, I have been fascinated by single board computers (SBCs) since the first Raspberry Pi was introduced almost a decade ago. I have owned and used every generation of Raspberry Pi, in addition to most of the popular competitors. You can search my site for tons of articles on these experiences.

Back in 2015, I wrote a popular post comparing the performance of a number of microSD cards when used with the Raspberry Pi. In the intervening three years, the marketplace hasn't changed a ton, but there have been two new revisions to the Raspberry Pi (the model 3 B and just-released model 3 B+). In that article, I stated:

One of the highest-impact upgrades you can perform to increase Raspberry Pi performance is to buy the fastest possible microSD card—especially for applications where you need to do a lot of random reads and writes.

For my Raspberry Pi Time-Lapse App, I find myself having to either copy hundreds (or thousands!) of 3+ MB image files, or a 1-2 GB video file from a Raspberry Pi Zero W to my Mac.

Copying over the WiFi network works, but it's extremely slow (usually topping out around 5 Mbps... which means it could take a couple hours to copy). So I decided to finally try to mount the Raspberry Pi's drive directly on my MacBook Pro (running macOS Sierra 10.12). This is normally a bit tricky, because the Raspberry Pi uses the Linux ext4 filesystem—which is not compatible with either macOS or Windows!

Late last year, I published a blog post with comprehensive benchmarks of various microSD cards used with the internal Raspberry Pi 2 reader, based on the comprehensive (and always-up-to-date Raspberry Pi microSD card benchmark page I maintain for the Pi Dramble project). After publishing the blog post, a few different readers pointed me to some overclocking tweaks that could help boost the speeds further for UHS microSD cards, allowing large file I/O speed to double, and random I/O to get a solid boost as well.

2018 Update: Please see the latest benchmarks in 2018 using a Raspberry Pi model 3 B+.

This post's benchmarks were performed on a Raspberry Pi 2; for all the latest benchmarks, on Raspberry Pi 3 or later revisions, check out the official Pi Dramble microSD card Benchmarks page.

In my experience, one of the highest-impact upgrades you can perform to increase Raspberry Pi performance is to buy the fastest possible microSD card—especially for applications where you need to do a lot of random reads and writes.