Testing 3 MicroSD cards with Raspberry Pi 2

I have bought 3 new Micro SD cards from my favorite shop on eBay and my plan is to use them predominantly with Raspberry Pi 2.

Samsung Evo+ 80MB/s 32GB for $9.69
Sandisk Ultra 48MB/s 16GB for $4.79
Toshiba 40MB/s 16GB for $4.79

cards1

It seems that these two shops on eBay: SincerityTrading and CourtesyTrading are the same, but with different names. Quality of the products is top notch and shipping is fastest I have ever experienced on eBay. From Hong Kong to Bosnia & Herzegovina it takes about 9 days for order to arrive. So I keep coming back to the shops whenever I need memory card or USB memory.

I have three Raspberry Pi 2 devices which I use for different purposes, main one is my Xbian media center, second is my RetroPie gaming rig and the third one is for testing purposes.

I have read a lot of reviews of MiroSD cards and decided to make a simple test with my Xbian backup image. I wanted to test how fast I can restore my backup img file to SD card.

I will use simple dd command through pv to track the output. First test using internal SD card reader in my laptop has proven not to be accurate and to slow:

pv /media/erol/torrents/xbian_jessie_8.3.img | dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1M
8.09GiB 1:02:46 [ 2.2MiB/s] [=================================================================================================================>] 100% 
520+60462 records in
520+60462 records out
8685355008 bytes (8.7 GB) copied, 3796.09 s, 2.3 MB/s

Then I decided to use one of my SD Card to USB adapters :

reader

I bought two of these on eBay for $1.58 and they seem to do proper job. Here is dmesg output when you plug it in:

[18559.016093] usb 1-2: new full-speed USB device number 2 using uhci_hcd
[18559.320186] usb 5-2: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
[18559.454054] usb 5-2: New USB device found, idVendor=14cd, idProduct=125c
[18559.454064] usb 5-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=3, SerialNumber=2
[18559.454071] usb 5-2: Product: Mass Storage Device
[18559.454076] usb 5-2: Manufacturer: Generic
[18559.454081] usb 5-2: SerialNumber: 125C20100726

So here are simple test results of the cards:

sandiskSandisk Ultra 16GB:

8.09GiB 0:18:11 [7.59MiB/s] [=================================================================================================================>] 100% 
1040+54680 records in
1040+54680 records out
8685355008 bytes (8.7 GB) copied, 1100.17 s, 7.9 MB/s

toshibaToshiba Exceria 16GB:

pv /media/erol/torrents/xbian_jessie_8.3.img | dd of=/dev/sdc bs=1M
8.09GiB 0:14:27 [9.55MiB/s] [=================================================================================================================>] 100% 
2559+39502 records in
2559+39502 records out
8685355008 bytes (8.7 GB) copied, 874.886 s, 9.9 MB/s

samsungSamsung Evo+

pv /media/erol/torrents/xbian_jessie_8.3.img | dd of=/dev/sdc bs=1M
8.09GiB 0:12:46 [10.8MiB/s] [=================================================================================================================>] 100% 
915+55436 records in
915+55436 records out
8685355008 bytes (8.7 GB) copied, 772.212 s, 11.2 MB/s

cards2

It seems that these simple test results show following rating:

1st: Samsung Evo+
2nd: Toshiba Exceria
3rd: Sandisk Ultra

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