Lexar‘s vary of SDXC playing cards will be complicated at first look, so to try to make clear issues: on the high of the tree are Gold-series playing cards, whereas Blue-series playing cards characterize the entry-level choices. Silver-series playing cards occupy the mid-range, and inside this sequence are Silver Professional, Silver Plus, and Silver.
Silver Professional is the higher mid-range selection, being a quicker UHS-II card. Silver Plus and Silver are each UHS-I playing cards and are nearly identically specified: each have an marketed 205MB/s learn pace, however whereas Silver Plus boasts a claimed 150MB/s max write pace, Silver playing cards are barely slower at 140MB/s.
Silver Plus playing cards can be found in 1TB, 512GB, 256GB, 128GB and 64GB capacities. All however the 64GB varient have the claimed 205MB/s learn and 150MB/s write pace, nevertheless the 64GB card has a decreased max write pace of 100MB/s. All capacities carry a V30 pace ranking, so they need to be able to sustaining a minimal 30MB/s write pace when taking pictures video. For reference, the highest Silver-series providing – Silver Professional – has a V60 ranking, although Lexar nonetheless claims the V30 Silver Plus is able to recording 4K video at 60fps.
In response to Lexar, Silver Plus playing cards are “constructed for sturdiness” and are put on proof (outline that?), temperature-proof (they’re rated to function between -25℃ and 85℃), x-ray-proof, vibration-resistant, magnetic-proof and shock-proof.
Lexar Silver Plus: Efficiency
(Picture credit score: Future)
We check reminiscence playing cards in actual world use circumstances, however to get one of the best indication of a card’s most doable switch speeds, you must use reminiscence/storage benchmarking software program like Crystal Disk Mark. This revealed a most 167.28MB/s learn pace – a way wanting the claimed 205MB/s, although our greatest write pace results of 156.06MB/s was barely above Lexar’s marketed 150MB/s.
These speeds have been attained utilizing a UHS-II SD card reader from ProGrade Digital, plugged right into a USB4 port on a quick laptop computer, so none of our testing {hardware} ought to have been anyplace near bottlenecking the reminiscence card.
(Picture credit score: Future)
Shifting to real-world file switch testing, we copied a single giant video file to and from the Silver Plus card to get an thought of the absolute best learn/write pace you are more likely to see when offloading footage from the cardboard. We additionally run the identical assessments utilizing a folder containing tons of of small picture recordsdata – a situation more likely to produce barely slower switch speeds. In each the video and the a number of picture switch assessments, our most sustained learn and write charges have been round 10-15% slower than the speeds recorded in Crystal Disk Mark:
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Actual-world switch pace check
Header Cell – Column 0
Learn
Write
Giant single file
156MB/s
135MB/s
A number of small recordsdata
142MB/s
132MB/s
To check real-world in-camera efficiency, we broke out our Sony a7R III and shot a steady burst of 31 uncompressed RAW stills within the digicam’s Hello+ burst mode (the utmost variety of stills earlier than hitting the inner buffer restrict). This 2.47GB burst of photographs then took roughly 30 seconds to switch from the digicam’s inside buffer to the Silver Plus card, equating to a write pace of 84.31MB/s – a way wanting Lexar’s claimed 150MB/s max write pace. We have used the identical digicam to check different SD playing cards and it is undoubtedly able to unloading its buffer extra shortly than we skilled with the Silver Plus, implying the difficulty is not associated to the digicam.
We additionally shot some 4K video on the digicam’s most 100Mbps bitrate – we encountered no perceivable glitches or dropped frames.
(Picture credit score: Future)
Lexar Silver Plus: Verdict
On the time of writing (August 2024) a 256GB Silver Plus card will be had for round $35 USD, whereas the common Silver (non-Plus) card is barely cheaper at $34. This compares fairly properly to different UHS-I playing cards from main manufacturers with related marketed learn/write speeds.
It is a pity we weren’t in a position to get near the marketed 205MB/s learn pace, and our examined in-camera write pace was means lower than the quoted 150MB/s. Nevertheless, the Silver Plus card simply dealt with recording excessive bit-rate 4K video, and it carried out properly when transferring pictures and video to and from a pc.
General, the Lexar Skilled Silver Plus SDXC card affords respectable efficiency at an accessible value: it is a good-value SD card.
