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The best performance yet

Superhero

Article from ADMIN 85/2025

By Federico Lucifredi

Unveiling little-known superpowers of microSD cards.

Recently, I analyzed the performance of new storage options on Raspberry Pi 5 boards [1], focusing on the Pi 5's USB bus improvements (the USB 3 ports are now independently capable of 5Gbps each) and testing the even faster new PCIe expansion hat with NVMe drives. Only hinted at is that the SD card interface itself has received some sophisticated upgrades for the fifth Pi series. Not only do USB and NVMe storage options outclass any benchmark that could be run on SD cards, they are also more reliable, with SD cards a notoriously finicky storage solution. Despite all this, the convenience of SD cards is not to be outdone, and the vast majority of users choose to use the format to power their single-board computers (SBCs), making any advance in the area truly noteworthy.

The Same, but Different

TransFlash (TF) cards were developed and marketed by Motorola and SanDisk back in 2004 [2], then adopted by the SD Association as the microSD [3] format specification in 2005. The microSD cards were functionally the same as those original TF cards. Use of the TF trademark does not require vendors to pay fees, which is why it has suddenly become popular in some quarters to use the TF monicker again (Figure 1).