This is a straightforward, possibly barebones review of the 32 GB Sandisk Industrial Grade Extended Temperature IX QD334 microSD card. I have had several high endurance (and max endurance, whatever that means) microSD cards fail on me over years of use in dashcams, so I decided to splurge the cash and get an SLC microSD card with an industrial-grade controller that’ll probably last me a lifetime.
SLC, MLC, TLC and QLC, are the industrial terms for the number of bits that are stored in a single NAND flash cell. Kingston’s website has a handy infograhic that illustrates the difference.
In a nutshell, the more bits that are stored per cell, the lesser is the endurance, which is measured in Program-Erase cycles (P/E cycles). SLC NAND typically have the highest P/E cycles since the cells store less data and can go through multiple writes and erases before it wears down completely. However this is a very simple view of it, endurance also depends on other factors like the controller, the wear-levelling procedures, etc.
The Sandisk card, pictured.
The card comes in capacities of 8 GB through 64 GBs. SLC 2D NAND cards typically have lower capacities due to lower data densities, but they tend to have more endurance. According to the datasheet, the Sandisk card, at least the highest capacity 64 GB one, has a TBW (Terabytes written) rating of 1920, and 30K P/E cycles (possibly for all cards in the series). Which probably means my card will last forever, or at least for a really long time, even with constant use.
The CrystalDiskMark score is nothing extraordinary, and the random 4K reads and writes are probably lower than many consumer grade cards. But the name of the game here is endurance - I’m looking for it to last over a long time in my dashcam without reliability issues.
I bought it from Mouser for ~$58 (the 64 GB one costs ~$107), and it has been running without issues in my dashcam for more than 3 years now.
Do let me know if you want any other tests run on this, or want any more information on the card.