Are The MicroSD Cards On AliExpress Valid?
For a long time, I have always bought my MicroSD cards from the local market or from a certain local seller on Amazon that I trust, so I almost never had issues with being scammed with a fake card way below the advertised capacity. That particularly goes for very large capacity cards, like 256GB, 400GB & higher. Not to mention the multiple 64GB cards I have.
I have been seeing MicroSD cards sold on AliExpress for a long time, and I always avoided them in fear of being scammed. But since I have been writing many articles about buying different stuff from AliExpress, I thought it would be a good idea to try them out. The cards are not expensive to begin with, and AliExpress itself always had my back whenever a seller sent me a bad item.
I bought 3 MicroSD cards to test out. I only sought out cards with believable capacity. I didn’t go for the obvious scams, where they sell you a 2TB MicroSD card for a few dollars. Many YouTube channels & other places have covered those already.
There are few advantages to buying MicroSD cards from AliExpress. For me. It’s a combination of two things:-
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- Low capacity:- Sometimes you have an application where you don’t need a very large card. This is particularly useful with older devices.
- They are cheaper. For some applications, the number of cards you have matters more than capacity. Sometimes you just want smaller cards that are just cheap rather than pay more & get a large-capacity card you won’t benefit from. You could even get two smaller cards for the price of a large one.
To avoid being scammed, each MicroSD card I bought has been tested with H2testw, a MicroSD card & flash drive testing utility that I trust. It tests the MicroSD card & indicates its real capacity, or at least the useful part of it. It’s free, and I recommend you use it with all your MicroSD cards & flash drives.
So, let’s get started.
Quickly go to:-
The 64GB MicroSD Card
64GB is a nice amount of storage that’s suitable for all applications. It also provides the most value for the money, so I picked one for this experiment.
Unfortunately, after testing the card with H2testw, it turns out to be an 8GB card spoofed as 64GB. I have been scammed by the seller. Lucky for me, AliExpress refunded me my money without having to return the card. I can partition this card & use it as an 8GB card, which is still useful in many applications.
The reading speed of this MicroSD card was 16.9 MByte/s.
4GB MicroSD
4GB can be used in quite many situations. I could use it for a small Retropie installation, where most of the games are of the smaller size, like Genesis & SNES games that are mostly less than 4MB each, or where the games are stored in a shared folder on some server. I can also use it in my remote-controlled car project.
The card passed my H2testw tests with flying colors. It had a 19.5 MByte/s reading speed & a 5.89 MByte/s writing speed.
While the MicroSD card itself was totally valid, the MicroSD to SD adapter it came with wasn’t good. I couldn’t get it to work, so I had to use one I already had.
By the time I am writing this. The seller offers sizes up to 128GB, though only the cards up to 16GB were priced well. Anything above that was in the same price range as the branded cards on Amazon. I am tempted to get one to test the same way.
Buy the 4GB MicroSD From AliExpress.
512MB Low Capacity MicroSD Card
While you are unlikely going to install an operating system on a MicroSD card as small as 512MB, it can be used in many other ways, like a gaming multicart. I can use it to store no less than 120 large SNES games and hundreds of NES games.
The card passed the H2testw test. It had a 20.0 MByte/s reading speed & 4.82 MByte/s writing speed. 512MB is the largest I could buy from the seller. While it turned out good, the 4GB card costs almost the same, making it more value for money. Unless you have a device that strictly can’t handle the higher capacity cards, I don’t recommend getting this card.
Buy the 512MB MicroSD From AliExpress
And Finally
While I won’t risk getting cards like this for my phone or Nintendo Switch, I am happy to have filled a niche in my needs.
Based on this experiment, buying low-capacity MicroSD cards can work just fine. I am yet to get a larger one that works. But maybe in the future.
I hope this experiment helped you with getting an affordable MicroSD card, and I will see you in another Tech Fairy article. Check out the mobile apps I developed, which I hope you find useful & interesting.