Main points
- Samsung’s new EVO Select and EVO Plus cards offer transfer speeds 23% faster than before, up to 160 MB/s.
- The company will also offer 1TB versions of both models for the first time.
- EVO Select and EVO Plus are ideal for use with mobile devices, portable gaming consoles, and more.
South Korean tech giant Samsung has unveiled its latest range of microSD cards. The new EVO Select and EVO Plus cards are faster than their predecessors, now offering transfer speeds of up to 160 MB/s. According to the company, speeds are improved by 23%.
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“With the rise of the mobile and handheld gaming markets, we strive to accelerate data transfer speeds on these devices with the updated EVO Select and EVO Plus series,” said Jose Hernandez, senior director of memory product marketing at Samsung.
In addition to the increase in transfer speeds, another notable change to the EVO Select and EVO Plus series is the debut of a 1TB model.
Pricing and availability
The new EVO Select series is available in 64GB ($15), 128GB ($19), 256GB ($30), and 512GB ($56) configurations. A 1TB version is expected to be released “later this year,” but pricing is still up in the air.
As for the new EVO Plus series, it comes in configurations of 64GB ($16), 128GB ($21), 256GB ($32), and 512GB ($61). As with the EVO Select, we’ll have to wait a little longer to learn about pricing and availability for the 1TB option.
Samsung highlighted the card’s V30 video speed rating, which means they can sustain a minimum write speed of 30MB/s. For models with capacities of 128GB and above, Samsung also has an A2 application performance level, which improves the performance of mobile applications running on the card.
Other standard features we’ve come to expect from Samsung-made microSD cards have also been taken into account – including water resistance, extreme temperatures, drops, magnetic shock, and more.
As far as memory cards go, Samsung’s EVO Select and EVO Plus cards are among the most popular choices. The speed improvements and 1TB storage capacity option are both noteworthy, making it worth the upgrade.
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As the company rightly points out, there’s a growing market for handheld gaming devices, which are mobile PCs in the form of the Nintendo Switch. Since modern video games often take up tens of gigabytes or more of storage space, it’s no surprise that Samsung points to the usefulness of its graphics cards in the gaming market.
MicroSD cards remain extremely valuable to content creators as the SD interface has become the de facto standard for consumer digital cameras. While the trend among smartphones and tablets is to ditch memory card slots to save space, the format itself isn’t going away anytime soon.
The new EVO Select and EVO Plus microSD cards are now available.