Lexar PLAY MicroSDXC UHS-1 Card 256GB Review

In this review, I shall be taking a look at the new Lexar PLAY MicroSDXC UHS-1 Card with 256GB of storage. Primarily this card will be used for my Nintendo Switch, as I seem to go through memory card rather fast, filling them up with games I purchase and Review. Yes, I could just delete them once completed, however, for some reason I keep them installed all the time, why you might ask? Well, sometimes, I just want to replay the game, sometimes I have no access to the internet due to limitations and downtime. I even go camping and head to remote holiday villages around Europe and these villages certainly have no access to the internet, or if they did they are super slow.

Now there are plenty of memory cards on the market, Samsung, Sandisk, Kingston just to name a few, but when I was browsing around I found this one from Lexar the ‘Lexar PLAY MicroSDXC UHS-1 Card’. It had a good price of only £37.22 on Amazon. I normally go for Integral, they are cheap and do the job, but this time I wanted something faster for those big AAA big-budget games, for faster loading more than anything else, and the ‘Lexar PLAY MicroSDXC’ does exactly that, thanks to its 150MB/s read time compared to 100MB/s with Integral.

When you first use the MicroSDXC Card you will find out right away that there is NOT 256GB of data available, which is nothing new, for some reason no storage device ever offers its full capacity, why? well let us find out, and we found out this info here https://www.tweakandtrick.com/2013/07/lost-storage-space.html it has something to do with “Over Provisioning” It uses 10% of space to move data around.

Now, this review is not going to be full of waffle about this and that, it is going to be simple and to the point. Why do you want an SDCard and why this SDcard, its read and write speeds and simple fact, does it to the job I asked it to do.

Well to answer ‘does it do the job I asked it to do’ this is a simple yes, its stores a load of games I wanted to download and keep. I tested this over Xmas and into the new year and no games became unplayable due to card errors. All the games loaded up just as fast as I expected with little to no load times. On average this card was around 35% faster than the Integral SDCards, for the majority of the time.

This was a disk benchmark to see how well it did for reading and writing, using Mini Tool Partition Wizard and its benchmarking section.

The card comes in a number of sizes, 128GB is the smallest 1TB being the biggest and you can use the card for a number of different devices, like mobile phones, wireless camera, action cameras, well anything that requires a MicroSD Card.

This card looks and seems to be designed especially for gamers, and the Nintendo Switch, Lexar even promotes the card for the Nintendo Switch within a video, which can be viewed at the bottom of the page. The card offers up to 150MB/s of reading speed and fast A1 or A2-rated performance, for more information on what I mean by A1 and A2 Rated performance head here for info, but in laments terms, it just means it offers lightning-fast loads times. The only issue with MicroSD card is the price, 128GB = £18.44, 256GB £37.22 and 512GB £84.17. Going, to be honest, here, I always purchase an Integral Micro SD, this comes in at around £29.99, offers up 100MB/s Read Speed and 50MB/s Write speed and they are a V30 UHS-I U3 Class 10 cards. The Integral cards are slower than these Lexar ones, so if you are on a budget you might want to consider the cheaper option, however, for quality and speed the Lexar wins hands down, and loads up games much faster. 

Now for the SPECIFICATIONS

Dimension (L x W x H)

• 11mm x 15mm x 1 mm / 0.43” x 0.59” x 0.04”

The Lexar PLAY MicroSDXC UHS-1 Card offers the storage and speed required to blow the competition out of the water.

So this comes down to either budget, personal preference, or speed, why? its because there are a lot of brands out there from Samsung, Sandisk, Kingston, Integral, Lexar and many more. Nintendo use Sandisk as there prefered brand, even have there own branded SD cards, many people prefer Samsung, people on a budget go for other brands like Integral. There is nothing wrong with your choice really and there is nothing wrong with going for one of these cards. The Lexar PLAY MicroSDXC UHS-1 Card 256GB does a great job, loads up games fast and has plenty of storage for a shed load of indie games and a number of good quilty AAA games. 

THE CHOICE IS YOURS

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