Patriot EP Series 128GB SDXC Class 10 UHS-1 Memory Card Review

When SSDs first started to appear back in 2007, their top capacity was 32GB and pricing soared to well over $3000; such is the price of new technology.  Even today, it seems incredible that we could fit 128GB of memory into a secure digital memory card.   Capacity in a SD card is nothing without performance and today’s media enthusiasts are looking for just that combination to fill their media needs for both photo and video.  This is where the Patriot EP Series 128GB SDXC card, performing at up tp 50MB/s, fits the bill.  Still though, one has to be in awe of the storage advance we have seen in so few years.

The Patriot Memory EP Series SDXC (secure digital extended capacity) card is available in capacities of 16, 32, 64 and 128GB and are Class 10 and UHS-1 (U1) certified.  Both classifications mean the drive can transfer data at above 10MB/s.  Patriot specifications list performance for the EP Series to be 50MB/s read and 35MB/s write.  Amazon pricing for the EP Series at the time of this report was found at $38 (16GB), $32 (32GB), $54 (64GB) and $141 for the 128GB capacity we are testing today.  Even in SD cards, getting a product under $1/GB is a great price as we see with the 64GB.

PERFORMANCE TESTING THE PATRIOT EP SERIES 128GB SDXC CARD

Our site camera is a Canon EOS 6D full frame camera which, unfortunately, does not all us to create an external logical drive for the SD card.  This isn’t so much of a concern as testing directly from the camera will always result in USB 2.0 performance bottlenecks. Pretty much a standard tool in our SD card testing is the Kingston MobileLite G3 USB 3.0 Card Reader which we reviewed a while back with the Kingston 64GB SDXC card.  Our testing today will encompass ATTO, Crystal DiskMark and Anvil Storage Utilities.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark relies on testing different file sizes with highly compressible data.  Although this is not the best representation of media files which are, for the most part, highly incompressible, it is a good start and is still the main mechanism most manufacturers use to determine their product specifications.

Initial ATTO highs of 56MB/s read and 39MB/s write surpasses Patriot specifications, however, ATTO tests in only highly compressible data, unlike Crystal Diskmark.

CRYSTAL DISK BENCHMARK VER. 3.0 X64

Crystal Disk Benchmark measures read and write transfer performance through the transfer of random, or highly incompressible data.  This is very representative of the type of media we will see most on the Patriot EP Series memory card.

Once again we see performance above specs and seeing such significant drops as we get to the 4K level merits explanation.  In this, we need to understand that SD cards are utilized to transfer large media files that are indicative of the speeds we are seeing in the high sequential tests above.  4K, and even 512K, performance isn’t such a concern for the most part as we would typically see very large media files in use with media cards such as this.