I highly doubt the WYZE cards are actually made by WYZE. I cannot speak for their durability or performance, but I am sure they adhere to the standards printed on the card.
I was just looking into this myself earlier in the week. I read consumer memory prices are going through the roof with no end in site due to the explosion in data centers. It’s a supply and demand thing. Supply is down because manufacturers are focusing their efforts on filling enterprise orders versus consumer products.
Given enough time, manufacturers will realize how much money is to be made in the consumer market and things should start to normalize. How long that is going to take is anyone’s best guess.
If you plan to go through/need/use a bunch of SD/micro-SD cards or even RAM w/in the foreseeable future, I think it is very wise (no pun intended) to buy now.
The Wyze cards are likely Lexar, which is a middle of the road card. They make a lot of “white label” cards for other companies. I can’t say for sure, just an educated guess.
The Samsung High Endurance have been really good for me, but the prices are way up on them. Sandisk Max Endurance was good, but the replacement pro endurance seems to have mixed reviews. They’re all pretty pricey right now. The Max Endurance are still available but prices are high and who knows how long until they’re gone.
The major memory manufacturers have cancelled a lot of expansion plans as they’re now forecasting significant reduction in demand with newer AI models needing a lot less memory. So hopefully prices will start to come down this year.
I wish I had bought a bunch of the Samsung when they were $13 for 128GB.
In fairness, who knew Sony even made SD cards. They certainly weren’t popular.
WD is a different story, their cards weren’t all that popular, but more so than Sony. But since Sandisk owns them, it is not surprising for them to kill them off and focus on one brand.
Here is proof Sony made shall we say “Memory Sticks”. The camera and Memory Stick must be close to 30 years old. I remember taking pictures of my 33 year old daughter when she was a toddler.
Memory stick pretty much started it all, but like many other things with Sony, they patented it and then others created a standard and it was better and cheaper. I had an older version of that cam with a 128MB memory stick (full size from before the Duo came out). I think I finally tossed it last year. It was quite expensive back in 2000 or 2001 when I got it.
If you get bored and have a linux PC available, you can pull the CID off the card and see who the actual manufacturer is. There are tools for windows and android too but I’ve never tried any of them.
My personal $.02: Express cards are typically more expensive and always complete overkill for use in a WYZE cam. WYZE hardware will not take full advantage of a MicroSD Express’ capabilities. Why pay for or buy more than you need?
There are very few that can do 2 of those things, and none that can do all 3. The Sandisk Max Endurance, which is still available, but seems to be phasing out, is good at having a decent speed along with high endurance (faster than most other endurance cards). But not cheap by any means. The Samsung Pro Endurance are probably currently the best for endurance, but far from the best speeds.
So you have to choose which things you want based on each use case. For the Wyze cams, speed is not important, but you don’t want a cheap card that is going to wear out quickly. For other devices, speed may be important and endurance isn’t a big deal as they aren’t constantly writing.
Generally, the cheap cards aren’t good at either of the two other things.
I have been using SanDisk Micro SD High Endurance 32GB cards in all of my v3 cameras. All are set to Continuous Recording and my oldest card is over 4 years old.
I’m still trying to find word on it but it looks like Open AI only made promissory agreements and didn’t actually purchase a lot of the DRAM that they had originally said they were going to for AI, And I noticed Micron took quite a hit today. So there’s a chance and I stress a chance that storage could become cheaper somewhat. Granted AI is still being built out but definitely keep an eye on things.
After Google announced the other day that they’ve found a way to use like 1/8 the memory for AI all the memory company shares started tanking. Coupled with the accusation today that you mentioned about OpenAI and others, I’m hoping we’re going to see prices start to fall fairly quickly. I know several large memory companies have already scrapped expansion plans.
How long that is going to take is anyone’s best guess.
