I would be a horrible maven if I only shared the upsides of my experiences and everything, but I did give Sandisk a chance, and even their endurance cards did let me down. In reading their warranty it was sadly subpar to Samsung and as a couple of the mavens I’m sure would attest to if I were to tag them in this, I struggled for a couple months trying to figure out the issues considering I was still using endurance cards. overall I am yet to find a single issue with samsung pro endurance but I have run into issues with sandisk.
I will say nothing more to this and let everyone else decide on their own particular format, but let’s just say that the type of memory cell they use appears to be on the surface subpar to Samsung Pro Endurance and their warranty definitely does not cover the same things that Samsung Pro Endurance does. I only speak for myself but definitely trying to cause less headaches for others if I can.
I’ve used both without issues, actually my dash cams are still running 10+ year old Sandisk Extreme (predecessor to the endurance) 32GB. That being said the only warranty I’ve tried was samsung and they just sent a new (larger capacity and better) card right out which was nice. Of course that also means samsung is the only one I’ve had fail too. I decided their “Evo” SD cards are not very good, even though the SSDs are.
I’ve actually been using Sandisk for much longer than Samsung and they’ve been reliable, but I haven’t tried one in a 24x7x365 cam yet, as I stocked up on the Samsungs when they were cheap.
Sandisk is plagued by counterfeits which is another thing to look out for. I won’t even buy the amazon “frustration free packaging” ones as I don’t trust anything but retail package from a big known seller.
Thank you for your honest opinion. I generally stick with a brand until I am let down.
My oldest SanDisk 32GB card has been recording reliably continuously for 3.5 years.
Funny how some items are Hit or Miss. My original Toyota battery in my pickup developed a bad cell at 33 months. The replacement Toyota battery is now almost 7 years old.
Don’t get me started on car batteries. Depending what region you’re in, there is one local company that makes them all. Johnson Controls around here and in most of the US, East Penn in some areas. I buy my batteries from Walmart. Can get the top of the line AGM with 3 year warranty (used to be 5) for at least 25% less than the auto parts store.
Same battery, different sticker.
Apparently if you order from walmart online, sometimes you will actually get a boxed battery that was made in Germany. I can only imagine the total end to end shipping cost on those. But then you can’t get your core charge back because the store has no idea how to do it for online orders. Usually I need one quickly and can’t wait on shipping, but the local ones have been fine. The trick is to never deep discharge them. My car sits in the garage for the winter on a float charger, and even in the summer when I’m not using it. The mid-range Advance Auto battery in that (back when you could use coupons to get them crazy cheap) is at 8 years now, still going strong.
The Mopar/Delco that came in my Ram (I believe made by Exide in India) lasted just short of the warranty (35 ish months) Even then they tried to tell me it tested fine, after it had been sitting in the heated bay for an hour and I had driven it there and warmed it up. I told them put it out in the snowbank and test it again in 30 mins, at which point it failed miserably. They gave me a new one, which lasted just barely longer than the warranty.
The battery testing done at auto parts stores is a huge scam. It will always tell you that you need a new battery, unless you’re asking for a warranty replacement, in which case the battery always tests good.
Wow. If that isn’t testament to the variance in experience that users will have. I actually put a SanDisk extreme in my doorbell Duo and had some experience issues with that and I was blown away because I was thinking I have a Samsung card in here I’ve never experienced this before this is really weird. Well one day I happen to pop it out and check and it turned out it was an issue with the card. The only time I’ve differentiated from Samsung I did have an issue but then again that was the only time I’ve had the issue as well so I don’t have a large sample size to pull from. But this is exactly the type of thing that most people will read one bad experience and say yep that’s horrible it’s evil we need to burn it at the stake and throw car and feather on it. You and I have both had the exact opposite experiences with the same card. It appears though you have much more experience with that card and I would argue that you are vastly more versed in it
Much like people’s experience with Wyze cams or anything else I guess.
I think the fact of the matter is both SD card companies have probably made duds over the years (Samsung is a lot newer to the market than Sandisk but their experience with SSDs seemed to help them hit the ground running). Heck some people use a cheap no-name brand card well beyond its intended limits and it works fine for years. I know there are a lot of photographers prefer Lexar cards which I’ve never used. As you say people find something that works (often on the recommendation of others that are doing similar things) and tend to stick with that. And all it takes is one bad apple to steer you away from something for good. In fact that experience I had with the Evo SD card (my first Samsung SD) almost did. But the excellent warranty service and the fact that the replacement card has worked great for years, combined with the great price on the Pro Endurance when I bought my Wyze cams, lead me to buy those and they’ve proven to be great. Of course I now know that the Evo simply was not meant to be used in a dash cam environment.
On the SSD front I was a purely Samsung guy but with my most recent PC, saw a good deal on a WD Black which was very highly rated and had great performance numbers, and so far it has been excellent. They are owned by Sandisk now but this drive is still pure WD. Years ago WD was not really a competitor in the SSD market, they were good, but considered a budget drive, now they’re a top contender. So that’s the other problem, things change over time and something that was great in the past can be problematic now (or vice-versa). I’ve beat the heck out my Sandisk Extreme Pro cards and they’ve been bulletproof. I have not had the Endurance card long enough (or in the same extreme use cases) to say whether it is up to the same standards.
I suppose flash memory has become a disposable commodity and not sure we can really expect a ton of consistency regardless.
I have a 1GB Kingston thumb drive that was bought around 2001 or 2002 for over $100. I still use it today for BIOS updates and stuff that needs a reliable FAT16 formatted USB. Its transfer rate (especially write speed) rivals some of the best thumb drives I’ve had over the years, and it has never skipped a beat.
But I’ve also had both Sandisk and Samsung thumb drives that did not perform anywhere near as well as advertised, and that Samsung Evo SD card that crapped out. I’ve been using Sandisk for a very long time so I can’t recall if I’ve had to chuck any of their cards, but it would not surprise me if there has been one or two that ended up getting tossed.
I’m actually a little surprised that Micron/Crucial has never ventured into the SD card/thumb drive market. Their stuff has been consistently excellent for decades and they probably have the best reputation out there as far as memory goes. Their SSDs are not blazing fast but they perform very well and when they’ve been stress tested they often last several times their rated endurance.
If your name brand microsd card prices seem too low they are probably counterfeit and a good chance the reason why some do not last even though called Sandisk or Samsung. Too many fakes out there unless directly sold and shipped by Amazon.
I would never buy an SD card from a 3rd party on amazon or via ebay etc.
Even if you buy “shipped and sold by” amazon you have to check it for a white sticker, which means they comingled 3rd party inventory with their own. I send those right back without even opening.
That’s actually another thing I like about the samsungs, they have a validation tool that confirms it is genuine within a few seconds (and not having to fill it with a bunch of data). Whether someone ends up finding a way to fake it at some point, hard to predict, but it is nice to have anyway.
Years ago the only way to check for a fake was to fill it to capacity, if it failed part way through (usually at 2GB or 8GB) you knew exactly what you had. A full overwrite format with the sdcard.org utility would accomplish the same thing.
WD Black are my favourite SSDs and Hard Drives, have them on all three of my computers plus one NVMe in a Thunderbolt external enclosure. Before I had Crucial and always had issues with them especially on my daughter’s powerbook, they would die within couple of months. Since I installed a WD Black she hasn’t had an issue for over two years now.
Kingston is another brand that I like especially in SD cards as well as RAM modules.
I’ve used the Crucial SSDs in various family and friends PCs that just needed a step up from HDD and not bleeding edge performance, they’ve all been going for years. Must be a Mac thing
I used to use Kingston RAM from time to time but Crucial has always been my go to. Or if I’m upgrading a PC that has a stock single stick in it I try to find an identical OEM module off eBay for the 2nd.
Back in the HDD days I’d always use WD ones but when they first ventured into the SSD market they were sort of “meh” performance wise, but even the Blue line is pretty decent now. But for a while I was using the OEM Samsung NVMe ones as you could get them very cheap and the performance was the same or sometimes better than the retail equivalents.
I do have a couple Kingston SD cards, small 8 to 32GB ones from long ago.
Not disputing that, but I know few Mac users who use them without issues. Maybe my Macs didn’t like them
Same here. Also used Seagate way, way back when they used to be really good. I have a WD Red HDD Enterprise version that I use for daily backups for over four years, still going strong.
I have five 32GB in five of my Wyze cams set to continuous since 2022. One of them is even older as it came from my first dash cam. All five are class 10.
I had Seagate 10,000 and then 15,000RPM in RAID in my home servers, the 15k had to have fans blowing directly on them nonstop or they’d overheat in very short order. The sound they made was annoying so the extra fans actually helped drown that out. I actually used a pair of their “Pro” SSDs when I finally made the switch as they had supercapacitors in them in case something crashed they’d have enough power to finish their writes. At the time two of those (SAS 600mbit/sec) in RAID was blazing fast. Of course pretty much any SSD now can hit 5x that speed. Hitachi made good HDDs too especially the laptop ones, but most PCs that I had or had set up for people used WD.
I only had 10,000 Seagates back in the day. After that WD was my drive of choice. Even, now all my digital media that gets fed through Plex resides on WD Black HDDs in a RAID 5 configuration.
Yeah, my first and only laptop, MacBook Pismo has one, sweet little thing. Laptop has been retired but still have it on my desk for nostalgic reasons.
Hello Steven!!
128GB is a smart upgrade for around 2 weeks of continuous recording. I’d only go higher if you need longer backups or can’t check footage often otherwise, 128GB balances capacity and cost well.
Good luck
