Lexar Play microSDXC Review

Testing

Test Platform:
CPU       Intel Core i9-10900k
Mobo    Asus ROG Strix Z490-I Gaming
RAM      32GB HyperX Fury RGB
GPU       Nvidia RTX 2080Ti FE
OS SSD  Samsung 960 Pro 2TB

Windows

Lexar’s PLAY MicroSD card comes formatted as exFAT and has about 464GB of free space available after formatting. ExFAT is very well supported and should be ready to go for the vast majority of devices without needing to format from the device first.

CrystalDiskMark 7.0

“CrystalDiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows measuring sequential and random read/write speeds.”

CrystalDiskMark shows around 153MB/s reads and around 120MB/s writes initially but writes fall quickly in real-world testing at QD1 to around 35MB/s.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Atto gives us 148-150MB/s on reads from 64KB and up but writes are very consistent and bounce around from 20MB/s to 125MB/s. We ran the test several times with cool down periods between and the write speeds were always unpredictable while reads infallibly hug the 150MB/s line as advertised.

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Anvil levels out on write speeds around the 45MB/s mark but reads are near the 150MB/s mark as expected.

Black Magic Disk Speed Test

Disk Speed Test is an easy-to-use tool to quickly measure and certify your disk performance for working with high-quality video! Simply click the start button and Disk Speed Test will write test your disk using large blocks of data, and then display the result. Disk Speed Test will continue to test writes and reads from your disk so you can evaluate both performance and readability over time.

BlackMagic’s Disk Speed test is intended more to check drive speeds against raw video formats from professional cameras but doesn’t really test compressed formats like you would get from a mobile device recording compressed video. Read speeds are predictable but every write pass seemed to get worse with it bottoming out under 20MB/s.

Most memory cards do pretty well but let’s fill it up to about 90% and see how Lexar’s PLAY handles it. It took a few hours to write 421GB of random stuff from our Steam library onto the drive with write speeds all over the place but averaging around 25MB/s.

CrystalDiskMark only drops a little bit on write speed from 35MB/s to 25MB/s, but read speed still holds on to around 155MB/s.

Atto shows the Lexar PLAY MicroSD card holding on to around 147MB/s on reads even when 90% full, pretty great!