Tech enthusiast Matt Cole is the determined creator and maintainer of The Great MicroSD Card Survey, a significant investigative testing and benchmarking treasure trove that began in July 2023. Cole has “set up 8 machines with close to 70 card readers running around the clock… writing 101 terabytes of data per day,” in order to expose the MicroSD card diamonds in the rough and to find fake cards with inflated capacity ratings and cards that use sub-par 'fake flash.' Key features of the regularly updated 15,000-word report are its highlighting and charting of MicroSD cards alongside authenticity, performance, and endurance measurements.
The survey currently encompasses over 200 different MicroSD cards. In a blog post last year, Cole informed readers that running the tests to harvest data from these fingernail-sized slivers of flash storage resulted in over 18 petabytes of data being written to nearly 200 cards, and 51 were literally tested to destruction.
