Samsung’s affordable EVO microSD cards are now faster than ever

South Korean tech giant Samsung has taken the wraps off its latest lineup of microSD cards. The new EVO Select and EVO Plus cards are quicker than the outgoing generation, now sporting up to 160 MB/s transfer speeds. That is a 23% increase in speed, according to the company.

“With the mobile and handheld gaming market on the rise, we sought to make data transfers on those devices even faster with these updated EVO Select and EVO Plus lines,” said Jose Hernandez, senior director of memory product marketing at Samsung.

Besides the increase in transfer speeds, the other notable shake up in the EVO Select and EVO Plus lines is the introduction of 1TB models for the first time.

Pricing and availability

The new EVO Select lineup is available in configurations of 64GB ($15), 128 GB ($19), 256 GB ($30), and 512 GB ($56). The 1TB version is slated for release “later this year,” though pricing is still up in the air.

As for the new EVO Plus lineup, it features configurations of 64GB ($16), 128 GB ($21), 256 GB ($32), and 512 GB ($61). Like with the EVO Select, we’ll have to wait a little bit longer for the pricing and availability of the 1TB option.

Samsung highlights the V30 video speed class rating of the cards, which means they can sustain minimum write speeds of 30MB/s. For models with capacities of 128GB and above, Samsung also boasts of the A2 application performance class that is supposed to accelerate the performance of phone apps running on the card.

Other standard goodies that we’ve come to expect with Samsung-made microSD cards are fully accounted for as well — including protection against water, extreme temperatures, drops, magnetic impact, and more.

Samsung’s EVO Select and EVO Plus cards are among the most popular options as far as memory cards go. The increase in speed and the 1TB storage capacity option are both notable and welcome upgrades for this very reason.

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As the company correctly points out, there is a growing market of handheld gaming devices, which are mobile PCs in the form factor of a Nintendo Switch. With modern video games often taking up tens of GB of storage space or more, it’s no wonder Samsung is pointing out the usefulness of their cards within the gaming market.

MicroSD cards are still incredibly valuable for content creators as well, with the SD interface serving as the de-facto standard in consumer-grade digital cameras. While the trend in smartphones and tablets is to drop the memory card slot in the pursuit of space-saving, the format itself isn’t going away anytime soon.

The new EVO Select and EVO Plus microSD cards are available now for purchase.