10 SDXC/SDHC Memory Cards, Rounded Up And Benchmarked

Lexar Professional 133x (16, 32 GB)

Memory specialist Lexar sent us two SD memory cards for this review, its Professional 133x with 32 GB and 16 GB capacity. Lexar does have a 128 GB SDXC card on its Web site, but it wasn't ready for review when we started collecting samples.

32 GB SDHC

The 32 GB Professional 133x is available for $120, which is acceptable considering the card’s positioning as a solution for digital photography and enthusiasts. Considering Kingston’s current pricing of $280, this is less than half the cost. In return, though, you also less than half of the performance.

The Professional 133x at 32 GB reaches 23 MB/s sequential read throughput, according to h2benchw and CrystalDiskMark 3.0. It is comparably weak as Kingston's Ultimate XX lineup in 512 KB random writes at only 0.8 MB/s, although this type of workload is unusual for SD memory cards. Sequential write speeds never drop below 14.1 MB/s, which is still a commendable result, despite the fact that the UHS-I cards from Kingston and SanDisk reach almost twice the peak write throughput. The card is not very convincing if you hammer I/O-intensive workloads through it, and it does not deliver very high throughput in combined reads and writes.

16 GB SDHC

The 16 GB model delivers similar performance as the 32 GB version. In has better combined read and write throughput (8 MB/s versus 7 MB/s) and slightly better I/O performance, but also a bit less throughput performance. These differences are not relevant, though. The card is well-suited to applications that require sequential operation, but it doesn't do well in random operations that involve a lot of write access.