Comments on Profile Post by Skyline

They are cheap enough that cheaping out further isn't worth it. I get Sandisk/Samsungs from B&H (not Amazon, risk of fakes too high).

I've experienced cheap Chinese thumb drives from Amazon, the failure rate was high.

Thumb drive failure not a problem if you have a box of them and just use them to copy files. SD cards tend not to be used as generically.

I typically go with Lexar or Sandisk for sd cards. Prob be fine with a second tier name n SD such as Kingston, Adata, etc if there’s a significant price difference.

Debating whether to blow it out and go 256gb for FLAC use or just 64gb for mp3. I'm leaning towards route 2, since this is a cheap DAP and it's for on-the-go listening. I sincerely doubt I'll ever notice the difference and 64GB is dirt cheap.

Some of my personal experience with higher end cards; I had a SanDisk 128gb die on me after 2 years, but I have 2 64gb SanDisks that are working fine 3+ years. I have had a 128gb Samsung in my phone for the last year with no issues.

Sandisk or Samsung. Haven't had any problems with either. Samsungs have been faster for the price. Like others have said, they are so cheap now that it doesn't make too much sense to cheap out.

If you are anything like me, the biggest risk to MicroSD cards is losing the damn things.

So many counterfeit cards too.

Only if you buy from ebay. I got scammed twice with micro sd cards.

@m17xr2b There are many, many reports of fake cards being sold via Amazon (possibly Amazon Marketplace). These are the perfect thing to counterfeit- high value:size, and difficult for the purchaser to test.

Make sure you get ones sold directly by Amazon and not a third party seller. I typically run a few rounds of H2testw to check for speed and proper capacity.

I can go to a marketplace here and order SD cards that register as, say, 64GB but in reality are only 16GB cards.

Yeah, that is why I use H2testw. It writes data to the whole card and then reads it back for errors or mismatches. There might be more modern ways to test, but it is still my go to.

Practical point: for music, it doesn't matter a damn how fast you can write to the card, because you only do it when you add new songs, and minutes don't matter. So keep the high-performance cards for writing video to, and stuff like that. Not necessary to top out on performance for audio... Mind you, somebody will complain that they don't like waiting 750 miliseconds for the album art to show!