With the rise of mobile devices such as phones and tablets becoming more popular, mobile storage is also on the rise. To help try and keep manufacturing costs down, a lot of tablets and phones don’t come with a great amount of storage. However, a lot of Android-based devices come with micro-SD card slots so the users can upgrade the storage on the device to their given need. Micro-SD Can allow users that extra bit of storage for their favourite music, movies or whatever they may need. If you don’t need extra storage for your mobile device, maybe you could use a bit bigger memory card for you DSLR or camera? Well then, it’s a good thing most Micro-SD cards also come with a full-size SD slot which allows them to be used with cameras and even some notebooks and laptops.

• Manufacturer Website: Patriot
• Product Page: Patriot LX Series 200GB High Speed Micro SDXC
• Amazon UK: £62.99 At the time of review
• Amazon US: $77.99 At the time of review

Today we will be taking a look at a massive 200GB Micro-SDXC card from Patriot’s LX Series. The card on test today is Class 10 and UHS-I and offers speeds of up to 90 MB/s. While 90 MB/s may not seem like much, you have to remember about the size of a Micro-SD card and then counter in the fact it holds 200GB (roughly 185GB when formatted). Patriots 200GB LX Series Micro-SDXC is to offer a mass amount of storage for users on the go who don’t want to be bothered with changing storage cards all the time. Have a vacation coming up and reckon you’ll take a few more snaps from your phone? Well then, pop one of these bad boys in and you should be good for at least a week or two of frequent picture snapping, dependent on your phone and output settings of course.

As it is a Micro-SD Card, there really isn’t too much to the packaging. The card comes with a full-size SD adapter, both of which are inside a plastic carrying case that you can see through the packaging. I’ve always been a fan of being able to see the actual product through the packaging, also just seems to help make sure you know what you are purchasing.

Looking around the package and we have all the relevant info we need such as storage capacity, transfer speeds and on the back, we can see the URL’s of all of Patriot’s Social Media accounts which are always beneficial.

Specifications

Looking at a Micro-SD card always reminds me of just how far we have come in terms of storage over the years. I grew up in the era of 3.5″ floppy disks that stored a whopping 1.44MB of data after being formatted. Yes, that 1.44MB allow for the storage of many files and even photos back in the day, but now, it would only allow for a few photos or test documents. All I can really say is thank goodness for things like Micro-SD cards, while they are really quite small, they can hold incredible amounts of information.

There really isn’t much going on with the Patriot LX Series Micro SDXC card and we wouldn’t really expect there to me. On the front of the card, Patriot has included their logo, the 200GB Storage size, and the Class 10 and Micro-SDXC markings. This information alone pretty much tells us all we need to know about the card itself and now there really only one thing to do as the back is left plain, that’s test this bad boy out and see what it is capable of.

All testing was done VIA a Micro-SD to USB 3.0 adapter which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on a MSI X99S SLI motherboard featuring 16GB of Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Ram, i7 5820K CPU and a 250GB Samsung 840 Evo SSD.

As you will see by the above performance benchmark tests, the Patriot LX Series Micro-SDXC is capable of hitting it’s 90MB/s transfer speed when it comes to standard read performance. Combining the tests and we are left with an average transfer of 88.23MB/s read and a 27.56 MB/s write speeds. Overall, not bad for a Micro-SD, especially one of this size.

I have to say, when Patriot offered to send this in for review, I was happy and a bit nervous at the same time. Happy as I can really use a 200GB Micro-SDXC for a number of things and nervous because it’s a Micro-SD card, there isn’t all that much to say about it. Design-wise, it looks like a standard Micro-SD card, except for the fact it is 200GB. Advances like this do leave me with hope, though, if they can fit 200GB onto a card of this size, hopefully, one day they will be able to implement a similar technology into mobile phones and tablets, thus upping the storage available on the device itself. It’s 2016 and I am sorry, even 16GB of storage on a mobile device is pushing its luck, especially after a couple out of the box updates which it seems most products have these days. The next thing to work on is the overall transfer speeds of storage on such small products.

Speaking of speeds, as mentioned, the 200GB LX Series Micro-SDXC was easily able to obtain the stated 90MB/s transfer speed in the form of its read speeds depending on the benchmark being run. While the write speed was closer to 30MB/s, I personally feel the read speed on a product like this will be more beneficial. While write speeds are important, once the file/movie/song/game/program is written to the storage device, it will then need to be read to be used, hence, why having a better read speed will be best in the long run of things.

When it comes down to it, Patriot has released a great Micro-SDXC card with an incredible capacity all at an affordable price by today’s standards. Having a look around locally, the only other 200GB micro-SDXC I could find came in at around £20 more expensive than Patriot’s offering which is an exceptional difference. Patriot has done a great job at placing their LX Series Micro-SDXC right where it belongs on the market, well done!

Major thanks to Patriot for sending in today’s review sample, I hope to see more from them in the future!