Hands on Transcend MicroSD 330S A2 Rated High Performance for Gaming and App

If you run out of storage space on your Android phones or tablets, one of the simplest options is to insert a MicroSD card to expand the storage. There are kinds of speed classes for Micro SD cards you need to consider, depending on what type of performance you require. Application Performance Class is one of these categories, developed to certify that micro SD cards incorporated within Android’s storage capacity, could endure the performance needed to manage numerous applications from the micro SD card directly.

The latest Application Performance Class 2 (A2) is defined by SD Physical 6.0 specification. It makes SD memory card much higher performance than A1 performance by using functions of Command Queuing and Cache. This is a new performance class that has to do with running Apps from the memory cards. The cards are structured a little different to better support caching for random read and write access.

Here are the listed performance differences between the A1 and A2 specifications:

From this diagram, and in reference to IOPS, it is clear to see that the A2 provides an extraordinary gain. The minimum read performance is up by 2.7x, at the same time as providing 4x faster minimum write speeds.

The Transcend’s microSDXC 330S memory card is the latest production of the Transcend High Performance cards. The microSD card comes with the best ratings for all your needs in data management. It has the U3 rating for the UHS speed for real-time recording on UHS-enabled devices and Video Speed Class of V30 for a sustained video recording performance at 30MB per sec.T he memory card is suitable for all your needs in every condition. It is quite a temperature resistant, waterproof, shock proof, X-ray proof, and static proof functionality would make it an excellent option for all your needs. 

The Class A2 microSD card should be one of the excellent options for working with Android smartphones, cameras and drones. The strength of the card lies in the 100 MB per sec read performance coupled with the 85 MB per sec write speed ensures you a faster shooting and transfer performance.

Smartphone Test

I use the AndroBench for the test to see how it performs, compared to the other Sandisk A2 rated card I bought earlier.

The result shows it able to get 80.23MB/s sequential read speed and 47.23MB/s sequential write speed. The random IOPS 4K hit 7.5MB/s. It performs slightly better than the SanDisk Extreme A2 64GB microSD card I have, which gets 72.00 MB/s sequential read speed and 39.69MB/s sequential write speed.

It seems no phones are yet capable of the A2 speeds, according to WD’s Brian Pidgeon. Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 845 chipset doesn’t support them. The microSDXC 330S is more than fast enough to handle the Android devices maximum bitrate of around 80mpbs.

Nitendo Switch

And yes, we have tested this microSD card and it 100% works with your Switch. If it’s loading small bytes at a time, A2 could certainly speed up the Switch load times. If it’s loading large chunks that are then handled through the RAM, then no. At that point, Nintendo does not take advantage of the newer 6.0 standard(A2). I this it is not a hardware limitation in this case and hopefully Nintendo will put some efforts to incorporate a firmware upgrade for this. So the card is indeed perfectly fine and the bottleneck is the reader hardware in most devices.

Technically, the A2 is rated for almost four times the random-write speed as the A1, but to achieve that, you need hardware and firmware that fully supports the newer A2 specification. Unfortunately,  there seems no known Android phones or tablets that support the 2016-era SD 5.01 specification. So we may have to wait another year for mobile phones with that kind of microSD performance. For the time being, the Application Performance Class specification is not really relevant to cameras or video game consoles but this could change in the future. If you want to choose a memory card suitable for everything from phones to video game consoles to 4K cameras, we recommend picking a card that carries both the A2 rating and a V/U speed rating – like Transcend’s microSDXC 330S.

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