- If you have a Microsoft Surface Go
you may be looking to expand
the internal memory using a micro SD card.
But what kind of stuff can you put on it?
And what kind of card should you get?
Do speeds really matter?
Today, we'll take a closer look.
Stay tuned.
(light jazz music)
Alright, so when it comes to micro SD cards
there's a lot going on with them
and there's a lot of theoretical debate
about random speeds, sequential speeds, which matter more?
Also, what cards are better than others?
And there's lot going on here with this stuff.
For instance, some cards have better warranties
than others and higher fail rates
and all that plays an important role here,
although, I wouldn't say it matters too much
on the low-end Surface Go.
First, let's talk about the kind of stuff
you can actually do with the micro SD card.
I'm happy to report it's actually very easy.
You just throw in a micro SD card, go into settings,
and then you can change this up.
You can actually tell it where the default apps
and games should be installed.
If you want to put them on the SD card, you can do that,
or you can keep them internally.
And when it comes to installing apps and games,
just remember, that SD card
will always be slower than the internal memory,
even on the 64 gigabyte Surface Go,
which as we all know, has slower internal storage.
It's still around twice as fast, though,
as any micro SD card.
But besides apps and games, you can also install photos,
videos, maps, and other things to that card by default.
And, if you want, you can always transfer
already existing apps back and forth
between a SD card and internal memory.
So if you do install it to the card
and you find it too slow,
you can throw it to main memory if you want to.
Just keep in mind that some apps cannot be installed
to the card including ones that came with Windows 10
and sometimes developers like MyTube won't allow their app
to exist on an SD card due to that performance degradation.
Alright, now we know what we can do with that micro SD card,
which one should you buy?
There's a whole range of devices out there,
ones that cost 15 bucks, ones that cost 80.
Well, we actually bought both of them from Amazon.
We also bought one that was more mid-range in the $60,
and that was the Lexar and these are all pretty good cards.
But as it turns out, the real cap here is going
to be the Surface Go itself.
So, no matter what card we're putting in there,
we're getting max read, 85 megabytes per second,
and for max write, we're getting 55 megabytes per second.
Those speeds are okay, but some
of those cards can do way more than that.
That Delkin, it can actually hit 250 megabytes per second
in the right device, including the Surface Book 2
and the Dell XPS 15, which we did try it on,
and they did get those speeds.
That means the Surface Go is going to be
the big limiter here.
Now I should point out those are sequential read
and write speed, so that's when you transfer a large file
between the disc and the SD card.
What about randoms?
A lot of people get upset about randoms.
We don't mention them all the time,
and randoms do play a part here.
If you're transferring a lot of files that are smaller,
say 50 or 100 files at a time, or you're doing apps,
well, again, the limiting factor here will be Surface Go.
We never saw these random speeds
for read go over seven megabytes per second.
And even on the cheaper card,
it was around four and a half megabytes per second.
The real world result wasn't that dramatic.
We took 50 photos from an external source
and transferred them to the micro SD card,
well, it was about 20 seconds or 22 seconds
between the cards so that two second difference
doesn't really matter all that much in my opinion.
Now, if you do 3,000 photos, I'm sure it adds up
but if you're doing that with the Surface Go, well,
you probably should have bought a Surface Pro.
Another real world example is
we loaded up a 10 gigabyte mp4 file on all these cards
and we put them in the movie player.
And, as it turned out, they all load instantly
and, more importantly, we didn't have any issues scrubbing,
that is, moving that slider back and forth.
There was no caching, there was no buffering,
everything was instant whether it was the slow card
or the fast card, meaning real world usage here
doesn't seem to have a dramatic play.
Now, I suppose there are theoretical circumstances,
and you'll tell me them in comments
about where the faster card will actually
outperform the slower one, and that's probably true,
but I'm more interested in the casual user here.
If you're just putting a lot of music on this,
you're putting movies on these things,
or you're gonna launch some documents and apps,
well, I don't really see a big benefit here
in spending a lot of money for the more expensive card.
Now if you can pick up, say,
a Samsung one on sale, go for it.
Just keep in mind, the speeds aren't gonna really matter
too much here with Surface Go.
The hardware itself is the biggest limiter.
The only thing you need to really look out for
is get a UHS-1 card that's Class 10
and you should be pretty much good to go.
Alright, so that's a quick look
at the micro SD card experience on the Surface Go.
Now there's a lot to unpack with this, I know,
and I'm sure you're gonna tell me
in comments, things I missed, that's okay.
We wrote an article on this at Windows Central,
we can always amend it and add your information.
So leave me a comment below and tell me what you think.
You know, also head to that description
and get some bio-links for the cards we used here
if you want to try them yourself.
If you have one that you want to recommend,
tell me in comments as well.
If you liked this video, give me a thumbs up,
and don't forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, take care everybody.