The PRETEC SDXC 64GB class 16 card clocks in at $75, while the Sandisk Extreme SDHC 32GB 45MB/s card will set you back about $64.  On one hand the Sandisk Extreme SDHC cards are well respected and considered to be well worth the money, while PRETEC made its name as one of the first companies to release a SDXC UHS-I (Ultra-High Speed) class memory card.

It’s clear that the PRETEC SDXC card is a better value when looking at price per GB. The extra $10 rewards you with 32GB of extra storage space which means you can fit almost a whole day worth of filming on a single card. But how does it stack up in the category of write speeds?

When I found these PRETEC SDXC cards, I went ahead and ordered a set of them, one for each of my Canon T2i cameras. As a measure of quality control I’ve run the same tests on both of these cards to see how they preform. For each of these tests I’m using the H2testw 1.4 flash drive testing program. This is a pretty handy testing tool that writes directly to flash memory in 1GB file chunks and records there average write speed over a length of time.

The first PRETEC SDXC card I tested preformed great at 18.2 MB/s. If you’re not sure how this stacks up against other cards, check out this earlier post. Basically the Canon t2i, t3i, and 60d require a constant write speed of about 6.25MB/s, a constant 18.2 MB/s gives you quit a bit of head room to work with.

The Second PRETEC SDXC card I tested wasn’t quit as impressive as the first. The speeds on this card averaged out at 17.5MB/s which is still a very good number, but it’s interesting to see that the same brand of card gives you 700KB of difference in speed.

I only have one 45MB/s Sandisk Extreme card in my collection to test, the other 32GB cards are 30MB/s. So I figured I would test both of these speeds and see how they preform against the PRETEC SDXC cards. The Sandisk Extreme 32GB 30MB/s card runs about $60, that’s about $4 less then it’s slightly more advanced brother, so lets see how it preforms.

The Sandisk Extreme 32GB 30MB/s card did pretty good at 15.3MB/s which is still more then enough speed to handle Canon’s video codec with room to spare for increased data rates with Magic Lantern. But even the slower PRETEC SDXC card out preformed this card by 2.2MB/s.

It’s no surprise  that the Sandisk Extreme SDHC 32GB 45MB/s card out preformed it’s slightly less expensive brother by 1.6MB/s, but 16.9MB/s is still a slower write speed then either one of the PRETEC SDXC cards. It looks like the PRETEC SDXC 64GB class 16 cards are the best value in terms of speed and space. I am very pleased to see the speed results of the PRETEC SDXC cards so far and with the few Magic Lantern tests I’ve been able to run, I’ve managed to get a constant 1.5x CBR without dropouts.

These PRETEC SDXC cards aren’t the absolute fastest cards on the market, but they have more then enough head room to allow for higher bit rates and more recording space without much problem. They defiantly have a better performance to price ratio when compared with these mid range Sandisk Extreme cards. I plan to take these PRETEC SDXC cards out with me on the next few projects I work on and see how the hold up. I’ll be sure to write a post on their performance again once I’ve had a chance to use them for a few months and see how they hold up.


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