I reviewed the PNY PRO Elite Prime and I'm not convinced putting 1.5TB on a microSD card is a great idea

PNY PRO Elite Prime 1.5TB: 30-second review

PNY makes a wide selection of flash devices, including USB thumb drives, but the PNY PRO Elite Prime series are MicroSD cards meant for use in mobile devices.

Anyone buying these things will soon realise that the standards that govern them have reached silly levels, as this is a Class 10, V30, UHS-1 and U3 card.

It's also a MicroSDXC, which means that it adheres to a profile that covers cards from 32GB to 2TB. But the critical numbers are the Class, with 10 being the fastest, that it is U3, making it suitable for use in cameras where burst performance is needed, and the V30 rating hints that it can sustain a write performance to capture 4K video (30MB/s).

This card comes in blister packaging with an adapter for a full-sized SD card slot. PNY offers capacities in this line from 32GB to 1.5 TB, the review card size.

Many of the best microSD card brands make similar specification cards, although most 1.5TB capacities are A1, not A2, with A2 being more suitable for multitasking scenarios where faster write speed is important, like app launching.

The asking price is close to that of SanDisk, the market leader, and the cost per GB is around 7 cents.

If you think filling a MicroSD card with 1.5TB of data is a good plan, this is one of the relatively few brands offering this capacity, but don't blame me if it gets corrupted somehow.

Those who want to embrace large MicroSD cards, might want to read our feature covering all the cards expected in 2025.

PNY PRO Elite Prime 1.5TB: Pricing and availability

• How much does it cost? From $22
• When is it out? Available now in the USA, but not in Europe.
• Where can you get it? Sold through online retailers and direct from PNY.

As with most PNY flash products, the PNY PRO Elite Prime comes in a range of capacities and multi-item blister packs.

It can be purchased directly from PNY, but the cheaper option is via an online retailer.

Therefore, the cheapest PNY PRO Elite Prime bought via Amazon.com is the 64GB, and that comes in a 3-pack for only $23.99, or roughly $8 each. The 128GB model comes bundled with a reader for $21.99, or as a 2-pack for $22.49, making it better value per-GB.

The larger sizes aren't in bundles or multi-packs, which cost $19.79, $35.99, $71.99 and $109.99 for the 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 1.5TB (reviewed here), respectively.

For those curious, the best value is the 512GB model, and the worst is the 64GB option, where each GB is almost double what it costs on the 512GB,1TB and 1.5TB cards.

Currently, the PNY PRO Elite Prime isn't available through Amazon in the UK or Europe, but it's safe to assume that it will soon.

These costs are slightly higher than the market leader, SanDisk, which is asking $99.99 for its 1.5TB MicroSD, although that is only an A1 class device, not A2. SanDisk has an A2 option, the SanDisk Extreme, and prices the 2TB model at $194.42.

Therefore, the PNY prices are generally competitive in what is a relatively small number of brand choices.

• Value: 4/5

PNY PRO Elite Prime 1.5TB: Specs

PNY PRO Elite Prime 1.5TB: Design

• A MicroSD card
• Comes with an adapter
• Optional Performance Prime card reader

There is little point outlining the external design of a MicroSD card, because we've all seen one, and they are all the same shape, size and weight (approximately).

As is the way, it comes in a card-backed blister back, which includes the MicroSD card and an adapter for using this storage in full-scale SD card slot.

This inclusion might seem largely redundant, but I use an older Nikon DSLR that takes full SD cards, so having the adapter might be useful even if it wasn't for me.

On both items, PNY decided to pass on making them colourful or distinctive, making them both black with white markings. It's mildly hilarious that the Flash industry now has so many marks and logos to add to each MicroSD card that its almost impossible to fit any more and make them readable by those who don't have perfect vision.

The writing on the microSDXC is so small that it's probably four points or less; some of it is only legible with macro photography.

It's hard to misplace the card when it's in the blister, but once released from those bonds and being black, misplacing these could be remarkably easy. As with all blister packs, opening them entirely guarantees that the contents will never, ever, go back inside.

Along with the PNY PRO Elite Prime 1.5TB, PNY also sent along the Performance Prime card reader, a USB 3.1 Gen 1 adapter that is made specifically for UHS-I MicroSD flash cards.

My immediate reaction to the USB 3.2 Gen 1 specification was to wonder why it wasn't Gen 2, or USB-C, but then I realised that the speeds offered by the PNY PRO Elite Prime aren't high enough to need Gen 2 performance.

This device costs around $15, and it's a good design that incorporates a projection at the slot side that protects both an inserted card and helps with insertion and removal. And, as I found out in testing, using that accessory delivers the best performance from the card.

• Design: 4/5

PNY PRO Elite Prime 1.5TB: Performance

Before launching into the benchmarks, I'd like to clarify how I did my testing.

Originally, I intended to use a Caldigit TS4 Thunderbolt Dock with its MicroSD card slot to test the performance. But, early experiments revealed that it was less than ideal.

I realised that when I inserted the card into the PNY Performance Prime card reader achieving much better results on another system. I decided to stick with that approach and used the GMKtec M7 Pro Mini PC as my testbed and the Performance Prime card reader together.

The PNY quoted performance for this card is 200MB/s reading and 150MB/s write, but my conclusion is that those numbers are for the whole range of capacities, and the 1.5TB card has a little more to give, probably due to its flash chip arrangement.

The test that most accurately represents what happens if you try to dump large amounts of data onto this card is probably the AJA System test. I've no idea why the read speed on that test is so low, other than it does the write speed first, and the drive may be recovering from that 64GB exercise when the read part executes.

For a MicroSD card, these are generally excellent scores. However, if you aren't using the adapter, the results tend to look more like 185MB/s reads and 145MB/s writes, depending on the card reader.

The card comes pre-formatted in ExFAT with a Windows capacity of 1,484,984,942,592 bytes, which translates into 1,484,985 MB (roughly) and 1.35TB. Therefore, if you can hit the quoted 150MB/s of write speed, it will take about 9,900 seconds to fill that capacity, which is about 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Don't worry, I'm sure that car, train, plane, yacht, or whatever will wait for you.

If the card was in a phone, where the USB-C port only supports USB 2.0 speeds of around 40MB/s, filling the card could take a working day.

Here is some extra bonus information for reading this far: The number of consoles and laptops that support A2 speeds is limited. The Nintendo Switch, for example, doesn't support A2. Therefore, on those devices, the loading speed of a game wouldn't be any different than it would be on an A1 card, like the cheaper SanDisk Elite.

• Performance: 4/5

PNY PRO Elite Prime 1.5TB: Final verdict

From one perspective, the PNY PRO Elite Prime MicroSD cards deliver almost exactly what the maker claims and at a price that's realistic.

But, these are only suitable for those devices that can activate A2 mode to launch apps, and don't have any USB ports that might accept much faster storage devices.

Ironically, the previous PNY product I reviewed was the Pro Elite V3 flash drive, a design that is at least four times the speed of this card, and it would be double even using a Gen 1 port.

It's worth stating that the SD card format that this technology sprung was never intended to have this much space or performance. Original SD cards were capped at 2GB, and only in 2009, when SDXC came out, was 2TB outlined as potentially possible, a reality that has only happened in the past year.

Until a new standard is developed, we won't see more than 2TB, and that's a problem since existing hardware won't be capable of working with an extended version of SDXC.

To underline this point, I put this card in my Nikon D90, and it immediately rejected it because it wouldn't read the ExFAT card format. Windows won't format this large of a drive in any other layouts, such as ExFAT or NTFS. It might be possible to format it to FAT32, but I doubt my Nikon would be happy with it if I did.

This card might be ideal on a drone or in a GoPro, where its capacity and performance can shine, but A2 mode won't impact that performance, even if it is supported.

Given how many MicroSD cards I've had that suddenly developed terminal issues, the idea of putting 1.5TB of data onto one seems, at best, foolish.

Don't be confused by my reticence; the PNY PRO Elite Prime is a decent MicroSD card by any standards. But, due to the lack of planning back in 2009 with SDXC, this technology is about to hit a brick wall on capacity and performance that it can't easily resolve, and this product might be the swansong of the MicroSD card.

Should I buy the PNY PRO Elite Prime 1.5TB?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

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