Patriot Memory LX 256GB microSDXC Memory Card Review

TweakTown's Rating: 89%

The Bottom Line

Even with the hefty price tag, the Patriot LX packs in top-tier capacity without sacrificing performance - a win for consumers looking for high capacity small form factor storage.

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It has been awhile since our last microSD sample came through the lab. In fact, our last sample was the 200GB counterpart from the LX Series. That left us with rather solid performance in the read department but was left wanting more write performance.

The 256GB LX Series from Patriot aims to take care of those wants along with a slight bump up in capacity. This solution is compliant to Class 10, UHS-I and U3 standards with an expected transfer rate up to 90 MB/s. This storage solution is geared towards smartphones, tablets, and cameras that want that extra capacity while on the go.

The MSRP of the Patriot Memory LX Series in the 256GB capacity comes in at $199.99 with a two-year warranty.

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Packaging is your standard hard card and plastic. There are a few marketing bits spread around with capacity bold at the top right.

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The back goes into more detail in several languages with warranty quite bold bottom center at two-years.

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The scope of delivery includes the 256GB microSDXC card and an SD reader for said card. Both are housed in a plastic retainer.

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Useable capacity for this solution is 238GB using the exFAT filesystem.

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USB Flash Benchmark showed pretty good performance read and write from 16M to 64k showing signs of struggle with small file sizes.

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Adding this LX Series solution to our charts, its sequential performance came in at 93 MB/s read and 83 MB/s write.

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That along with its price translated into a card that is safely in the top ten for microSD. At 95.7%, the Patriot solution is right on the tail of the Samsung EVO+.

As it sits, the Patriot LX has as good of build quality as one could expect from a microSD solution. They even paired it with an SD adapter for those that want to use the card in multiple places or only have a full-size SD reader for their PC or Mac.

Performance is quite good, as a matter of fact, only 5MB/s read and write separates this LX series from the EVO+ we reviewed from Samsung. It can stand on its own at 93 MB/s read and 83 MB/s write putting it in the top tier for UHS-I class solutions.

While it seems that the SD format will soon see the glorious 1TB mark in capacity, microSD solutions, at least for now, are stuck at 256GB. That tremendous capacity does come at a price with nearly all vendors offering it have their MSRP locked in at $199.99. With that said, knowing Patriot, I expected to see them be rather aggressive in pricing going up against giants like SanDisk and Samsung, but it seems they are a bit lax on this one, and rightly so.

Tyler's Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS Maximus IX Hero (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K (buy from Amazon) / (Read our Review)
• Memory: G.SKILL TridentZ DDR4 3200 (buy from Amazon)
• Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Hybrid (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Intel 730 480GB SSD (buy from Amazon) / (Read our Review)
• Secondary Storage: MyDigitalSSD BP5 512GB SSD (buy from Amazon)
• Case: EVGA DG-86 (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 750 P2 (buy from Amazon)
• Networking: ASUS PCE-AC88 AC3100 (buy from Amazon)
• Networking: ASUS ROG 10G Express
• Networking: ASUS Thunderbolt EX3 (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)