Best SD Cards for the Raspberry Pi: 2023
Ash (362)The Raspberry Pi is a single board computer (or SBC) which means all of the components are soldered into place on the board—that is, except for one. Instead of using a static hard drive, the Raspberry Pi uses a microSD card for storage.
This makes it possible to swap out operating systems on the fly. It’s worth noting the microSD cards are not hot swappable, you will need to shut the Pi off to change out the card. That said, it’s also possible to boot the Raspberry Pi using a USB SSD or flash drive. However, most users will opt for a microSD card for its convenience.
If you’re looking for a microSD card to use, it helps to know what to look for. There are some limitations with the Raspberry Pi regarding compatibility, so in this guide, we’ll go over what some of those limitations are and what to look for when choosing a card.
The biggest concern is capacity. The Pi is designed to support 32GB cards formatted as FAT16 or FAT32. Although, it is possible to use larger cards, but they need to be formatted using the exFAT file system. The Pi will do this automatically when formatting the card using the official Raspberry Pi Imager program.
I’ll be ranking the microSD cards in this list with both price and speed taken into consideration. But first, it’s important to understand how speed is classified for microSD cards on the market. When researching microSD cards, you’ll notice that they’re often broken up into classes.
Most of the microSD cards in this list are C10 which means they have a minimum read speed of 100 MB per second (written as MB/s). The speed often varies depending on the capacity of the card, so I will list the available capacity range alongside the available speed range.
Double check the speed for the size of the microSD card before making your purchase to ensure you’re getting the quality you want.
