Micro SD cards are not all created equal, so it is important to buy a card for the intended use case. Unfortunately, people tend to think speed and class is what they need for a surveillance camera, dash camera or go-pro, but that simply isn’t true.

What is critical, in this case, is the ability for the device to keep writing data, around the clock, without fail, for many years. The technical term for this characteristic is endurance, which is measured in Total Data Written (TDW), and Terabytes Written (TBW). The higher the number the longer it will last. Micro SD cards typically do not publish this information and unless you really understand how to unravel their documentation, as well as reading between the lines, you have no way to know what to choose. If you want a cheat sheet, a real giveaway, that you do see these days, is the word Endurance in the product name for the Micro SD Card.

Samsung Endurance Pro (current model) and Samsung Pro Endurance (older model) is not the only brand to solve this, but according to the research I have done it’s all I have been buying and very happy with it. I own countless 32GB and 128GB Samsung Pro Endurance (older model).

Priced from $9 (32GB) to $38 (256GB) they are so cheap it’s hard to imagine not buying the largest size at 256GB these days. This ensures you have more days of history in your recorded footage, as well as the card having an even longer life expectancy. The higher the recording quality, the shorter the recording time and life span so keep this in mind for 4K at 60FPS recording devices like top of the line Go-Pro and Dash Camera.

With fives years of usage in Wyze cams to date and no issues, both the 32GB and 128GB Samsung Endurance Pro are continuing to deliver. This is not accidental and if you want a rabbit whole analysis of why I make this claim, about five years ago, I wrote this post on on Micro SD Cards to use in a Wyze cam:

https://forums.wyze.com/t/bytes-bits-bitrates-fps-codecs-compression-and-samsung-pro-endurance-microsd-cards/

Given that pre-2018, only expensive MLC based cards would solve this problem, my running theory, from the post I linked above, on how these can be so cheap, is that the 256GB cards from Samsung are really a 2TB raw storage TLC micro SD card of sorts, with a wear leveling controller which presents 256GB of usable, logical storage.

Affiliate links:

Samsung Pro Endurance (newer model)

32GB https://amzn.to/41HHxN0

64GB https://amzn.to/3S1InBe

128GB https://amzn.to/48WW3mP

256GB https://amzn.to/41FBkBv

Samsung Endurance Pro (older model)

32GB no longer shipping

64GB no longer shipping

128GB no longer shipping