General information
      Back to home
      1. Knowledge Base
      2. Hardware
      3. General information

      General recommendations for MicroSD cards

      The following list contains microSD cards extensively used at our office:

      1. Samsung 32GB 95MB/s (U1) MicroSD EVO Select Memory Card
      2. SanDisk Extreme 32GB microSDHC UHS-3 Card
      3. Patriot LX Series 32GB High Speed Micro SDHC Class 10 UHS-I
      4. SanDisk Ultra microSDHC 32gb UHS
      5. SanDisk Ultra microSDHC 16gb UHS
      6. SanDisk Extreme PRO micro SDXC

      General Recommendation

      You don’t have to stick to a specific manufacturer or brand for your microSD card and for larger device fleets the price becomes a driving factor. The nomenclature of SD cards might not be easy to understand, but we want to give you the following advice:

      • Regarding the bus (UHS-1): there should be a roman 1, which looks like a capital i, depicted on the SD card
      • Regarding the speed: there should either be
        • C with 10 in it (Class 10)
        • U with a 1 or 3 (Class U1 / Class U3)
        • V10 or V30

      Recommended microSD card sizes

      Minimum size:

      • Android 7 based images, e.g. RPi3 / CM3: 4 GB
      • Android 9 and 11 based images, e.g. Polaris, RPi4, RockPi 4B: 8 GB
      • Android 13 based images, e.g. RPi4: 16 GB

      Our standard image comes with userdata partitions up to 8 GB. On-demand we offer larger userdata partitions. For this you can read our tutorial.

      The emteria installer only lists storage devices up to 128 GB. Please head to our forum if your use-case really requires larger userdata partition.

      Further reading

      Jeff Geerling did an awesome comparison of microSD cards performance with regard to the Raspberry Pi. It’s worth reading if you want to get the most out of your RPi.