Food for Heroes: SanDisk Extreme Plus 32GB in the Red

First Ultra, then Extreme ...
and now for the, well,
ultimate climax:
The Extreme Plus. Woo-hoo!

It caught us in total surprise. Yet another product name rehashing the «plus» meme in its name. This time, SanDisk marketing had this great idea in order to create another microSD card wonder.

So, SanDisk's product management managed to pimp up its product names from Ultra to Extreme, and now even to Extreme Plus. How im-press-ive. It seems that the Extreme Plus series is going to replace the previoius Extreme series of microSD memory carads. However, I don't really see any real differences, at least not in terms of packaging and the labelling on the microSD card itself...

The performance figures printed on the packaging are still totally inflationary as they have been before with the Extreme series. I never managed to see any such performance in any of my real-world usage as boasted on the packaging. But maybe that's already the improvement, the big leap: product management launches – fanfare! – a new microSD card series with a big plus, yet doesn't inflate performance figures again. Look, how grateful I get these days.

At least, the hefty price tag for the Extreme (Plus) microSD cards has slightly lowered; the big electronics retail stores over here sell the Extreme Plus for around 15% less than where the Extreme started (32GB cards).

SanDisk Extreme Plus microSD 32GB (32kByte write).

My real-world performance readings are unobtrusive: the Extreme Plus 32GB microSD smoothly exceeds the magical 6MBytes per second required for stable Protune operation and reach approximately 7MBytes per second. The hunchback in the performance graph above seems to appear more or less reproducibly at the beginning of my performance measurements, whatever the reason is. Some rundown tests in my HD Hero 3 Black Edition also went through smoothly without any problems; the camera captured video for around an hour with Protune enabled and in 2.7K resolution until its battery ran out.

But now for the unpleasant surprise: when comparing the performance of the Extreme Plus with my performance figures for the Extreme...

Without a Plus: SanDisk Extreme 32GB (32kByte write).

...well, what did we get here?! The previous Extrem microSD 32GB runs at approximately 7.7 MBytes per second. Yet, the newer Plus comes at a clearly detectable Minus: only 7 MBytes per second.

So, this is what SanDisk thinks the «Plus» really means to us customers. This reminds me of the slightly brain-damaged logic of Madam «Dr.» Merkel with her more net after gross imagination, beating Bistromathics by a wide margin.