SD card that will work reliably on Note 20

Question

I have had an SD card that I have been using for years, over half a dozen phones (all Samsung, as I upgraded the phones). It suddenly died.

I put in a SanDisk Extreme Pro 1TB (as I had it lying around, never used before), It only lasted about two weeks and is not responding.

What I am looking for

1. A brand of SD card that is known to work reliably on Samsung Phones
2. Atleast 250GB, preferably 500GB+
3. Reasonable speed to be able to watch movies and record video to it
4. Price is not that important, looking for value for money.
5. I am in NZ

What I am using it for

1. I am not reformatting it, just using it as storage that I can physically shift to a new phone when upgrading.
2. I had redirected Camera, screenshots etc to it
3. It holds most of my photos
4. It holds most of my music and music videos
5. It holds about 20 movies that I haven't watched yet

Answer 1

Samsung Pro Endurance 256 GB - $73.07 (NZD)

All NAND flash will die eventually; the question is how long (more specifically, how many write cycles) it takes. There's a fundamental trade off between density and endurance. The good news is that you can buy high-endurance microSD cards, since there's a large market for them (particularly for use in dashcams.) They aren't going to be super fast (they're all U3/V30 at best, with the Samsung Pro Endurance rated for 100/40 MB/s read/write)—I wouldn't try to put them in an expensive camera and shoot top-quality video—but that should be more than sufficient for watching movies, especially at your bitrate.

Of the various options on the market, the two most available are the Samsung Pro Endurance and the SanDisk Max Endurance. Both are specifically rated for high-continuous writes, with 5-year and 15-year limited warranties respectively. The SanDisk Max Endurance uses TLC cells in pMLC mode; I believe (though I have not fully confirmed) that the Samsung Pro Endurance card uses proper MLC flash. This should theoretically give the Samsung cards a minor edge, but they both should be extremely durable.

That said, I do want to reiterate that "two weeks" is a suspiciously short lifetime; even the crappiest SD cards should last longer than that. Moreover, NAND flash does not suffer substantial wear and tear from read operations, only write operations. Your use case is not particularly strenuous by most standards, and probably does not require a high-endurance SD card. That's not to say that buying one will be "bad", it'll just be a little more expensive, slower, and lower density than buying a "normal" SD card.

Answer 2

I accepted JMY100's answer. I ended up buying SanDisk Extreme Pro microSDXC 512GB. I just had a feeling that perhaps 1TB was too large for the phone.

I tracked down the source of the SdCard. It was Temu, so I am writing it off as fake.