When picking an SD card to use with the MiSTer, Raspberry Pi, or any SD card-based retro gaming setup, there is the general (and sane!) advice to go for the trusted brands, like SanDisk and Samsung. Also to make sure you have a reliable supplier, since it’s easy to get sold a fake card — if the price is too good to be true, it probably is.
But the other thing to consider is — don’t optimize for speed. Optimize for reliability. The retro gaming files you load on your FPGA/emulation device are not very large. There’s no need to go for cards that optimize for speed, it will not make a meaningful difference. The SD card reader on any of these devices don’t deliver meaningful speed increases beyond UHS-I anyway, which is what the following high-reliability cards are rated at.
There are two SD cards in particular we want to highlight — and this isn’t an affiliate link thing or anything, just linking you to the manufacturer’s pages:
- Samsung Pro Endurance — These are SD cards that trade a little bit of speed for extreme reliability. Rated for constant writes for 16 years (140K hours!), these cards are designed for CCTV cameras, dash cams, etc. 5 year warranty for any failures — although if the card fails, that’s hardly any solace, so make sure you do regular backups.
- SanDisk Max Endurance — This is SanDisk’s equivalent, rated for 15 years (130K hours) of constant writes, and comes with a 3 year warranty. Note: Do not get the High Endurance version, only the Max Endurance uses the longer-lasting technology.
These both use the superior MLC technology for endurance and reliability instead of the more common and more error-prone TLC technology.
When choosing a card for your SD card based emulation/FPGA setup, it doesn’t make any sense to optimize for speed — rather, choose these marginally more expensive variants for extreme reliability.
The only downside? They don’t come in extremely high capacity versions, but if you have more than 256GB of ROMs/disc images, you should probably reconsider how many of those games you can actually play in a human lifetime. 😄
(Late 2026 Note: These cards used to be maybe 20% more expensive than the regular ones, these days they are substantially more — so if you are OK with keeping a backup of your setups + waiting 1-3 days to ship a new card + paying for a second card if the original card fails, that could be a be a tradeoff that is worth it to you. Hopefully pricing will get to more reasonable levels again soon.)
If you absolutely need more than 256GB of storage for your games, consider an external USB drive or network drive — obviously this is impractical for handheld/mobile devices.