Raspberry Pi Launches Own-Brand, High-Performance microSD Cards

Raspberry Pi has announced that it's getting into the storage game, launching branded microSD cards guaranteed to provide the best performance on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer — and there's a new way to protect your desk from your Raspberry Pi 5, too.

"As many of you will know first-hand, your choice of SD card makes a huge difference to your Raspberry Pi experience," says Raspberry Pi engineer JDB. "Historically, we've worked with our Approved Reseller partners to test and endorse third-party cards. But as cards have become more sophisticated, and particularly with the advent of Class A2 cards, this process has become increasingly cumbersome. To ensure you have the best possible experience at the lowest possible cost, we've worked with our partner Longsys to develop a range of branded Raspberry Pi SD Cards."

Manufactured by Longsys, the Raspberry Pi-branded microSD cards are guaranteed to meet the SD Card Application Performance Class A2 standard. They also fully support Command Queuing (CQ), an updated way for a compatible device to communicate with the SD card that delivers improved throughput for random input/output operations — exactly the sort of workload you'd find when running an operating system from a microSD card on a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computer.

While JDB was able to write a driver to enable CQ support on the Raspberry Pi 5, there was a catch: not all A2-specification cards implemented a compatible CQ mode. "SanDisk cards, in particular the Extreme and Extreme Pro product lines, were my first choice — and they performed well," JDB explains. "However, other manufacturers' offerings suffered from one or more of a number of common deficiencies that precluded CQ mode operation, or caused them to flake out in use. There was even one type of card that claimed Class A2 support but ignored any request to read the expansion registers to probe for any of these features!"

This was the catalyst for Raspberry Pi's partnership with Longsys on the development of cards which are guaranteed to offer CQ support — with Raspberry Pi's custom Linux kernel filtering out cards that are known to have incompatible implementations, in order to avoid potential data loss. "While best performance on Raspberry Pi 5 was our primary goal," JDB explains, "the non-CQ performance of these cards is still stonkingly fast, and you will generally see a significant uplift in performance on older Raspberry Pi computers."

Separately to the new microSD cards, which Raspberry Pi's "Approved Resellers" will be require to exclusively promote as the cards of choice for the company's single-board computer range, Raspberry Pi has also announced a simple accessory for the Raspberry Pi 5: a $3 silicone bumper that snaps onto the board's underside, to protect your desk from its base and vice-versa while also making it easier to use the Raspberry Pi 5's side-mounted power button.

The Raspberry Pi Bumper is available to pre-order from the company's resellers now at $3; more information on the branded microSD cards is available on the Raspberry Pi website, with resellers' pricing starting at $9.95 for a 32GB blank card.