Buyer's guide
Price per gigabyte is the only number that matters
A $40 128 GB card and a $60 512 GB card sit next to each other on the shelf, and the $40 one looks cheaper. It isn't. Once you divide by capacity, the bigger card costs about a third as much per gigabyte. That single division is the whole game.
Why the sticker price lies
Flash storage is one of the few things you buy purely by the gigabyte, yet almost nobody shops that way. Manufacturers price cards in tiers that rarely scale evenly — the 256 GB is often the sweet spot while the 128 GB is quietly the worst deal in the lineup. The only way to see through it is to normalize everything to the same unit: cents per gigabyte.
Do it once and the rankings scramble. Cards that felt expensive turn out to be the bargains, and the "cheap" small card reveals itself as the markup trap it usually is. On every card here, that number sits right under the price — it's the figure we sort and score against, not an afterthought.
"Cheap" is a moving target right now
Here's the part that makes a static price meaningless: the underlying cost of NAND flash has been climbing hard. Through 2025, memory makers redirected capacity toward AI data centers, and consumer cards got squeezed. Kingston said its NAND costs rose 246% over the course of 2025, and analysts pegged further double-digit quarter-over-quarter jumps heading into 2026. A 1 TB consumer SSD that sold for around $45 roughly doubled.
That's why we don't trust a price in a vacuum. A $/GB that looked mediocre in the spring can be a genuine steal by the fall simply because the whole market drifted up around it. Tracking the number over time is the only way to know whether today's price is actually good or just familiar.
MSRP is theater — we anchor to the street
Most "70% off!" badges measure the discount against a list price the item hasn't sold at in years. We don't. Our discount is anchored to a card's typical recent street price — what it has actually been going for — so a "deal" has to beat reality, not a fantasy number printed on the box. When a listing is priced above its typical street price, we say so instead of dressing it up.
How the deal score works
Every card gets a 0–100 score, and it's deliberately simple: 70% is relative price-per-gigabyte (how this card's $/GB compares to the rest of the catalog) and 30% is discount depth against that street price. Star rating is left out of the math on purpose — a well-reviewed card that's overpriced shouldn't be able to buy its way onto the Best Value row. Bang for buck leads; everything else is a tiebreaker your eyes can do.
The 🔥 badge and the Best Value row are just this score surfacing. Nothing about it is hidden or weighted by who's paying us.
The honest caveat:
Cheapest per gigabyte is not automatically the right buy. A rock-bottom card that's too slow for your camera, or unrated for the 24/7 writes of a dashcam, is a false economy — you'll pay for it in dropped frames or a dead card. Use $/GB to compare cards that can actually do your job, not to pick the cheapest thing on the page. That's what the speed-class guide is for.
Put it to work
Sort by value and let the math do the arguing. The Best Value view ranks the whole catalog by score, or jump straight to a size — 512 GB and 256 GB are usually where the best $/GB lives.