Are you planning on purchasing a GoPro for yourself this year? Or are you even considering buying one for a family member or friend as a gift? (And if the answer to that last part is “Yes!”, then I think we should be friends….). Well before you make that purchase, let’s talk SD cards! There’s a plethora of them to choose from and you want to make sure you get the right one first time around. What you don’t want to do is find out too late that your card is unsuitable, too slow or even worse, fake!
It never ceases to surprise me how many people spend hundreds of dollars on a brand new, top of the range, state of the art action camera… and then try to cheap out on the SD card by purchasing the cheapest card available… This usually ends with them either having a totally unsuitable card like the Sandisk ULTRA card or a knock off fake card that won’t even work in an mp3 player, let alone an action camera….
There is a valuable piece of advice that one should always keep in mind. If it seems too good to be true, then it usually is. Trust me, there are people out there who are willing to take your money and give you nothing in return. If you don’t believe me, just send me $100 and I promise I’ll prove to you that what I just said is completely 100% true!
So why should you be fussy about which SD card you buy for your GoPro? And doesn’t the GoPro come with a Free SD card anyway?
In all fairness, using a recommended, tried and tested SD card with proven performance is going to save you a lot of problems in the long run. It’s that simple. Purchasing an SD card that is too slow or just not compatible is going to give you major headaches and prove to be a major disappointment while trying to use your camera. Do you really want to have someone open their gift (or you open your new purchase for yourself for that matter) only to have it malfunction and throw up repeated “SD ERR” messages? Of course not, yes this is something that can very easily happen.
Now, while it’s true that GoPro cameras purchased from GoPro.com come with a Free SD card, it’s actually a tiny 32GB model. For a rough idea of how small that is, around 8 mins of 4K video can take up 4GB. So your 32GB card may only last you 64 mins. Now this will vary depending on which settings you use, resolution, frame rate, compression etc. But keep in mind that the GoPro Hero 10 and Hero 11 both shoot in 5.3K video, while the Hero 11 offers 10bit color recording too. Suddenly this gobbles up a lot more space when recording and now your 32GB SD card is pretty much next to useless. So yes, you need to purchase a recommended SD card for use in the GoPro camera. While GoPro does offer you the chance to upgrade to a 64GB card (as of last purchase) that’s still a tiny amount of storage space and you don’t want to have the chore of backing up your footage every single night or deleting it just so you have room to record the next day’s activity.
So the first question you need to ask yourself is “What size SD card should I buy?”
That’s going to depend on the type of shooting you do. Look, we all know that newbies and amateurs are going to want to shoot for hours on end, after all, nothing is more exciting than sitting down to watch your footage of a 4-hour hike that you went on…… from 1st person perspective….. (And yes, that’s sarcasm….) However, the more professional videographers out there are going to shoot in much shorter bursts. This not only saves them time in editing, but assembly of their final edit too. However, my recommendation is going to be down to 2 sizes of card. 256GB and 512GB.
I actually used to specifically use 256GB cards myself this offered ample storage space for all my shooting needs. However due to lowering prices and the fact I didn’t want to sort through footage every weekend, I now use 512GB cards exclusively. I find its the optimal balance between storage space and time to sort through footage (whether I want to keep certain files, upload them to my storage cloud or just delete them).
So which brand SD card should I buy? And where should I buy them from?
So people have a lot of different opinions about this one and I also have my own opinion. However my opinion comes from years of experience filming with GoPro camera’s as well as years of dealing with customers on the GoPro Support Forums (if you’ve ever visited there, I’m sure you were lucky enough to have a response from DemonView LLC!). So the one card I 100% recommend for use in your GoPro is the Samsung Evo Card. This is a card I stand behind and have never had a single issue with. I’ve used these cards since the GoPro Hero 4 black was released, I’ve used them with the Hero 6, Hero 8, Hero Fusion, Hero 9, Hero 10, Hero 11 and even in my dashcams and I can honestly say that they have kept on working with no issues at all. So for me, that’s just a testament to the quality and reliability of the Samsung brand.
Now people also recommend the Sandisk line of cards and these are the “Free” cards that come with your new GoPro. I personally don’t use these cards and although I still have the “Free” cards that came with my GoPro, they are just lying about as spares for my dashcams if I need them. When the GoPro Hero 9 was released, it seemed to me that there were a huge amount of people having the dreaded “SD Err” messages on their GoPro while using these cards. Now some of these people hadn’t take that extra step of prepping their SD card for use by formatting it in their camera first (a very important step BTW), however, others had performed this step and were still having issues. I recommended at the time that people change to using Samsung Evo cards and when they did, it seemed their issues went away as many of them thanked me for the advice and stated their cameras were working as intended.
I will fully admit, I did try my hardest to get my own GoPro Hero 9 to create an “SD Err” message by using the “Free” SanDisk card that came with my camera and I never could get this to happen. So, I can’t confirm that this was a GoPro issue, a Sandisk issue, or a combination of the two. So which model SD card you buy is entirely up to you, I just know from my years of experience from using Samsung Evo cards, that they never presented me with any problems so that’s why I use them exclusively.
So where should you buy your SD cards?
Again, don’t try going on Ebay or Aliexpress trying to find the cheapest SD card price that you can. There are plenty of fake sellers selling fake cards and you don’t want to have to deal all the problems that brings just because you tried to save yourself $1!
This is why it’s always simple, easy and quick to buy directly from Amazon.com. What you want is a no hassle return service if you experience any problems and the ability to choose multiple shipping options for your purchase. My additional advice is to make sure you purchase from Samsung when on Amazon and not some 3rd party reseller. This way you are sure to be purchasing genuine original products that will work as promised. So use the links I’ve provided by clicking on the pictures of the SD cards you want to purchase.
I’ll include affiliate links to my SD card recommendations so you can purchase directly (and yes, I do get a small commission from these sales, but considering that amount of time I put into writing these articles, it’s a nice way to say thank you!)(also with the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes that I make, wouldn’t it be nice if I could afford to pay for some grammar lessons… maybe a website building course too?)
Even better, save yourself some money this Christmas by signing up for an Amazon account. Take advantage of their great delivery times, the huge selection of items and just make your life easier this Christmas!
Join Amazon Prime – Watch Thousands of Movies & TV Shows Anytime – Start Free Trial NowThe last question….. Why don’t you recommend even faster SD cards that are available
Well, two reasons really.
1: Some cards such as UHS-II cards do offer faster transfer speeds. Some of them do this by having two rows of contacts on the card which is used to transfer data. However, GoPro camera SD card readers only read one row of contacts. So, it’s no use buying such an SD card if your camera can’t take advantage of this. It’s not going to transfer information faster, it’s not going to improve information read or writes, so you’re literally spending more money on something that’s not going to be of benefit to you. It would be like putting the world biggest rear wing spoiler on your car that’s guaranteed to generate so much downforce, you could corner at 200mph while driving upside down in a tunnel…. only your car is a Geo Metro and it’s never going to be reach speeds that would require a giant spoiler
2: Your GoPro camera really does have a “top speed” when it comes to how much data it needs to read or write at a time. And again, there’s no use buying a memory card that outperforms that “top speed” as it’s not going to offer you any advantage over a less expensive card. So this is why the Samsung Evo Plus will do in place of the Samsung Evo Pro Plus (and you save yourself $10 in the process!).
However, at the end of the day, it’s entirely up to you which card you purchase, and I can only make a recommendation based upon my own personal years of experience. So, the only thing you need to do is make sure that the card is fully compatible with your GoPro, and you don’t cheap out on the most important purchase for your GoPro camera.
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