Manfrotto Pro Rugged MicroSD Card Review

Here’s my Manfrotto Pro Rugged MicroSD Card Review. Having used their Street backpack for the last few years I’m familiar with the brand. A brand synonymous with producing and selling excellent camera peripherals.

I’ve not reviewed an SD Card before, so I was a little unsure how I should approach such a review. I decided I’d take a look at three different categories. The categories I settled on are; build quality, performance and reliability.

Manfrotto are really quite to the point with their new range of SD cards. They’re called ‘Pro Rugged’, so I wanted to test them almost to breaking point to if they deserve the title.

So, let’s get into the review and find out just how good this Micro SD card is.

Manfrotto Pro Rugged MicroSD Card Review

When the mail arrived I ripped open the outer shipping envelope and was greeted by a really simple, yet stylish design on the front of the SD Card box. Well, it’s not much of a box actually, it’s more of a flat cardboard sheath. Regardless of what you call it, it looks great.

The Pro Rugged range sub title is fairly in your face and is there for all to see. Make no mistake, you’ve purchased the tough line of SD cards from Manfrotto.

I did notice that there isn’t an ounce of single use plastic packaging in the packing. The only plastic that came with it, is a useful storage case which I had initially thought to be a cheap, poor quality one. I was wrong, it’s really good quality and it will help keep your SD cards organised.

Build Quality

I really wanted to test just how rugged the MicroSD card is, so after a short deliberation I decided on a course of action. The village where I live has some lovely dog walking routes which I was going to use for the tests.

For the first test, I wanted to see if it was as Manfrotto claim, waterproof! To do this I Submerged the card under an icy puddle and then dried it off and inserted it back into the GoPro Hero 7. As soon as I put the card back in it detected it right away and worked flawlessly, recording the below footage in 4K.

For the next test I thought I’d take it to the next level by introducing mud into the mix. I pushed it into the mud in the field and then washed the mud off in a puddle! Not very scientific, but it did the trick of testing the reliability and ruggedness. Again it worked perfectly.

File Transfer Speeds

For an SD card to pass my tests it also has to have decent transfer speeds. I wanted to transfer some of the footage I have recorded onto my storage server. Most of my personal files are backed up to a Raspberry PI running OpenMediaVault, which is then also backed up to Google Drive.

So I took the raw footage which was around 3GB and transferred it from the SD Card direct to a mapped network drive. Manfrotto advertise up to 280MB/s for data transfer. I was only able to achieve around half of that.

But the transfer speed bottleneck wasn’t the fault of the SD Card. My backup solution isn’t all that fast, but it’s extremely reliable. So, I won’t mark the SD card down a point for that!

I also transferred footage from the SD card to an Internal SSD and the transfer speed I was able to achieve was around 225MB/s. All in all then a decent speed and one that’ll certainly be quicker depending on your individual system specs and setups.

Where To Buy

You’ll be able to buy the Manfrotto Pro Rugged MicroSD Card from the official Manfrotto Store. Hit the link here to check it out.

Score and Verdict

It does exactly what it says on the tin. A fair price too! Far too often SD cards over promise and under deliver. But, the Rugged SD card lives up to it’s name.

Score: 10/10.