What Is the microSD Card Endurance Testing Project on bahjeez.com?

bahjeez.com is the personal site of Matt Cole, and its most notable project is a long-running microSD card endurance test. Cole has been running the test for about 2.5 years, has destroyed more than 150 cards from over 30 brands, and has another 100-plus cards from 30 brands still under load. The point is to measure how long microSD cards actually last when continuously written to, and he publishes the results in a browsable public database.

What the project measures

The test is an endurance test, not a speed or benchmark test. Cards are put under sustained load and run until they fail, so the useful output is a failure point per card rather than a peak read/write number. That makes the data relevant if you care about how long a card survives in always-on hardware — single-board computers, home servers, cameras, or anything else that writes constantly.

Scale and duration

• Roughly 2.5 years of continuous testing at the time of the open letter to SanDisk.
• Over 150 cards destroyed across more than 30 brands.
• Over 100 additional cards from 30 brands still in the testing pool.
• Results collected into a browsable database rather than posted only as one-off articles.

The combination of sample size and elapsed time is what separates this from a typical single-card review. A card that dies in a week and a card that dies in two years are both single data points; hundreds of cards across dozens of brands starts to show patterns.

Why it got attention

Cole's testing has been covered by TechRadar, TechSpot, Tom's Hardware, IGN, and various social media posts, according to his own account on the site. The TechRadar link is the one pricing/coverage reference present in the site data. The coverage is a signal that the dataset is treated as a useful independent source, not just a personal blog post.

The SanDisk finding

The site's most prominent post is an open letter titled "Dear SanDisk, Please Do Better." Cole states that SanDisk used to be his default choice — cheap, widely available, and reliable in his experience — including in a cluster of more than 35 single-board computers using SanDisk Ultra cards as primary storage. He reports that one of those cards eventually failed, and that the failure destroyed the only copy of source code for a Wikipedia bot he had written. The bot scanned Wikipedia for cut-and-paste page moves and generated reports so administrators could fix them; the code was not backed up elsewhere and he considers it likely gone.

That single failure is presented as the starting point, not the conclusion. The broader claim in the letter is that SanDisk microSD cards have a problem that shows up across his larger dataset, which is why the scale of the testing matters to the argument.

How to use the data

If you are choosing a card for a workload that writes continuously, the database is the part worth checking: look for cards of the capacity and model you are considering, and compare how long they lasted relative to others from the same brand and price tier. Treat it as one input among several — endurance results depend on the specific card, capacity, and load pattern, and a brand's behavior can change between production runs. The site is a personal project, so the raw database and the open letter are the primary sources; media coverage is secondary reporting on the same results.