Best Memory Cards For The Sony A6000

An In-camera speed comparison between the all most popular UHS-I and UHS-II SD memory cards for the Sony A6000.

Use this guide to help you find the best memory cards for your shooting style and budget.

Sony Lenses For The A6000

Must have Sony A6000 Accessories

In-Camera Memory Cards Speeds | Sony A6000

First things first, there are a few things you need to know before you buy memory cards for the Sony A6000. The camera features only a single UHS-I memory card slot, so you do not need to buy the more expensive UHS-II cards that are tested below.

Second, the camera maxes out its write speed at about 34MB/s. So the difference in speed between high-end and cheaper UHS-I cards won’t be that relevant. It’s recommended to at least stick with the U3 speed class to make sure you get the best performance when recording video.

Top 5 Recommended Memory Cards Sony A6000

These are the top 5 best performing and most reliable UHS-I memory cards on the market right now. They all have been tested in various Sony cameras and will work great in the A6000.

Sony A6000 Memory Card Speed Tests

In-camera benchmarks showing the performance of each card as it was tested in the A6000.

The first two read and write speeds are how the card performs in the USB 3.0 memory card slot in the Macbook Pro. Alongside that, we’ve listed the Sony A6000 memory card write speeds. These tests are done shooting RAW with the A6000. Please do not use this data without properly linking or crediting this page. 

 On the Sony A6000 there really is no best sd memory card, they all perform very close to the same in terms of write speeds. There is an internal bus speed bottleneck in the A6000 slowing down the write speed to the card.

What else is interesting is when shooting JPEG only, write speeds slow to a 10-12MB/s range which makes me think it’s capping out because of a single threaded processing. Most of the Sony cameras we’ve tested like the Sony A7s and the Sony A7r give very similar results. However, the Fuji X100T is the complete opposite.

Camera Specs

Sensor Size: 24.3MP APS-C     
Memory Card Format: UHS-I      
Video Resolution: 1080p60        
Video Codec: XAVC S
Sony A6000 – Amazon / Adorama / BHphoto

Sony A6000 Speeds Stats

Shoots at a burst speed of 11fps and its file sizes are roughly around 25MB.

Burst Speeds: 11fps

To maintain a burst of 11 fps that’s some crazy bandwidth. 11fps x 25MB = 275MB/s.

Buffering

With the buffer you can shoot 49 Jpeg shots, or 21 Raw. Meaning the buffer has something like 512MB of memory.

Your card speed doesn’t necessarily affect your burst performance. Just when you’re done bursting it will take a long time to write those files to your card.

With something like the SanDisk Extreme Pro 95MB/sec card, you’ll wait about 14 second for the files to write from the buffer to your card.

Do You Need A UHS-II Card

This camera only requires UHS-I cards and cannot take any advantage of a UHS-II card. So if you’re looking to improve your burst write speeds this camera will not take advantage of UHS-II like a proper UHS-II compatible camera will.

Bottom line is, purchasing a UHS-II memory card for the Sony A6000 will yield you no speed improvements.

SDXC VS SDHC

If you want to buy a 32GB version of any of these cards, they perform the same. However, 32GB cards and smaller are SDHC and are formatted Fat32 instead of exFat64.

Do you need an SDXC card for the Sony A6000? Yes, the A6000 now shoots XAVC S footage so you need an SDXC card to shoot in this format. If you don’t shoot video, then it won’t matter.

Side note: You won’t be able to format an SDHC card to exFat64 and be able to record to the XAVC video codec.

Update: Sony updated some of their cameras with firmware to support SDHC with XAVC S video. You’ll have to check if the Sony A6000 firmware included this update.

Avoiding Counterfeit Cards

A big problem in the memory card scene right now has to do with counterfeit cards.

If you’re buying memory cards from Ebay or even sometimes from Amazon, sometimes you can end up with a counterfeit card.

These cards are often made by hacking the memory controller so the card can report more flash than what is actually in the card. But this is easy to test.

How To Test For Counterfeit Cards

After buying a card it’s a good practice to fill the card completely to make sure it doesn’t have any strange issues. A counterfeit card usually will not reach it’s maximum capacity without failing. Fill your card with video or stills or copy files from your computer. If transfer speeds are reasonable and the card gets close to it’s rated capacity and does not fail, you should be good to go.

Memory Card Speed Tests Conclusions

We’ve been getting pretty consistent results with these cards. Usually the Kingston and Sandisk Extreme Pro are the fastest cards. We’ve always bought the Sandisk Extreme Pro cards because they last for years and it saves you from having to upgrade in the near future.

When it comes to performance, you don’t really see or notice any speed difference between any of these cards even with burst write speeds. You will however notice it on older cards. Mainly when you go to view playback.