[Galaxy Note 3 Accessories] iunlock:
Over the years I've owned about every brand of cards from eBay cheapo's to the best the industry has to offer like Samsung. I shoot HD wedding videos, take millions of pictures and edit so micro SD cards have been a necessity.

It just dawned on me today when I was looking at the mountain of SD cards I have in my office and realizing the life span on all the cards I've used over the years. Therefore, I'd like to share my experience along with asking those who are knowledgeable in the area of memory cards to help answer some of my questions.

I shoot HD videos and take lots of pictures on my Note 3 so having a reliable card is very important to me. Currently I'm locked and loaded with a 64GB | Class 10 | SanDisk microSDXC UHS-I card in my Note 3. (I also have a Samsung 64GB PRO Micro SDXC | Class 10 Memory Card (MB-MG64DA/AM), which I use in my Canon Video Camera and it is by far the best card out there. Period.)

The 6 most reliable cards that I've owned throughout the years: (Best to Worst)

Samsung

A-Data (Samsung chip, go figure. However, they are highly likely Samsungs '2nd hand' chips as they are not as fast as the actual Samsung brand labeled chips.)

PNY

SanDisk

Kingston / Sony (tie)

Transcend

It's not worth listing the other non-brand ebay junk so I've left those out.

Lately, I've been very disappointed with SanDisk's quality. Especially with their Class 10 cards, where I have found them to have a very weak 'integrity' in their chips. A good card should give you about a million write cycles. (Write cycles is a whole another can of worms...)

I have had more failed SanDisk's (lemons) cards than any other brands combined. This is why I will never buy SanDisk again and am switching to what has never failed me, Samsung. I can't afford the chaos and hate having to recover priceless wedding pictures from a card who decides to kick the bucket when you need it the most.

Recently my 64GB | Class 10 | SanDisk in my Note 3 decided to go belly up and I had to use a data recovering software to salvage all my 4,000 pictures and hundreds of HD video's. WTH right? This card is a couple months old. My previous SanDisk in my old Note 2 did the same thing after a couple of months.

ME, MYSELF AND MICRO SD CARDS...

With a new card I reformat it to Fat32 with Disk Utility (Mac) and then pop it in my device.

Since I take a lot of pictures / videos, I connect my phone to my computer (Android File Transfer, works flawlessly on Mac), copy over everything to my hard drive, back it up again if it's important and then properly eject the phone/card. I've always read and heard from camera guru's that

it's best to reformat your card from the device

instead of deleting the pictures in the folder from your computer while it's still connected. Therefore, after copying over the pictures/videos I would immediately eject and delete directly from the phone. The 'theory' surrounding this is that if you leave your card connected to your computer, it will access (checking byte order/changes) the directory more times than you would want it to thereby decreasing the life expectancy of the card.

Now of course it's not convenient or practical by no means to do this every day with your Note 3...most people just plug in and play with no problems whatsoever throughout the life of the card.

QUESTIONS FOR THE GEEKS

Explain the difference in the structural integrity of the internal SD card vs external SD card.

How much more life expectancy / write cycles does the internal card have vs an external card?

For a heavy user like me I have always put everything on the external card to avoid using the internal memory as much as possible avoiding unnecessary stress.

How often should the external card be reformatted for a heavy user like me where I'm constantly copying over, deleting, etc...

To be continued...