Just How Fast Are the Vita’s Memory Cards, Anyway?

The PlayStation Vita's proprietary memory cards are a bit on the pricey side. In some cases, they'll cost you upwards of five times as much as open alternatives, with the 32GB model clocking in at an astounding $100.

But that's okay, right? As Sony's told us time and again, the Vita's a demanding piece of hardware, and they need to ensure that the storage solutions perform well enough to stream games to the system.

Not so fast. An experiment run by Eurogamer's Digital Foundry discovered that the Vita's proprietary memory cards don't outperform other options on the market by any stretch of the imagination. On the contrary, the study found that the read speeds on the Vita's memory ran between 6.3 and 7.6 MB/s, while the write speeds varied from 4.2 to 7.3 MB/s.

To put that in perspective, you can currently pick up a 64GB SDXC card that offers speeds between 10 and 25MB/s for around $80. That's twice the capacity and up to four times the transfer speed, all for $20 less than what Sony is offering.

Curiously, the test also found that the higher capacity Vita memory cards offered better performance, making them a much better (albeit more expensive) option for reducing in-game load times.

In the end, though, it seems that Sony's statments about proprietary memory cards ensuring high performance are something of a tall tale. In all likelihood, the primary motivation lies in their other public talking point: piracy prevention.