LinkMore XV23 Lite 128GB: V60 from the first gigabyte to the last

What is the LinkMore XV23 Lite?

LinkMore is a brand of Moment Semiconductor, a memory company in Toufen, Taiwan, and both the card and the box say Made in Taiwan. LinkMore also sells cards called XV23 and XV23 PRO; they are different products, I tested only the Lite, and nothing below carries over to them. I bought this one on Amazon on 6 October 2026, sealed, and it is the first LinkMore card on my bench.

It is worth testing because of what it prints. Plenty of budget cards print a read speed and stay quiet about writes; this box prints both, 100 MB/s read and 85 MB/s write, and adds that a reader needs UHS-I SDR104 to reach the read. SDR104 is the standard UHS-I mode every modern reader speaks, not a proprietary faster one, so this is a claim any reader should be able to check. The card is in CKBench now, the running index of every card on my bench, next to the other budget 128 GB cards I have bought this autumn, the PNY Premier-X and the Silicon Power Superior Pro.

What the LinkMore XV23 Lite claims, and what it did

Both printed speeds land. The read, 96.8 MB/s, is where every standard UHS-I card on my bench lands, because that is the practical ceiling of the SDR104 mode the box names, and the QuickFlow, which can drive a faster mode on cards that support one, read it at 96.9 because this card does not speak one. My rubric treats a 100 MB/s read claim on an SDR104 card as met at that ceiling. The write is the one to watch: 81.8 MB/s on my primary reader is 96% of the printed 85, inside the 95% my rubric counts as met, and 87.0 on the second reader beats it outright. That 6% gap between the readers is real and I have not pinned down its cause; the reader section has what I know. A2 is not testable on any USB card reader, because its floors assume a command queuing mode that USB readers do not perform; the card cleared the lower A1 floors at queue depth one on both readers, which is indicative and nothing more.

A sealed blister that prints both speeds

The XV23 Lite comes sealed in a retail blister with a full-size SD adapter. The front carries every class mark, microSDXC, V30, UHS-I, U3, Class 10 and A2, an “up to 100 MB/S” headline, three durability icons and a five-year warranty badge. The back has a proper specification table: 128 GB, Class 10 UHS-I U3 A2, read 100 MB/s, write 85 MB/s, 2.7 to 3.6 volts and a five-year warranty, with the line Card reader needs support UHS-I SDR104 could reach the speed underneath. Amazon’s fulfilment sticker covers the end of the write row, but the 85 is clear. There was no returns sticker on any panel.

The card arrived empty, formatted exFAT with 128 KB clusters and no volume label, which is a clean factory layout. It carried one detail I would not have noticed without a second card to compare it with: its volume serial number, which Windows normally fills with a value that changes on every format, read 0123-4567. That is a constant a factory tool writes, and on my bench exactly two cards have arrived with it.

Five minutes at 83.8 MB/s, and no cache to fall off

The timed write starts after an untimed warm-up that runs until the speed stops changing, so the five minutes that decide the video class start on a settled card. On this card the warm-up settled at the earliest point the tool can declare, 60 seconds, at 84.8 MB/s. The trace below is the scored run, one sample a second, with the speed-class floors marked. The first thirty seconds averaged 83.0 MB/s and the last thirty 83.9, the whole five minutes 83.8, and the worst ten seconds were 77.28 MB/s, at 0:24. The longest single write the card took was 97 milliseconds; the bench flags anything over half a second. On the second reader, twice, the same five minutes read 85.5 steady, with worst ten seconds of 82.42 and 82.00.

77.28 is 17.28 MB/s above the V60 floor, so V60 holds with room to spare on a card that only promises V30, and the second reader’s runs leave 22 in hand. Second to second the trace is not perfectly flat: it steps between two levels, about 87 and about 76 MB/s, and the dips have no regular rhythm. Neither level comes anywhere near a floor. Among the 128 GB microSD cards on my bench that puts it just under the Vantrue Endurance PRO (83.4) and the Samsung EVO Plus (83.6), and well above the PNY Premier-X (47.1) and the Silicon Power Superior Pro (37.8).

The same identity as the SUNEAST Ultimate Pro 128GB

Every SD card carries a set of registers, written at the factory, that a USB reader cannot show you and a native SD host can. One names the card: manufacturer ID, OEM ID, product name, revision, serial and build date. The others describe it: how big it is, which SD specification it follows, which speed classes it declares. I read this card’s on a Raspberry Pi before its first run, and they matched a card I had benched the week before, the SUNEAST Ultimate Pro 128GB, sold by a Japanese brand. It has its own review, and its measurements are the comparison here.

No other card I have read shares that identity. Manufacturer ID 0x27 is the one my manufacturer ID register attributes to Phison, a controller company that builds for many brands, and SD128 is a generic product name rather than a brand’s own: the ProGrade card on my bench with the same ID writes its own, PGD. Two brands, one identity, the same factory format and the same style of laser marks. Then I ran them, and on the same ProGrade reader, each on its first run, this is what five minutes of continuous writing looked like.

The SUNEAST writes about twice as fast at first, 159 MB/s, and it can keep that up for about 15.7 GB, counting its warm-up. Then it falls off a cliff to about 35 MB/s and stays there, a 4.5 times drop, with worst ten seconds of 31.04: a V30 card, just. The LinkMore never goes fast and never slows down. It also reads differently: the SUNEAST reads 181.8 MB/s on the same ProGrade reader, because it speaks a faster UHS-I mode, and the LinkMore stops at 96.8. Same identity registers, different card.

124.6 GB at 80 MB/s, every byte verified

The capacity test wrote 117 files of unpredictable, dedup-proof data until the card was full, 124,641,476,608 bytes, then read every one of them back and compared. Zero mismatched bytes. Zero read errors. The fill took 25 minutes 57 seconds and the read-back 22 minutes 11 seconds. Across the first, middle and last tenth of the card the write ran at 79.8, 80.4 and 79.8 MB/s, a spread of 0.85%, and the read spread by 0.72%, which is what a genuine card looks like.

The fill is also the best evidence that the card has no cache at all: a write of the whole card is far bigger than any cache could be, and this one ran at the same speed from the first gigabyte to the last. Its worst ten seconds across the whole card were 73.71 MB/s, still V60. The SUNEAST, filled on the same reader, ran at about 28 to 34 MB/s for the whole card and spent 85% of the fill under 30.

The card declares 124,675,686,400 bytes, 97.40% of the 128 GB on the label, which is ordinary provisioning overhead for a genuine card; the SUNEAST declares 97.39%. A matching byte count proves nothing on its own, by the way: the VIOFO High Endurance 128GB, made by a different company, declares exactly the same 124,675,686,400. Windows will show this card as about 116 GB, because it counts in binary; that is arithmetic, not a shortfall, and the methodology page has the conversion. The capacity row of the rubric scores the declared share of the label, and 97.40% is a 4.

Filled, emptied, and no slower

Some cards write much more slowly after they have been filled once, until something tells them which space is free again; I wrote up the effect in why a used microSD card tests slower. A card reader cannot send that signal, so a card that has been written end to end and emptied over USB stays in that used state. The SUNEAST did exactly that. So I gave the LinkMore the same treatment: its first run ended by filling and emptying the whole card, and the next suite started five and a half minutes later.

The SUNEAST lost V30 after its fill, on both readers. The LinkMore came back faster than its own first run. The after-fill figures come from the second reader, so part of that gain may be the reader, which the next sections deal with, but there is no drop to explain: a card that writes the same speed full or empty has nothing to recover.

Same identity, different card: what can explain it?

I can say what differs, because I measured it; I cannot open the cards up and say why, so treat the rest of this section as the likeliest candidates, not a finding. The registers identify the controller family’s reference identity, the one a brand keeps when it builds on a controller maker’s reference design. They do not identify the flash, the firmware build or the settings a brand picks, and even these two cards’ registers differ in small ways: an erase-timing field, the declared capacity, and build dates two years apart.

Three things differ that the registers do not show. The bus mode: the SUNEAST reads in a faster UHS-I mode on both of my readers and the LinkMore stays on standard SDR104, which is something the card’s firmware offers or does not. The cache: the SUNEAST writes its first 15.7 GB or so fast and then drops to its slower base rate; the LinkMore has no fast stage at all. The flash, possibly: the LinkMore’s steady 80-odd MB/s is more than twice the SUNEAST’s rate after its cache runs out, which suggests different flash behind the same controller, though it could also be the SUNEAST spending effort moving cached data while it takes new writes. From outside, those two cannot be told apart.

The cache is the likeliest reason only one of them slows down after a fill, but it is not the whole answer. The Silicon Power Superior Pro has a cache and held its speed after a fill, and the Samsung PRO Plus 512GB has no cache cliff yet one of my units slowed down after a dash cam filled it. What a card does to keep track of its free space is what decides it, and that is invisible to a bench. Why two identical SD cards test differently covers the opposite case, one product hiding two builds; this is one identity hiding two products. For a buyer the difference is simple: the SUNEAST is the faster card for short bursts and fast reads; the LinkMore is the steadier card for anything that records continuously.

What scattered writes do to it

Loop recording is a long write interrupted constantly by small ones, and random 4K writes are the bench version of that: three twenty-second passes, and the question is whether the third is as fast as the first. On this card it nearly exactly was. The scored run did 1,154, 1,153 and 1,153 write IOPS, 4.73, 4.72 and 4.72 MB/s, a fade of 0.21%, and the card was back at its full sequential rate within ten seconds of continuous writing afterwards.

The second reader’s run went the other way, faster with each pass: 1,344, 1,373 and 1,380 write IOPS, with 29% more read IOPS and 18% more write IOPS than the ProGrade overall. Random figures move with the reader on this bench, which is part of why the A classes cannot be tested on a USB reader, and the rubric scores the primary reader’s run, where this is a 5.

153.5 °F under load, and no throttling

LinkMore prints a temperature-proof icon but no operating range, and publishes none for the Lite, so the rubric scores heat against an assumed 85 °C maximum, the usual rating for a card like this. At the end of five minutes of uncooled writing in a 76 °F room the card read 153 °F, and the thermal frame, taken a few minutes later while the whole-card fill was writing at about the same rate, read 153.5 °F (67.5 °C) at its hottest point. The rubric takes the higher figure: 17.5 °C under the assumed maximum, which scores a 4. The two runs on the second reader read 152 °F.

It did not throttle: the last thirty seconds of the timed write ran at 83.9 MB/s against 83.0 for the first thirty. For context, the SUNEAST peaked at 140.0 °F on the same reader, but it spent most of its five minutes writing at 35 MB/s; heat follows work, and this card does more of it. 17.5 °C of margin in a 76 °F room is comfortable for a dash cam, and a windshield in summer is a harder place than a reader with its fan off, so it is not a reason to worry, just a reason not to bury it in a camera that already runs hot.

Two readers, and a 6% gap I cannot pin down yet

Every card I review runs on my primary reader, a ProGrade PGM0.5, and again on a SanDisk QuickFlow SDDR-B751, which can drive a faster bus mode on cards that support one. This card ran once on the ProGrade, with its whole-card fill, and twice on the QuickFlow afterwards.

The two QuickFlow runs agree with each other almost exactly, so the QuickFlow result is solid. The ProGrade run is 6% slower on writes, and the table shows how: both readers see the same two write levels, about 87 and about 76 MB/s a second, and the ProGrade run simply spends more of its time on the lower one, 28% of the timed seconds against 11%. That is unusual for this bench. Cards writing at this speed normally land within a fraction of a percent of each other on the two readers; the Vantrue, at 84.7 and 85.0, is the nearest example. Random figures always run higher on the QuickFlow, so that part is normal.

The catch is that two things changed between the ProGrade run and the QuickFlow runs: the reader, and the card’s state, since the ProGrade run was the card’s first writes and the QuickFlow runs came after the fill. Either could explain the gap, and I have not separated them. It does not change the score, which takes the lower reader’s figures and lands in the same rows either way, and it does not change the verdict: on either reader this card holds V60 with room to spare.

How the 4.5 breaks down

The same rows come out if the scoring uses only the two QuickFlow runs, so the 6% reader gap does not move the score: the write claim is a 5 at 96.3% or at 102.3%, and the worst ten seconds are a 5 at 77.28 or at 82.00.

The bottom line

The LinkMore XV23 Lite 128GB is a budget card that behaves like a better one. It delivers both of the speeds it prints, holds V60 on a box that only promises V30, writes the whole card at the same 80 MB/s it starts at, verifies every byte, and does not slow down once it has been filled. For a dash cam, an action cam or anything else that records for a long time, that steadiness is worth more than a fast first few gigabytes. Its reads stop at the standard UHS-I ceiling, so it is not the card for fast offloads on a premium reader.

It is also a warning about reading too much into a card’s identity. Its registers match the SUNEAST Ultimate Pro’s field for field, and the two are different cards in every way a user would notice. The register tells you whose controller family a card comes from; the bench is still the only way to find out what the card does. On the day I bought it, 6 October 2026, it was on sale, and it cost less per gigabyte than any other genuine 128 GB card I have bought for this bench.

Sample size: one unit, purchased sealed at retail from Amazon on 6 October 2026. Three runs on two readers on 16 October 2026 under CKBench protocol v1.26.

Disclosure: I bought this card at retail from Amazon on 6 October 2026. LinkMore and Moment Semiconductor had no involvement in or knowledge of this review, saw no result before publication, and had no opportunity to influence any number on this page. This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. Affiliate links like these and my YouTube channel are what keep the site running.