If you want to install the operating system, you'll need the best Raspberry Pi 4 SD cards, as that's how you'll be able to do it. It's important to find the correct card. A fast and robust one won't break the bank. If you picked up one of the best Raspberry Pi kits, then you probably already received one in the kit, but if not, or if you need to expand the storage, here are your best options.

Raspberry Pi

(Image credit: Jerry Hildenbrand)

Even if you've never used a Raspberry Pi, the little board that can do it all does the same things as the micro SD card you're used to. One of the best Raspberry Pi screens can be connected after you have set it up, and some of these have a display built in.

Read and write speed is the first thing to know. For most applications the maximum throughput speeds are fine. Random input and output speeds are more important than throughput speeds when you use the card as the boot partition. The speed of any SD card will never be advertised. The most consistent speeds of all the major brands were found by Jeff Geerling, who tested all of the major brands in the Pi 4.

Unless you change the card size, the Raspberry Pi only supports smaller cards. The exFAT file system is used to format cards larger than 32 gigabytes, and the Raspberry Pi bootloader only works with cards formatted as FAT16 or FAT32. Before you can use a tool to format and partition a card into an image, you need to know how to do this using a different computer. If you don't have time to fuss with it or you don't know how to do it, stick to 32 or lower cards. You won't even notice the OS is small.

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I switched to the new brand of cards from the old one a few months ago and have a 32gigabyte model inside every Pi I have. I think they're the best value for use in your pi.