PlayStation Vita Memory Card 64GB (PCH-Z641J)

Let me get this out of the way first: I despise Sonys proprietary price gouging with a fiery passion. For this much money, you can buy a decent 120GB SSD. But I digress. This card will display 59GB when you look at its storage capacity on the Vita itself. Ive included an explanation at the end of this review on why your card will read 59GB when you put it in. For those of you who dont want to read all of it, 59GB is what is displayed and this is not incorrect, nor is saying that it is 64GB wrong, its just a common deceptive practice in todays digital storage market. This card, despite being a Japanese import, works just fine on American PS Vitas. What you are buying is a direct Japanese import, not a card thats been localized for North America. Im using it on my NA PCH-2000 and Ive played games from it, it works just fine. The amount of data on this card makes it a far better deal than all the other cards, and youll never realisitcally fill this thing unless youre a Vita junkie and have a ridiculous number of games from PSN downloads. I put 5 PS Vita games (Borderlands 2 with all DLC, Gravity Rush, Uncharted, Soul Sacrifice, and WipEout 2048) and 3 PSone classic games (Front Mission 3, FFVII, and FFVIII) on here and its only taken up 9GB of space. You can get by on the 32GB card, but Id rather not have to worry about disk space, especially for a relatively minor increase in price comparatively speaking. Swapping cards is frustrating on PS Vita, mainly because it requires you to completely reboot, its nothing like PSP. However, thats on the Vitas end, not this cards. An explanation on digital storage sizes: The card holds 64GB measured in metric units as opposed to binary units. Whats the difference you ask? This is a fairly common practice that many people misunderstand. This thing will display 59GB to your console, despite the fact that it is in fact 64GB. Why? Its not because 5GB is allotted to formatting (it doesnt take 5GB to do that). 64GB is measured in metric units, meaning it is measured as 64 billion bytes, since giga- means billion. In computer architecture, measurements are based on binary units, meaning each power of 10 is actually 10 bits, which is 2^10 = 1024 Bytes = 1kB. Expanding this, 1MByte = 1024kBytes = 1,048,576Bytes, and 1GB = 1024MB = 1,048,576kB = 1,073,741,824Bytes in binary units. However, in metric units, 1GB = 1,000,000,000Bytes. The difference is then 1,000,000,000/1,073,741,824 = 0.931, so metric measurements allow them to display sizes that are actually 7% smaller. If you do the math, 0.931*64GB = 59.6GB, so its 64GB in metric (what they write), 59.6GB in binary (what the computer reads). This is a common business practice and is how literally every form of digital storage is marketted nowadays.

i always wondered why hds or memory cards always show less then what their advertised so i googled it a while ago and its simple really microsoft and others calculate the gbs as a gig of ram which is 1024 megabytes so its shows it as not being the size when checked and the people that sell it calculate them as a true gig. so its really all there also some shadow files that are there to support the hds or cards working properly... if you want more indepth info look it up

Today I got my 64GB memory card for the PS Vita/PS TV. I first tried it in the PS TV and it works fine. It shows 60GB of usable memory, which is probably going to be more than enough. I dont think Ill be swapping the card out from the Vita to the TV because every time you move it from one to the other, it rearranges all of your downloaded games, which is annoying if you ask me. I got my Vita the day it came out and I just recently filled up all but 212MB of space on the 32GB card I got when I bought it. While I think it is overpriced for what it is (like most of the other posts Ive read), I believe youll get your moneys worth out of it as you fill it up with whatever you put on your Vita/PS TV.

I previously owned a 16GB card for my Vita, upgrading from the 4GB card the unit came with. However, as a Playstation Plus subscriber, I quickly found myself running out of room on that card too. After learning that this 64GB card works with any Vita despite only being available in Japan at the moment, I decided to take the plunge and quadruple my space once again. The card itself is outstanding, and hasnt given me a single problem. With 59GB of usable space, it can easily hold every single free game released on PS+ thus far, with plenty of space remaining for other Vita/PSP/PS1 games and media. No more deliberating on which game to delete...at least for now. Having said that, on to the obvious negative. I know everyones pointed it out before, but Vita memory cards are quite expensive. Thats still very much the case here, but this card is easily the best in terms of dollars per gigabyte. A 32GB Vita card is usually about $80; this card has double that space for only about $30 more. Bottom line: this is the kind of card the Vita always needed. Vita games can be up to 4GB in size, and those smaller cards arent going to cut it if you get a lot of games digitally (i.e., if youre a Plus subscriber). If youre upgrading your card, though, might as well upgrade to this one. Its pricey, but its also the best deal on Vita memory you can get right now.

Sonys insistence on keeping Vita memory cards proprietary (not even letting 3rd party companies making and releasing their own versions) is ridiculous, but no use whining now after all these years. If youre going to get a memory card, it might as well be the largest around for the best value. 64GB doesnt sound like much in this day and age where phones come in 64 and even 128GBs. But trust me, for gaming purposes, its plenty and will alst you a long time. game saves barely take up any space at all and the bulk of your memory will most likely be taken up by digital games you purchase (or get free every month from Playstation Plus). Game sizes can vary, though massive games that take up 3/4 GBs are pretty rare. 64GB will hold plenty of games to play for quite a while.

I thought I could use my PSVita as my sole entertainment device going aboard - so like using (any) smartphone. So buy some memory expansion and fill it with media! The first hurdle is to understand the very willful and awkward way how to transfer content to the device, Once figured out you will see yourself confronted with an hour long transfer time and a progress bar stuck at 5s. This is caused by the slow class 2 memory device speed of this memory module. (For comparison: Standard memory cards are Class 10). But then you learn the worst by wasting a lot of time: No matter how you do it, you can only fit 4000 media pieces on the device. So say good bye to your idea of using the space for all your audio books and music. So after many attempts to use this awkward program, you will give up, format the memory card, create a new folder on the computer and copy the 4000 media pieces you mostly want into. Then you will use the media manager to select all and copy everything - since no one wants to check individually 4000 items on the tiny PSVITA screen. After spending then many hours you look at your system info and can be proud that you have used 1/3rd of your new memory card - leaving 2/3rds free for other purposes! Only what could that be? Using your UV movie collection? Does not work. Buying expensive old movies from Sony to watch on this tiny screen? No. Games? Oh wait - they come as memory modules. Soo... why didnt you buy 32GB or even only 16GB? Honestly - I dont know. So let me summarize: - You pay more then 4 times more than an ordinary SD card - You get less then 1/5th of the transfer speed of an ordinary SDcard - You can only fill the device with 4000 media files leaving the device 2/3rds empty. - You will spend lots of time doing so since the transfer is really awkward and checking of 4000 check boxes is no fun - Finally you end up with a lot of unusable memory. I am very sorry to say, but it appears that this is only half thought through and mainly made from a greedy company. What happened to the great Sony company? I will return this since for a failed experiment this is far too much money.

Its expensive, but if you use your PS Vita a lot then a 64GB card is definitely worth considering. Moving straight to this from a 4GB card it felt like a whole new world. Lol I now have all of my music (roughly sixteen albums) saved to my Vita (I suggest using a program like Freemake to shrink file size significantly), ten minutes worth of videos, most of my pictures, two cartridge based games, twenty five digital games (including two classic PlayStation games: Dino Crisis 2 and Harvest Moon: Back To Nature), and ten demos on my card, and I still have 42GB remaining. So yeah, this memory goes a long way. Simply put if you buy games for your Vita often, plan to buy several over the course of its lifetime, or are a PS+ member and download the games it comes with, then you need to consider buying a 64GB memory card. Its a steep price but its worth it since you wont have to worry about another card for a long time, if ever.

The first impression that I had was, Wow, that little cards expensive! But this card does hold a lot. To put it in perspective, I have 47 games, consisting of PS Vita, PSP, and PS1 titles. 20 video files, and over 200 songs. With that, I currently have 5GBs left. If that amount of content for the price sounds good to you, then I would recommend a buy. Edit: 4 years later, the card has gone bad on me. The data has become corrupted and cant be copied, backed up, played, moved, or uninstalled. I lost a lot of game saves because of this. I suppose this is the unfortunate outcome of every card eventually, and i have heard of this happening to others in a shorter period of time.

Its a huge memory card, and if like me you like to keep a lot of games and podcasts on hand its pretty sweet. It has no region locking and shows no slow down when used in the Vita. Just be aware you need a Playstation Plus subscription to back up most of your digital PS Vita games saves. So if like me you deleted games before they added PS+ cloud saving to the system you will have to start from scratch unless the game itself uses its own cloud saves (like StarDrone, Playstation All-Stars, and Soundshapes do to enable save transfers with their PS3 counterparts). Digital versions of Vita only games like Uncharted Golden Abyss and Gravity Daze however cant have their data backed up without the service. Though those two are free with the service itself so if you havent bought them yet and want them it makes the pill a bit easier to swallow. Just buy a subscription, back up all your saves, then when the new Memory card shows up youre set, get youre games downloaded off the store, touch the + icon on the games/app start screen and itll bring up the download from the cloud option. Its important to note this issue will not effect Physical PS Vita, PS One Classics, Minis, or PSP game saves.

The price was a little annoying. Setting that aside, being the only way of expanding the PS Vitas storage, it was necessary. Im probably using less than 10% now. But, Im happier that I have that extra 90% to play with than having to worry about, What do I delete? later. The other day, I just bought 6 flash drives of the same capacity at the same price as this one card. But Im okay with that because I only have to buy this card one time.