Life would be so much easier and convenient if you could pack all your pictures, music and videos in a single SD card and not multiple portable hard drives. Well, that could soon become reality with SD Express, a new standard for SD memory card.
The SD Association, which is a group of nearly 900 companies that together prescribe the standard for SD memory card, announced that the next memory card in line will have a theoretical maximum storage capacity of 128TB and a rapid data transfer rate of 985MB/s. The new standard integrates PCI Express and NVMe interfaces into SD memory cards to achieve the high transfer speeds and storage capacities. Both PCIe and NVMe are known for their high bandwidth and low latency storage.
“With SD Express we’re offering an entirely new level of memory card with faster protocols turning cards into a removable SSD,” said Hiroyuki Sakamoto, SDA president.
The latest upgrade is a giant leap from the current SD 6.0 standard, which supports max storage of 2TB and has a maximum data transfer rate of 624MB/s. With SD Express, you could store more than 25,000 HD movies on a single maximum capacity SD card. This will particularly be useful for recording 360-degree videos and 8K videos. The SD Express supported memory cards will also be helpful for story game files and data in consoles.
The SD Association has not revealed the roadmap as to when these memory cards will become commercially available. However, it is certain to be very much expensive. SanDisk’s 512GB Extreme Pro SDXC card costs about $300 and 1TB cards are yet to hit stores. The association has confirmed that SD Express will be offered only on SDUC, SDXC and SDHC memory cards initially.