SanDisk, a subsidiary of Western Digital, is gearing up to captivate the tech world with an impressive lineup of SD cards, including the groundbreaking 4 TB SDUC SD card. In anticipation of the NAB Show in Las Vegas, the company revealed plans for two new SD Express cards, each with eye-catching speed improvements.
Customers can look forward to two variants—one in the standard SD card form and the other in a smaller microSD format. These cards will be available in sizes of 128 GB and 256 GB. Thanks to the integration of the innovative SD Express interface, users will experience a remarkable speed jump. Preliminary information suggests that these SD Express cards could perform up to 4.4 times faster than SanDisk’s UHS-I offerings.
Although SanDisk customarily surpasses the standard speed limitations of UHS-I through specialized methods of delivering data speeds up to 200 MB/s, it requires a proprietary SD card reader to tap into this enhanced performance.
The exciting new SD Express cards are touted to reach peak speeds at about 900 MB/s, tripling the maximum speeds of SanDisk’s former UHS-II SD cards, albeit not reaching the heights of the Cinema CFExpress cards from SanDisk, which surpass the 1 GB/s mark. Despite this, the SD Express standard holds potential for further speed augmentation.
Detailed specifications for the larger SD card have become available, revealing read speeds of up to 880 MB/s and write speeds capped at 650 MB/s when operated via the SD Express interface.
These cards maintain backward compatibility with legacy SD card readers by defaulting to UHS-I mode. The future support for the proprietary mode is, at present, uncertain, and the cards can’t utilize UHS-II or UHS-III standards. This signifies that consumers may need to make informed choices regarding interfaces to guarantee access to the high-speed capabilities offered by these cards, dependent on whether their readers support these advanced speeds.
The market debut for these pioneering SD Express cards is slated for the summer of 2024, with pricing details yet to be released by SanDisk.
Progress around the SD Express standard has been gradual. Although there have been glimpses of SD Express cards—like the one showcased by AData at Computex 2023, which boasted a 1.6 GB/s speed—widespread announcements have been scarce.
As the industry eagerly anticipates the NAB Show, it remains to be seen how these developments will influence the larger SD card market and whether new momentum will be injected into this segment of storage technology.
