SD Cards with 128TB storage, ~1GB/s transfer speeds are coming in the future

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The SD Association is a non-profit organization made up of around 900 companies which set out the standards for SD memory cards. They’ve announced the latest iteration of SD cards, SD express, which aims to provide 985MB/s transfer speeds. Even better, the maximum storage size has grown from 2TB to a huge 128TB. This comes as part of the new SD Express specification, which adds PCI Express and NVMe interfaces to support such high transfer speeds. These speeds are necessary for some of the most demanding applications. SD cards are often complained about for their speed. High speed is needed especially when it comes to recording high-quality video on a DSLR, for example.

This upgrade comes from the previously attainable 624MB/s, meaning that the SD Association has achieved a 58% increase over the previous version. SD Express will be found in SDUC, SDXC, and SDHC memory cards, and they will be backward compatible with other devices.

“SD Express’ use of popular PCIe and NVMe interfaces to deliver faster transfer speeds is a savvy choice since both protocols are widely used in the industry today and creates a compelling choice for devices of all types,” said Mats Larsson, Senior Market Analyst at Futuresource. “The SD Association has a robust ecosystem with a strong history of integrating SD innovations and has earned the trust of consumers around the world.”

NVMe is most famous in mobile technology for being used in iPhones and provides large transfer speeds. Android phones often lean towards UFS, with the Samsung Galaxy S10 tipped off to possibly have UFS 3.0 for up to 2900MB/s.

While these SD card speeds won’t really be relevant to smartphone users, they could very well be in the future. Currently, maximum microSD card read speeds top at about 160MB/s, so it stands to reason that the technology will eventually trickle down as we find better ways of compressing such high-speed technology into smaller form factors. The SD Association has released a video to explain more about SD Express, which you can check out down below.