This was announced by industry group SD Association (SDA). the latest development of microSD Express memory cards. The new standard doubles the maximum transfer rate to 2 Gbytes per second and guarantees a minimum performance level with four variants and associated logos to guide consumers when purchasing.

Memory cards (external and removable) They are still very useful and not only to increase the capacity of the device’s internal storage, because they are also used to run applications or entire operating systems. MicroSD stands out in this group, the smallest of all SDs in terms of size and weight, which, together with their enormous versatility of use, has made them the most used in their segment.

microSD Express, maximum performance

This specification of the Secure Digital standard took the format to another level by using the PCIe 3.0 interface and the NVMe v1.3 protocol, the same used by other storage products such as SSDs. Now SDA increases its performance even further with use PCIe 4×1 and maximum transfer rates 1969 Mbytes per second. Stratospheric performance for so little support.

In order to guarantee a minimum performance For cards with this SSD standard, he published data for four SD Express variants and their corresponding (minimum) speeds, from 150 to 600 Mbytes.

To optimize the use of SD Express speed class under different power levels and thermal conditions, cards offer different power management settings through maximum power (MP) values. The card consumes power up to one of the MP values ​​set by the host device to control the card’s temperatures. SD Express memory cards use a new thermal management feature where the card indicates a set of its specific temperature thresholds.

Increased performance allows you to comfortably perform advanced tasks, wireless or wired communication for super slow motion video; continuous RAW burst mode; 8K video capture and playback; Sports cameras for 360-degree shots; constantly evolving game systems; multi-channel IoT devices; automotive industry and in general use cases that require the highest bandwidth.

We hope to see offers with this standard from major manufacturers (SanDisk, Samsung, Kioxia, Kingston…) soon. The next level for this group of external and interchangeable cards small size, huge flexibility of use and now stratospheric performance.