Samsung announced its the first SD Express card. And as expected from the new Secure Digital specification standard, they are very fast, with data transfers of up to 800 Mbytes per second in read mode.

SD Express is a new specification for the most popular memory card format. As a big news, They use the PCIe 3.0 interface and the NVMe v1.3 protocol, the same as other storage products such as SSDs. The use of PCI-Express brings the format closer to the performance of the fastest removable Compact Flash cards, which are limited to the professional camera market due to price.

In addition to improving SD Express card performance, it will also increase storage capacity with a potential theoretical reach of up to 128 Tbytes. They will initially be offered in SDUC, SDXC and SDHC formats, and in both SD and microSD variants, used by millions in all types of devices.

Samsung SD Express cards

The South Korean giant, one of the world leaders in flash storage, has announced that it is already testing the first cards under this interface. It can reach the maximum speed during sequential reading 800 megabytes per second. Putting the data into context, it’s four times faster than current UHS-1 microSD cards and 50% faster than the maximum read speed of SATA SSDs, limited to 560 MB/s.

The cards will use technology Dynamic thermal protection (DTG) to ensure that the card temperature remains stable even after long hours of use. In addition to the typical data recovery software and data encryption options, we expect Samsung to include a general level of resistance against water, dust, or X-rays from traffic centers.

Samsung’s first SD Express cards will be sold in microSD format and 256 GB storage capacity. It is certain that later it will sell higher capacities, because, as we pointed out, the maximum capacity of the new standard is enormous and that they can be used separately and with adapters.

And more power in the future. The industry group responsible for the standard, SDA, has already announced the development of the upcoming SD Express version, which will double the number of PCIe lanes with an additional row of pins and increase the maximum performance of the cards up to 3,938 MB/s. , offering a PCIe 4.0 interface.

Very interesting considering that these memory cards continue to be massively used not only for storage, but also as a means of installing operating systems or running applications. Samsung did not mention the price of the cards, which will be available in late 2024.