SD Express card will be released in 2020, SDExpress will spread faster than UHS-II.
It is clear from the beginning that the development of new SD cards is not driven by the photography industry. Its popularity in the camera field is slower than that of memory cards in other fields.
The new SD Express memory card can reach a reading speed of nearly 1000MB/S, which is way faster than ordinary SSDs.
At the display of SD organization, the editor found a brand new SD Express memory card. The SD Association claims that this is a new memory card manufactured based on the seventh generation of SD standard. Of course, it is still in the testing stage, so it provides an engineering test card. The director of the SD Association and global marketing chairman Nakano introduced that the introduction of the new SD Express memory card is to meet needs of shooting higher resolution video in the future, such as 8K video and high frame rate video, so those devices will need memory card with excellent performance.
Since the SD Express memory card supports the highest PCI-E 3.0 channel and the NVMe protocol, the speed of this memory card is quite amazing, with a reading speed of 888.8MB/S, and a writing speed of 426.9MB/S. Its 4K random reading and writing have achieved 42MB/S and 178.4MB/S, respectively, it can be said that the speed of the new SD Express memory card has exceeded the speed of most SSDs. The SD Association claims that the theoretical speed of SD Express can achive 985MB/S.
In addition to the powerful SD Express memory card, the SD organization also introduced a new SDUC standard to meet the needs of high-capacity consumers and professionals, starting from 2TB and up to 128TB. At the same time, SanDisk’s CTO also told the IT House editor that the SDUC memory card is still at a standard size. With the development of technology in the future, the SD card will become smaller and smaller, and it can eventually be used as an expansion card for mobile devices such as mobile phones.
The first new SD Express format physical cards are expected to launch in next year, but the photography industry may not adopt SD Express standard cards until 2021.
The news comes from a recent conversation between Lensvid and SD Association Chairman Yosi Pinto. They discussed in detail about the development and release of the new standard memory card.
Interestingly, the main driving force behind SD Express is not the photography industry, but other SD association members such as mobile computing, video games, automotive and the Internet of Things industry.
These industries are eager to adopt more mature new technologies such as PCIe and NVMe protocols used by CF Express and XQD formats, which can make SDExpress memory card performance closer to today’s SSD.
From this point of view, SD Express has brought great benefits to the photography industry. Not only has the storage capacity limit soared from 2TB to 128TB, but it has also increased the speed to 985MB/s, an increase of nearly 600%, becoming the best memory card standard for shooting 8K video and ultra slow motion, it may be one of the standards adopted by various industries in the future.
“I think we may see some memory cards launch at least sometime next year. From a manufacturer’s perspective, I can only see the current market situation, mobile devices, mobile computing device interfaces or the gaming industry may adopt this standard,” Pinto said, “But whether it will be adopted in the camera field or not is currently unknown. “
Lensvid believes that it will take at least a year and a half, or even longer, for camera manufacturers to adopt the standard significantly, and he also points out that it takes time to produce new cameras that support UHS-II cards.
Pinto pointed out that the main reason why SD Express is superior to UHS-II is that it uses the existing protocols in CF Express and XQD, so the infrastructure and interfaces have been developed, waiting to be installed in new products such as those mobile phone that specializes in taking photos.
Pinto said: “Sometimes it can even be said that these products already have this standard. For example, all mobile devices, especially mobile computing devices, have a PCIE interface, so it is easy to adopt this new standard.”
“So it doesn’t have to start from scratch like we did when developing UHS-II. It is much easier to adopt SDExpress, if anyone wants to adopt it … I hope SDExpress will spread faster than UHS-II.”
It may take a while for cameras to adopt SD Express, but soon we may see camera phones adopt this new standard next year, this can help camera phone gain more advantage in the market while the camera market is shrinking.
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