Lexar has announced that it’s developing a new breed of memory card, SD Express. Using PCI Express 4.0 specifications and NVMe Express technology means that the cards will be able to offer transfer rates of up to almost 4GB/s. That’s 3x faster than the speediest UHS-II SD cards currently available.
The new cards will be available in SD and microSD format and will be backwards compatible. They’re designed to meet the increasing demand for fast data storage, for example, for recording 8K video, shooting raw files at high rates and recording 360° video.
The new Lexar SD Express and microSD cards will have read speeds of up to 824MB/s and write speeds of up to 410MB/s and they’re anticipated to go on sale in 2022.
According to Lexar, the new SD Express cards will feature the Silicon Motion’s SM 2708 controller. Nelson Duann, Silicon Motion’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and R&D explains, ‘Many of the latest high-end cameras and mobile phones are capable of recording video in 8K and require a fast transfer rate. With the SM2708 controller now supporting the SD 8.0 specification which offers more than triple the throughput, applications such as 8K video capture, raw photo capture, multi-channel IOT devices, multi-processing automotive storage and other applications requiring ultra-high data speeds are now possible’.