New SD Express 8.0 cards are much faster than cellphone memory

The organization responsible for standardizing the SD card, formally known as the SD Association (SDA), introduced a new SD 8.0 standard that will allow SD Express cards to transfer data at approximately four gigabytes per second. According to the foundation, this can be achieved thanks to the use of the PCIe 4.0 and NVMe interfaces usually found in SSDs.

This new SD 8.0 standard comes at an opportune moment, given that current technologies, such as 8K videos, require very high transfer rates to transfer a large amount of data they occupy in a reasonable time.

More specifically, the new SD 8.0 standard enables memory cards to achieve transfer speeds of up to 3,938MB / s. That is, the speed is 4 times higher than the standards used in current SD cards (SD 7.0 and 7.1), which use the PCIe 3.1 interface and its maximum transfer speed is 985MB / s. If we go into the mobile field, the standard SD 8.0 is almost three times faster than UFS 3.0 (top speed 1.5Gb / s) used by today's best smartphones.

SDA says the SD 8.0 standard will be available on SDHC, SDXC and SDUC memory cards, which means that it can theoretically be used on a 128 TB SDUC card, which is currently the largest amount of memory supported by an SD card. At the same time, this means that in the near future we will not see this standard on mobile. For this to be possible, mobile phones must first be manufactured with a PCIe 4.0 interface and such cards must be created compatible with smartphones.

Most likely, the first devices that will use the new SD 8.0 standard will be the laptops, cameras and card readers that will be released in the coming years. However, this will take some time, as manufacturers have to adapt their products to comply with this standard.