Next Gen. Memory Cards With New Spec Will Be Faster Than SSDs

Memory cards are now considered obsolete, but they are still highly valued by DSLR owners and cinematographers.

The SD Association, which undertakes the task of setting standards for memory cards, has announced new SD 8.0 specifications for upcoming SD Express Memory cards.

The new SD cards will support the transfer speed of 4 Gigabytes per second (3,938 megabytes per second to be precise) with the help of PCIe 4.0 and NVMe interfaces, which are found in SSDs. This is four times faster than the current SD Express cards that offer a maximum speed of 985 Mbps.

With a data transfer speed of around 4Gbps, memory cards based on SD 8.0 specs will be faster than standard SSDs for PCs that usually offer speeds in the range of 2,000-3,000 Mbps.

Faster data transfer speeds in the latest memory card standards can be attributed to a new architecture with two rows of pins that support both single or dual PCIe 4 lanes.

According to the SD Association, SD 8.0 specs will prove to be a boon for transferring large amounts of data in data-intense tasks like super-slow motion videos, RAW continuous burst mode, 8K video capture and playback, and 360-degree cameras/videos.

SD 8.0 specs will be available in all storage capacities, including SDHC, SDXC, and SDUC. Therefore, it implies that you could soon buy an SDUC 128TB memory card based on SD 8.0 specs, as it is the highest amount of memory available in a memory card.

However, you’ll have to wait for a long time until memory card manufacturers adopt the specs and release the cards built on top of SD 8.0 specifications. The association has confirmed that, like all its previous specs, SD 8.0 will maintain backward compatibility.

You can read more about the new memory card specifications in the whitepaper released by the association.