The SD Association announced the brand new microSD Express format at MWC 2019. The new cards are said to reach transfer speeds up to 985 megabytes per second.
These cards use the much faster PCIe and NVMe interfaces that are used on modern SSDs, allowing the cards to reach 985 megabytes per second. Let’s compare that to Western Digital’s new 1TB SanDisk microSD card, which claims to be the fastest 1 TB card in the world. That card runs at 160 MB/s for reading data, and 90MB/s for writing.
The new speeds will be incredibly fast compared to what we are getting even from smaller capacity cards, which can run at up to 300 MB/s.
“microSD Express gives the mobile industry a compelling new choice to equip mobile devices with removable SSDs,” said Hiroyuki Sakamoto, SDA president. “SD 7.1 prepares consumers and mobile device manufacturers to meet ever increasing storage demands for years to come.”
The SD Association first announced full-sized SD Express cards a few months ago. Those were claimed to reach similar transfer speeds thanks to the SD 7.0 specification. Now, those speeds are being brought to smaller microSD cards. It’s said the new microSD Express cards still have the legacy microSD interface for backward compatibility with older devices.
When are we going to get cards using this format?
Currently, there are no known cards being made with the new format, but we probably should expect to see cards using this format in the near future.
