MicroSD Express, the PCIe/NVMe MicroSD Standard, has been Revealed

[WYP]

Turning SD cards into portable SSDs.



Read more about the MicroSD Express Specification for PCIe/NVMe MicroSD cards.

 

[Emu]

985mb/s isn't that excessive when you consider that a few manufacturers (at least Lexar and Sandisk) have released 1TB SDcards. With a 95mb/s read speed, it would take you just under 3 hours to read the whole thing. With a 985mb/s read speed, it will only take you 17 minutes to read the whole card.

 

[WYP]

985mb/s isn't that excessive when you consider that a few manufacturers (at least Lexar and Sandisk) have released 1TB SDcards. With a 95mb/s read speed, it would take you just under 3 hours to read the whole thing. With a 985mb/s read speed, it will only take you 17 minutes to read the whole card.

Yes, but how often will you read the whole thing? Pushing past the peak performance of SATA SSDs is still an insane feat on MicroSD.

While I doubt any early MicroSD Express cards will saturate the 1x PCIe 3.0 lane, it is a pretty incredible feat for most applications. Need to transfer 1GB of images from your camera? Have fast load times on a Next-Gen Nintendo Switch etc etc. 985MB/s is still pretty darn insane for that.

 

[meuvoy]

Yes, but how often will you read the whole thing? Pushing past the peak performance of SATA SSDs is still an insane feat on MicroSD.

While I doubt any early MicroSD Express cards will saturate the 1x PCIe 3.0 lane, it is a pretty incredible feat for most applications. Need to transfer 1GB of images from your camera? Have fast load times on a Next-Gen Nintendo Switch etc etc. 985MB/s is still pretty darn insane for that.

Basically, Video Recording will use that, also high speed photography.

Right now if you're a pro photographer with a high resolution, high speed camera like the Sony A9 the camera will actually record into 2 SD cards, much like RAID 0, but not quite, to achieve the kind of performance levels needed, and will still slow down after some shots, (also cameras like this usually have a massive internal buffer that takes a long time to offload to the SD card after a long sequence of shots, redering the photograper unable to shoot again untill the buffer is emptied).

Also high resolution videography already uses SSD's, as SD Cards just can't be fast enough for high resolution, high framerate video recording, but this comes at the cost of space and some other inconveniences. Nowadays a lot of videographers prefer to output their videos from their camera to an external video recording device via HDMI or DP, to avoid the trouble with internal storage and compatibility between different camera models and manufacturers.

This is a very much welcomed improvement to the SD card standard as it will surely speed things up, especially considering that since there is no mention of full size SD cards here, I'd guess they'll be releasing an even faster standard for full sized SD Cards which will also be very much welcomed by anyone who do videography or sports/events photography.

Basically, on MicroSD will allow smartphones to have higher resolution/higher speed cameras, and yeah, there's the question about trasnfer speeds. I myself have 67GB of music loaded into an 128GB MicroSD card in my phone right now. If this card dies, it will be a pain to copy all of this into a new one.

 

[Chopper3]

We already boot all of our ESXi hosts off SD, perhaps this might encourage more enterprise OS's such as RHEL/Windows-Server to allow for hypervisor boot from SD.