MicroSD Express, the PCIe/NVMe MicroSD Standard, has been Revealed by the SD Association
MicroSD Express, the PCIe/NVMe MicroSD Standard, has been Revealed by the SD Association
In effect, this breaks backwards compatibility with UHS-II and UHS-III devices, though UHS speeds of up to 104MB/s can still be utilised. With MicroSD Express, speeds of up to 985MB/s are possible, which is great news for future high-performance mobile devices.Â
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Support for NMVe 1.3 also adds several SSD-like specifications to the SD Express standard, like bus mastering, multi-queue, host memory buffer and several other enhancements while maintaining backwards compatibility with SD UHS104 and lower standards.Â
Because of the SD Associations repurposing of UHS-II pins with SD Express, the standard is not backwards compatible with either UHS-II or UHS-III speeds, preventing UHS-II/III cards from accessing their full speeds on SD Express hosts and SD Express cards from saturating UHS-II/III hosts, reverting to UHS104 speeds. A full chart which showcases backwards compatibility is available below.Â
PCIe Specification conformance tests are available today for SD Express, thanks to a collaboration between PSI-SIG and the SD Association.Â
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While transfer speeds of 985MB/s seem excessive for a MicroSD card, it is encouraging to see compact storage solutions offer more SSD-like features and increased transfer speeds, especially in an era where 8K video recording is becoming more popular and high-resolution/framerate video is becoming recordable on today’s smartphones and drones.Â
This new standard will provide additional competition in the high-end video production market, though SD Express will also be usable for future mobile computing platforms, games consoles, automotive applications and a wide range of other applications.Â
You can join the discussion on the SD Association’s MicroSD Express standard and it’s 985MB/s transfer speeds on the OC3D Forums.Â