SD Association Releases SD Express with Major Changes to SD Cards

Superficially, SD cards are simple storage devices and they can be used on your phone, camera and other devices to record and store pictures, videos, apps. 

However, you may find many standards and variations in performance turn quite confusing when looking into it. Over the last few years, things have become much worse with more icons and labels.

Recently, SD Association (SDA) has announced a new standard: SD Express which will bring large changes to this industry.

What Is SD Express

To put it simply, it is just like an SSD since it uses the same protocols and standards as an SSD in a PC or laptop. This means SD Express is much faster than the SD card available currently in read and write speeds. Besides, it also means higher capacity, which can reach up to 128TB. Currently, the maximum capacity is 2TB.

How Does SD Express Work

Similar to the latest SSDs, SDA has added the PCI Express (PCIe Gen 3.0) and NVMe interfaces to the legacy SD card interface. 

SD association president says “With SD Express we’re offering an entirely new level of memory card with faster protocols turning cards into a removable SSD“.

PCIe interface can deliver the data transfer speed up to 985MB/S. And NVMe upper layer protocol can implement advanced memory access mechanism, which offers new opportunities for SD memory cards.

As a matter of fact, the performance of SD Express cards may vary based on the speed of flash memory used to make them.

Is SD Express Card Backward Compatible?

The answer is “Yes”.

Like the older SD cards, SD Express cards have the same connecting pins. Namely, it is allowed to transfer data to an old laptop from an SD Express card or use the new card in your old camera, dash cam, drone, etc.

However, there is still a limiting factor: capacity. Thus, an SDUC card can only be used in an SDUC reader or device. Likewise, an SDXC card cannot work in a reader that only supports SDHC. Readers are all backward compatible, but cards can only be used in a reader that supports that particular standard.

Besides, another limit is that the new cards will run at the speed of the card reader or host. Hence, you should limit the read and write speeds in your laptop, camera or drone to 50MB/s.

Where Can SD Express Used?

The new cards will be initially used on SDXC, SDUC, and SDHC memory cards. And the maximum storage capacity in SD memory cards increases to 128TB with the SDUC cards from 2TB with SDXC cards.

These changes maintain the SDA’s commitment to backward compatibility and are a part of the new SD 7.0 specification.

Final Words

SD Express will revolutionize removable storage. If you are interested in this new card, please pay attention to this industry. When it comes into the market, you can purchase one to replace your old card by using MiniTool ShadowMaker, PC cloning software, to clone SD card to a larger one without data loss.