We’ll have to see it to believe it.
One major downfall of microSD cards is how slow they are in comparison to modern SSDs (and many hard drives). Despite them being flash storage, transfer speeds haven’t really been a priority as much as being compact and easily swappable, so anything more than moving HD videos back and forth can be a struggle. Samsung seems to think it can fix that problem, with the release of new “SD Express” cards that are apparently four times as fast as regular SDXC cards.
Samsung Electronics has launched a handful of new SD Express cards, which join the company’s existing range of microSD cards and pack what Samsung says are groundbreaking advancements in microSD card technology. Samsung says that these are good for “on-device AI applications,” and while you’re probably not going to buy these for their AI capabilities (whatever that means), you might do so because of the speeds. The cards themselves offer speeds of up to 800MB/s, which is pretty impressive if you happen to have a device with a microSD port that’s capable of pulling up these speeds.
Samsung says that these cards are able to offer “SSD-like” performance. Indeed, 800MB/s is roughly what a SATA SSD can pull off these days, perhaps slightly more, but there are a lot of variables that you need to know about. The SD card reader would need to support these speeds in order for you to take full advantage of them—if it doesn’t, then you’re just overspending on your microSD card. This is also not a standard, like SDXC, but rather looks like a proprietary advancement from Samsung.
If you don’t mind speed too much, you might care more about Samsung’s newest non-proprietary 1TB microSD card. Thanks to eight layers of the company’s 8th generation 1TB V-NAND, it achieves high-capacity storage that Samsung says was previously exclusive to SSDs. This is not the first 1TB microSD card to hit the market by any means, but it seems to be one of the fastest ones available.
Both the 256GB SD Express microSD card and the 1TB UHS-1 microSD card are expected to hit stores later this year.
Source: Samsung
