SD Association announces microSD Express standard
The SD Association has introduced the new microSD Express standard. It is part of the pending SD 7.1 specifications. The microSD Express standard uses one-channel PCIe 3.1 and NVMe 1.3 to achieve throughputs of up to 985 MB/s.
MicroSD Express has been developed due to the increasing demand of fast memory for applications like slow motion and 8K video and for 360 degree recordings. The microSD Express cards contain a second row of pins that are utilised to bring the PCIe 3.1 and NVMe 1.3 technology to life in such a small form factor. The SD Association claims that the microSD Express cards are basically equivalent to a removable SSD card in smartphones and other compatible devices. In addition to a significantly faster data transfer speed, the microSD Express video cards are also claimed to consume less energy, besides serving as an ideal solution for high-intensity tasks such as capturing super slow motion videos, RAW burst mode output and 8K video playback.
The cards are backwards compatible and can lift on further developers of PCIe and NVMe. This means that future microSD Express cards could use, the for this year scheduled, fifth generation PCIe that allows throughputs of up to 4 GB/s
The new standard also ensures a decrease in latency and lower energy consumption.
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Don Vito Corleone
Posts: 40020
Joined: 2000-02-22
I doubt it, the tech would fall back to early SSD development where there have been no write caches. In theory, they could do a partial SLC cache and or/a system buffer cache to divert it (thus a small portion of your system memory as cache), but other than that I think small files write issues would be a hindrance for your OS.
Senior Member
Posts: 138
Joined: 2010-01-26
So much epic microSD news, I love it! Man I can't help but think what if back in the day if we never went with Optical drives with the CD and everyone just stuck with Game Carts for everything(games, music and video). Where would our SD, USB, NVMe, SSD etc tech be right now. Maybe it's crazy to think that way but it really feels like we should of gone that way and skipped Optical tech all together even if it is super low cost to make the CD, DVD, Blu Rays. Who knows... I am sure the capacity + price was the killer and why it never stayed on that path.
Got say one thing even as a hard core PC enthusiast I really believe that the new consoles will all actually have embedded NVMe drives like the rumored specs of the new Xbox. Wonder if they will dump Optical and go with Write only SDs? Chances of PCIe 4.0 on consoles is really high as well by then so the IO will have access to massive bandwidth. I bet by 2020 SD prices will be rock bottom and also SSD + NVMe.
Going to be a crazy next two years for everything!
Senior Member
Posts: 200
Joined: 2016-12-28
Crystal clear. Thanks HH.
Senior Member
Posts: 5587
Joined: 2012-11-10
Impressive they managed to retain backward compatibility with this. I was about to get REAL pessimistic, but it looks like the SD Association handled this pretty well.
The only thing I don't especially understand is how exactly this is supposed to yield any performance enhancement? Flash memory in and of itself isn't that fast, but SSDs have great performance because they have controllers with caches that can juggle data between multiple memory chips simultaneously. So, how exactly do you accomplish that in a microSD card? Existing cards can't even saturate USB 3.0 bandwidth.
Senior Member
Posts: 200
Joined: 2016-12-28
Could we imagine this support as a substitute to traditionnal SSD ? Smaller, very fast, reliable (?)