Could we imagine this support as a substitute to traditionnal SSD ? Smaller, very fast, reliable (?)

FM57:

Could we imagine this support as a substitute to traditionnal SSD ? Smaller, very fast, reliable (?)

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.

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!

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

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.

Crystal clear. Thanks HH.

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.

varkkon:

..... .................. 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. ......

Unless Microsoft can get the SSD or NVMe storage for the same price, if they favour NVMe speeds over more SSD capacity, imo it will be a dumb move from a consumer standpoint.

I don't like how the cards fallback to such old standards if both host and card don't MicroSD Express. That sucks because the cards would be abel to fully saturate UHS-II & UHS-III but instead they're locked to UHS-I (104). https://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2018/07/03045152122l.png