After the confinement and the de-escalation phase, many users have realized that for their daily life they need both more storage on their devices and more speed. This has especially happened on mobile devices as such, where 4K recordings take up a lot of space and playing them requires a lot of speed. For this reason, the SD Association has kicked off its latest standard called SD Express 8.0 , a new version that includes very interesting news.
The world is moving very fast and with it file sharing on various platforms. We can not ignore from YouTube, Twitch through Tick Tock as well as new ways of creating content that are monopolizing the market.
User demand focuses on the two main factors of any content creator: capacity and performance. The first is linked to manufacturers and their technologies, but the second can be defined and this is where the SDA comes in.
SD Express 8.0: a new high-speed standard
The leadership of SD memory cards is indisputable, from photographers to musicians, YouTubers or different professionals in the audiovisual sector, they use systems as diverse as Chromebooks or Smartphones every day to carry out their work.
Performance is key, and that’s why the SD Association has created two versions of the same standard that will bring the compact, portable storage of the future to life with the newest SD memories in the lead.
The first novelty is undoubtedly the most important, since after a year and a half since the SDA launched the SD 7.0 specification in July 2018 there has been no change in the sector. This specification was based on PCIe 3.1 and NVMe for SD memory, opening a gigantic field that surprisingly maintained the compatibility of previous versions.
In February 2019 SDA released a second version for the microSD Express 7.1 specification that pushed the industry again to match its capabilities. But SD 8.0 will change the sector once again.
Native PCIe 4.0 support in two different versions
The SDA gets on the bandwagon of the highest performance memory cards under an increasingly used interface such as PCIe 4.0. The goal, of course, is that you can capture everything from slow-motion and 4K videos, to burst photos with the highest definition, or to play 8K videos without the device slowing down due to a slow file transfer rate.
Therefore, the SD Express Gen 4 × 1 Version will be able to offer speeds of up to 1,969 MB / s in Type PCIe G4L1 and PCIe G4L2 cards , while the SD Express Gen4x2 version increases performance.
PCIe G4L1 cards will be able to get the same performance rate as their previous version (1,969 MB / s, but cards that are compatible with PCIe G4L2 will achieve an incredible performance of 3,938 MB / s , which is more speed than many NVMe SSDs on the market, not to say practically all but PCIe 4.0 precisely.
Best of all, this new type of card will be fully compatible with previous versions and older standards, with the consequent reduction in performance, yes, but it is a good thing since we can use a PCIe G4L2 card on an SD Express Gen4x2 host with maximum performance and also use it with SD Express Gen3x1 even if its speed drops to 985 MB / s.