SD Express – a Revolutionary Innovation

SD cards could hold 128TB of storage

The SD Association announced on 26th of June 2018, SD Express which adds the popular PCI Express® and NVMe™ interfaces to the legacy SD interface. The PCIe interface delivering a 985 megabytes per second (MB/s) maximum data transfer rate and the NVMe upper layer protocol enables advanced memory access mechanism, enabling a new world of opportunities for the popular SD memory card. In addition, the maximum storage capacity in SD memory cards grows from 2TB with SDXC to 128 TB with the new SD Ultra Capacity (SDUC) card. These innovations maintain the SDA’s commitment to backward compatibility and are part of the new SD 7.0 specification.

Right now the maximum storage space on an SD card is 2TB, and that limit was promised back in 2009, but still hasn’t reached commercial stage.

1TB prototype was unveiled by SanDisk in 2016, which would make it the biggest in the world, but it’s still not commercially available.  This advancement was made to match the required capacities for 4K Video Content as well as VR.

The new faster speeds, called SD Express, will come to all types of cards, but the high storage is a new thing called an SD Ultra Capacity (SDUC) card.

The current SD card on the market maximum capacity is 512GB, so we are two “doublings” away from 2 TB, the maximum capacity of SDXC ( 512x2x2)

From there, it will be another six “doublings” until we hit 128 TB.

The biggest thing holding back storage technology is the fact that nobody needs that much storage space, not to mention Cloud utilisation for storage that is increasing as well.