Sometimes, when look back at the first two PC I had, I laughed at how much RAM they had. They were in megabytes then. Same goes for the storage which were in MBs. The same is going to happen few years down the road when SD Ultra Capacity Card, or SDUC, becomes available. The SD Association, the organization that sets memory card standards, has announced two new developments that will change the SD card as we know it.
The first is the aforementioned SDUC which will have an astonishing maximum storage capacity of 128 TB (!). Holy mother of… if that becomes commercially available, it will be the new MOAMC – mother of all memory card! Apparently, with that kind of capacity, just three of it will be suffice to store Spotify’s entire library of 35 million tunes, or in every day terms, you are looking at the possibility of holding 16 million non-lossless songs, or more than 26 million photos, or over 29,000 FHD movies – all which are way more than a person can consume in a lifetime.
In other words, it has no real world consumer applications, but more a thrilling news to commercial uses where storage on-the-go is a major issue. But with such large capacity, transfer speeds will be a pain. This is where the other development, SD Express, is going to make difference. SD Express basically revolutionizes transfer speed by integrating 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.”
With the technology offered by SD Express and SDUC, SD Association has effectively turn cards into SSD. Just imagine that! The storage capacity and performance of a SSD, but at a fraction of its size. Perhaps, storage capacity is not as critical as speeds, but SDUC will certainly be available in future (possibly, near future).
When that happens, expect it to cost more than an arm or a leg. We reckon SD Express will arrive sooner because, speed is what many need today. According to official words, SD Express will be initially offered on SDUC (alright, it is happening. The question is ‘how soon?’), SDXC and SDHC memory cards.
SD Association made the announced during the Mobile World Congress Shanghai which was held between June 27 and 29 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre (SNIEC). You can learn more about SD Express in the video below, or dive into the details in the new white paper HERE.
Images: SD Association/Engadget.
