Western Digital is working on 900MB/s and 2TB SD cards, set to launch later this year

[Daniel Sims]

Something to look forward to: Memory card makers have only recently begun unveiling products that meet the SD Express performance standard, despite the specification having been available for a long time. These new cards feature unprecedented speeds, aiding content creators and broadcasters in quickly encoding high-resolution, high-refresh-rate video. Additionally, Western Digital plans to introduce standard SD cards with multi-terabyte capacities.

Western Digital unveiled several new memory cards this week at the 2024 NAB Show in Las Vegas, pushing speed and capacity to new levels. With this announcement, Western Digital joins Samsung in introducing commercially available ultra-portable SD Express storage in 2024.

The top choice for high-speed microSD cards in our SD card buyer's guide – the SanDisk Extreme UHS-I U3/V30 A2 – features a read speed of roughly 200MB/s, but the newly announced SanDisk SD and microSD Express variants can achieve nearly four and a half times that speed. Western Digital's testing suggests that they might reach 900MB/s.

The company doesn't mention write speeds, but the listed performance targets could nearly double that of a typical SATA SSD. The products are slated for general availability starting this summer, but pricing remains unclear.

Western Digital plans to offer the Express cards in 128GB and 265GB capacities, but the company is also introducing the largest-ever UHS-I products. The highest-capacity cards currently available top out at 1TB or 1.5TB, but WD plans to break the 2TB barrier for SD and microSD cards in the summer, with 4TB models coming in 2025.

Although the company hasn't discussed price tags, 1TB cards can hover around $100 or $200, so products doubling or quadrupling that storage space could cost hundreds of dollars.

Also read: microSD and SD Card Buying Guide

Samsung announced its first SD Express cards last month, boasting 800MB/s read speeds and 1GB/s write speeds, with a launch planned for later this year. The company also unveiled its first 1TB microSD cards, albeit trailing behind the competition.

The SD Express standard has existed for some time, and the SD Association released the SD Express 9.1 specification late last year, which could harness PCIe 4.0 and NVMe hardware to achieve speeds of 2GB/s. However, manufacturers have been slow to adopt the standard because existing products can already handle 4K video.

Use cases and supporting hardware for higher-performance memory cards remain somewhat limited. However, SD Express could prove useful for tasks such as 8K video and 120Hz video, or potentially AI applications.

Permalink to story:

Western Digital is working on 900MB/s and 2TB SD cards, set to launch later this year

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Cool, but I don't shoot uncompressed 8K video on my full frame camera.

 

[R00sT3R]

I suspect Samsung are releasing the higher speed SD cards because Nintendo paid them to, for use in Switch 2, which desperately needs faster storage.

 

[yRaz]

Cool, but I don't shoot uncompressed 8K video on my full frame camera.

Since many things can't be taken apart these days to replace the m.2 drives (looking at you minisform) I see these becoming a big deal on portable computers and things like the steam deck.

 

[Burty117]

Yeah I can see these being very useful on StemDeck 2 / Switch 2.

Even on normal consoles, you could store older PS4 titles if the console had an SD Express reader.

 

[rmcrys]

Since many things can't be taken apart these days to replace the m.2 drives (looking at you minisform) I see these becoming a big deal on portable computers and things like the steam deck.

IMHO it doesn’t make much sense. There are very small and fast external SSDs as well as ultra fast 2230 SSD units. If I need more storage I’ll change my SSD for a bigger one as most SD cards are much more expensive per GB.

On my legion go I use a fast 400 GB microSD as an expansion as I had it there doing nothing and I have lots of non demanding games; if I had no previous microSD, I would rather change the 512 GB SSD for a bigger one.

I only see some important points there for an SD: Switch 2 + fast 8K lossless compressed video. SD card makers took waaaaay too long to release faster and cheaper SDs and now few need them. SSDs are much better and cheaper.

 

[yRaz]

IMHO it doesn’t make much sense. There are very small and fast external SSDs as well as ultra fast 2230 SSD units. If I need more storage I’ll change my SSD for a bigger one as most SD cards are much more expensive per GB.

On my legion go I use a fast 400 GB microSD as an expansion as I had it there doing nothing and I have lots of non demanding games; if I had no previous microSD, I would rather change the 512 GB SSD for a bigger one.

I only see some important points there for an SD: Switch 2 + fast 8K lossless compressed video. SD card makers took waaaaay too long to release faster and cheaper SDs and now few need them. SSDs are much better and cheaper.

Okay, but there are still devices where serviceable is a sacrifice made for the form factor. I want the minisform v3 tablet PC and the M.2 slots are basically non-servicable as a sacrifice for the form factor. I'm still running sata SSDs that read and write at like 500MB/S each and that's fine with me. I mostly just want easily expandable storage. Having a couple SD card slots on the outside of a laptop or tablet would be a nice compromise if service ability needs to be sacrificed for a form factor. I can replace the m.2 cards in my laptop pretty easily but it still requires me taking out like 12 screws to access the back panel. 900MB/S without needing to touch a screwdriver sounds like a pretty sweet deal, that's faster than SATA

 

[daffy duck]

Cool, but I don't shoot uncompressed 8K video on my full frame camera.

I doubt any camera offers it as the file sizes would be ridiculous. They still are even with compression.