back to article SD cards hop on the PCIe 4.0 bus to hit 4GB/s with version 8.0 of storage spec

The SD Association, which oversees the design of SD cards, has emitted version 8.0 of its specification that promises to accelerate the mini-memory storage standard to a tick under 4GB/s. As outlined in a whitepaper [PDF] this month, the new spec will let existing SD Express and microSD Express cards employ PCIe 4.0 and NVMe …

  1. Tubz Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    I can see me building a new mini media server, for my special movie collection.

  2. TWB

    Still not fast enough

    For uncompressed 4K... (I know, not many people use it)

    But still impressive.

  3. Steve Todd

    So not full speed on any Intel platform then

    Plus there’s the question of power consumption (PCIe 4 isn’t designed with mobile power constraints in mind).

    1. theblackhand

      Re: So not full speed on any Intel platform then

      I'm wondering about power as well - while the standard may support 4GB/s there is also a lower 3GB/s option versus SDXC maxing out at 1GB/s which is much higher than you would typically see on an SDXC card reader.

      The interface appears to be rated at 1.8W vs current cards that are under 100 mW.

  4. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Coat

    128TB ?

    Dear God, please give me a NAS enclosure that can support 128TB SDs.

    I promise I'll be a good boy.

    1. TrumpSlurp the Troll
      Trollface

      Re: 128TB ?

      P!us a 5G mobile phone which supports this card for a pocket cloud server.

  5. Christopher Reeve's Horse

    Presumably

    These speeds and capacities are the capability of the interface, not the actual flash storage on the card. How far behind the curve is the existing tech, even if this interface is used?

    At the moment a 1TB Sandisk SD card with a 170 Mb/s interface is more than £460. Scaling linearly for storage alone (I know it's a bad example) your 128TB card is going to cost nearly £60,000. But if this ever does become affordable then paying for Cloud storage becomes a bit pointless, you could be feasibly be running a 0.5PB portable NAS server from your phone over 7G.

    1. Boothy

      Re: Presumably

      Assuming that's the 'SanDisk Extreme PRO 1TB SDXC Memory Card', which are listed as 170 Mb/s, they are £323.99 on Amazon currently.

      Still expensive though, you could buy 3 x 1TB M.2 NVMe cards for £330!

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