New SD cards promise 300MB/s speeds

Posted on 6 Sep 2010 at 11:19

A new ultra-high-speed standard for SD memory cards has been announced that will allow transfer rates of up to 300MB/s, or three-times the speed of existing cards.

Although the new standard will require new hardware to take advantage of the speed, the SD Association has announced that it will be fully backwards-compatible with older SD standards.

While this means that the new cards will be required for anyone wanting to get the top performance out of their compatible devices, older and slower SD cards will still operate correctly, while owners of older hardware can use the new cards at slower speeds.

The impressive performance boost is achieved without losing backwards compatibility thanks to a second row of pins, allowing compatible devices to gain extra channels for data transfer while still allowing connectivity to gadgets that expect a single row of pins.

Both full-size and microSD formats are supported in the new specification, giving the potential performance boost to devices such as cameras and camcorders as well as smartphones and slates.

High-definition 3D cameras will especially benefit from the higher speeds offered as part of the new standard, due to their need to store double the number of frames compared to a standard camcorder.

According to a report on GizMag the new dual-pin design is expected to form part of the SD 4.0 specification due for release early in 2011, meaning that devices supporting the new cards could start to appear towards the end of next year.

It remains to be seen how much of a premium consumers will be expected to pay for the higher-speed cards upon release.

Author: Gareth Halfacree

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