Samsung’s new microSD cards are 4x faster than its current interface

Samsung makes just about everything you can think of, from fridges and TVs to dishwashers and storage solutions. The South Korean company is a giant in the tech business and today they announced new microSD cards with high performance and capacity, four times faster than the current interface.

The company announced that it has started sampling its 256-gigabyte (GB) SD Express microSD card with sequential read speed of up to 800 megabytes per second (MB/s) and has commenced mass production of its 1-terabyte (TB) UHS-1 microSD card. With the introduction of its next-generation microSD card line-up, Samsung aims to provide differentiated memory solutions required for tomorrow’s mobile computing and on-device AI applications.

“With our two new microSD cards, Samsung has provided effective solutions to address the growing demands of mobile computing and on-device AI,” said Hangu Sohn, Vice President of the Memory Brand Product Biz Team at Samsung Electronics. “Despite their tiny size, these memory cards deliver powerful SSD-like performance and capacity to help users get more out of demanding modern and future applications.”

Here’s what the press release had to say.

Industry-First SD Express microSD Card Offers Maximum Speeds of 800 MB/s

Samsung's new microSD cards are 4x faster than its current interface

For the first time in the industry, Samsung introduced a new high-performance microSD card based on the SD Express interface. The development was the result of a successful collaboration with a customer to create a custom product.

Thanks to its low-power design as well as firmware technology optimized for high-performance and thermal management, Samsung’s SD Express microSD card offers performance equivalent to SSDs in a small form factor. While read speeds for traditional microSD cards based on the UHS-1 interface were limited to 104 MB/s, SD Express was able to boost it to 985 MB/s, although commercial availability of the latter were not viable in microSD cards until now.

The sequential read speed of Samsung’s SD Express microSD card reaches up to 800 MB/s — 1.4 times faster than SATA SSDs (up to 560 MB/s) and more than four times faster compared to traditional UHS-1 memory cards (up to 200 MB/s), allowing improved computing experiences in various applications, including PCs and mobile devices. To ensure stable performance and reliability for the small form factor, Dynamic Thermal Guard (DTG) technology maintains the optimum temperature for the SD Express microSD card, even during long usage sessions.

Samsung’s new 1 TB microSD card stacks eight layers of the company’s 8th generation 1-terabit (Tb) V-NAND within a microSD form factor, realizing the high-capacity package that used to be possible only in SSDs. The new 1 TB microSD card passes the industry’s most rigorous test settings and offers reliable usage even in challenging environments, with features such as water protection, extreme temperature, drop-proof design, wear-out protection, as well as X-ray and magnetic protection.

The 256 GB SD Express microSD card will be made available for purchase later this year, and the 1 TB UHS-1 microSD card is set to launch within the third quarter of this year.

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