The SD Association just announced a new standard of SD cards which paves the way into the (very data-hungry) future: SD Express combines gigantic capacities of up to 128TB with SSD-like transfer speeds in order to keep pace with the developments of the tech industry.
   

8K Video. Super Slo-Mo. RAW. Virtual Reality. All these buzzword share the same needs: Lots of storage capacity and lots of speed. The SD Association quenches that thirst with the  announcement of the all-new SD Express standard. It supports capacities up to 128TB and transfer speeds of up to 985MB/s. And, best of all, it’s backward compatible.

These new cards combine modern SSD technology with the convenient SD Card form factor. PCIe Gen3 and NVMe protocols, normally used in high-speed SSD drives, are directly integrated into the new SD Express standard.

Best of both worlds, so to say. The high speeds of nowadays SSDs and the widely implemented SD form factor result in a very neat product. I honestly have no idea how to squeeze something like the claimed 128TB into such a small card, but that’s probably a question for the manufacturers.

SD Express is the 7th version of the SD standard. What startet in 2001 with a maximum capacity of 2GB and 25 MB/s is now mature with capacities up to 128TB (that’s 64.000 times the capacity of an 1st gen SD card) and with transfer speeds of up to 985MB/s ( 40 times the speed). With a 128TB SD UC (as in ultra capacity) you could carry your whole library of movies, music and everything else with you, I guess. Well, at least in 2018, who knows what kind of capacities we’ll need in 10 years time.

Of course, a new standard also translates into new logos. In the case of SD Express these are called SD HC I Express (up to 32GB), SD XC I Express (up to 2TB) and the all-new SD UC I Express (up to 128GB). All of these new classes share the same pin layout so the new cards are fully backwards compatible.