Lexar will release SD Express memory cards next year

Lexar is working on SD Express memory cards in SD and microSD format. The SD cards have a capacity of up to 512GB and the microSD cards have a maximum capacity of 256GB. According to Lexar, devices that support SD Express will be released next year.

According to Lexar, the SD Express and microSD Express memory cards will have a read speed of up to 824MB/s and a write speed of up to 410MB/s. The manufacturer uses the SM2708 controller from Silicon Motion, which was announced in April.

Lexar says it is working with manufacturers who make relevant devices that the memory cards will work in and plans to release the memory cards in 2022. It is not yet known which devices will support the SD Express cards. This could be, for example, cameras, laptops, tablets and smartphones. In the announcement, Lexar hints at the usefulness of fast memory cards in phones, with the arrival of 8k movie functions and the ability to take raw photos in high resolutions.

The SD Express standard was already announced in 2018, but so far no SD cards have been released that use it, nor are there any devices in which they can be used. SD Express initially used the PCIe 3.0 interface and the NVMe protocol. A later revision uses PCIe 4.0, for a higher theoretical maximum speed of 3938MB/s.

To take advantage of the full speed, hardware with support for SD Express memory is required, but the standard also offers backward compatibility by falling back to the UHS-I specification.

Although there are no SD Express cards on the market yet, alternatives that also use the PCIe interface have appeared in recent years. For example, there are CFast, CFexpress and XQD memory cards, which are mainly used in high-end photo and video cameras.