With many of us wondering whether 8K video is set to become the new normal, there comes the question of how memory cards are going to keep up. The SD Association has just announced the prospect of cards that transfer data at almost four gigabytes per second.
The new SD 8.0 Specification for SD Express memory cards will use PCI Express® (PCIe®) 4.0 along with NVMe Express™ (NVMe™) upper layer protocol, as well as offering full backwards compatibility. This will offer much faster speeds than cards currently available on the market.
As The Verge notes, a speed of 3,938 megabytes per second is a dramatic improvement on the 985 megabytes per second currently found in SD 7.0 and 7.1 specification cards.
The new speeds will take a while to come to market, as card manufacturers will have to start implementing the technology, and other hardware such as cameras and card readers may take some time to catch up.
The new write speeds will no doubt be expensive, and storage will not be cheap either. With 8K video recording potentially consuming around 600 MB of storage per minute, it will be a while before shooting 8K becomes a realistic prospect, and that’s before you consider whether such high resolution is even necessary.
You probably meant 600 MB per SECOND
You think 8K will record over 1gb per 2 seconds of footage, that doesnt sound realistic.
If you run the math, 8K video is 33.1M pixels per frame at 30 frames per second. Even with only 8-bits of data per pixel, you're well over 600MB per second. The article didn't mention anything about storage capacity or more importantly, reliability. I'm thinking that CFExpress will still be a better option over faster SD, plus it's already arrived. SD is trying to catch up.
I've had really bad results with "fast" SD cards and I've noticed that Sandisk has never failed me and Sandisk doesn't sell these really fast cards. Not sure if they've figured something out and refuse to make unreliable cards but I'm tired of waiting for my SD cards to transfer and I welcome a reliable card that could even transfer at 500MB/s.
I agree
It takes two to tango. The system bus needs to be optimized for newer tech.
Much welcomed. I use NVMe's in all my pc's and the speed is insane.