Recently during the 2019 Mobile World Congress, the SD Association unveiled the new microSD Express. This new microSD card will allow future mobile devices to consume and create content at way more faster speeds. This card will boost incredible transfer speeds while consuming less energy used by previous formats.
The new format will be available in different flavors of microSDHC Express, microSDXC Express and microSDUC Express.
Just like SD Express, microSD Express taps the PCIe interface to hit a maximum data transfer rate of 985 megabytes per second (MB/s). This is possible through the PCIe 3.1 and NVMe v1.3 specifications that live on a second row of pins. The SD Association expects the faster cards to consume less energy than traditional memory cards while still being backward compatible. The fast data speeds could lead mobile device makers to rethink how they equip devices.
Read and write speeds have long been a limiting factor for expandable memory, but with this new format, which is backward compatible, the data transfer happens nearly as quickly as built-in memory. In recent times expandable memory has been dropped by the big names in the smartphone market. But with the creation of large files by 5G technology and new cameras, expandable memory could make a comeback.
