Octopus Overlords

MicroSD cards are about to get a whole lot faster, thanks to the newly announced microSD Express format that the SD Association announced at MWC 2019. The new cards will rely on the far faster PCIe and NVMe interfaces commonly used on modern SSDs to reach speeds of up to 985 megabytes per second.

For comparison, Western Digital’s new 1TB SanDisk microSD card, also announced at MWC and which claims to be the fastest 1TB card in the world, tops off at just 160MB/s for reading data, and 90MB/s for writing it. The new microSD Express spec also should crush (in theory) smaller capacity cards, like Delkin Devices’ 128GB Prime card that tops out at a maximum read speed of 300 MB/s.