CFexpress cards created by Sony can displace the SD standard in the future

Sony showed new CFexpress cards with a reading speed of up to 1.7 GB / s. This is a new medium that has a good chance of replacing future SD cards that are celebrating their twenty years.

The SD standard was presented in the last century, and this year it will be equal to 20 years. When the SD card specification was approved, the world looked completely different. In 1999, we were delighted with modern special effects in the Matrix movie and listened to the Bomfunk MC's electronic beats Freestyler.

The digital revolution was just around the corner, though we did not know how fast it would affect us. Many people have heard of the error of the millennium bug , which in 2000 was to have devastating consequences after the information systems go from the date of 99 to 00. In practice, however, our lives were mostly analogue.

In our homes you could find analog cameras and video cameras based on Digital8 cassettes. We put CD-ROMs into computers, and the movies started appearing on DVDs, although players of this format could be seen mainly in store catalogs. Nobody dreamed about the times when you could have 1 TB of data on a nail-sized carrier. Besides, why was there such a large capacity?

It is in such realities that the SD medium was born. The carrier, whose newer iterations are still the absolute standard.

SD cards will stay with us for a long time, but their days are slowly coming to an end.

SD media, namely newer SDHC, SDXC and last SDUC standards , are today an absolute standard used throughout the entire consumer electronics section. They are mainly associated with cameras, but today they are also used in smartphones, sports cameras, drones, and finally in computers. Along with the miniaturization of devices, the adoption of the microSD standard has become more and more important, but it is based on the foundations of large SD cards.

In that case, why do the SD cards start to end? They are very popular, and the new SDUC standard has cosmic parameters. SDUC cards can hold (theoretically, according to specifications) up to 128 TB of data. The SD Association has also approved the SD Express standard with a transfer rate of up to 985 MB / s.

It's just that these parameters will hit the market for a long time, or not at all. The fastest-selling SD card standard is UHS-II with a speed of up to 312 MB / s. Only the latest cameras support it, and the UHS-II standard itself was shown ... in 2015. After it, the SD Association has already approved two more generations of cards (UHS-III and SD Express), but it does not promise to be quickly to the market. We now have four years of market delay compared to the standards approved by the SD Association.

As you can see, the adaptation of new standards is very slow. Is it wrong?

From the perspective of an ordinary user - no. The problem begins to appear among professional users who require top capabilities from the device. It's best to show it on the example of top cameras, which take about 20 fps at a resolution of about 24 megapixels.

One RAW image from such a camera weighs 50 MB, and in combination with a JPG file, we capture up to 60-65 MB for one frame. This means that over 1 GB of material can be generated in 1 second. Meanwhile, the fastest card in the specification has a record reaching up to 312 MB / s, although in practice it will be much less.

And bright, top cameras have their own buffer temporarily storing photos, because the SD card is simply too slow to work at full speed of the camera. It's just that this buffer can be filled up quite quickly, after which the camera ... does not allow taking pictures, because it has to dump all data to the memory card. A few seconds of downtime in professional sports photography can mean a very big problem.

As you can see, there are already industries that use the maximum speed limits for carriers. For them, even the announcement of the latest SD Express standard is not a solution, because it is insufficient in today's realities. And the story shows that SD Express cards will only be on the market in about four years, when they will be completely inadequate.

The CFexpress standard grows on the successor of the SD card.

First of all, CFexpress has nothing to do with CF cards (CompactFlash). This is a new standard presented in 2016 that works like a miniature SSD, using PCIe 3.0 and NVM Express connections. The first generation of CFexpress cards support transfers up to 1.97 GB / s, but the next generation is announced with speeds up to 7.88 GB / s.

The most important thing, however, is that the implementation of CFexpress is much faster than in the case of SD. The CFexpress cards are starting to appear on the market, and the most frequent carrier is the Sony CFexpress Tough memory card with a capacity of 128 GB. In the future, the introduction of 256 GB and 512 GB models is planned. The card provides a reading up to 1.7 GB / s and upto 1.48 GB / s.

The question remains, what about the adaptation of such carriers in consumer equipment. Time will show how quickly the new standard will come to life on the market, but promises to be that we will not wait long. Several cameras from 2018 served XQD cards, which turned out to be a market failure. The CFexpress standard has the same dimensions as XQD, and it will be possible to support newer media after upgrading the camera's software, so today there are cameras on the market that will support CFexpress cards.

What's more, if Sony shows CFexpress media, there is a good chance that they will go to another company's cameras. According to many analysts, CFexpress will first add cameras to the SD standard as a second socket, and eventually replace it. It is necessary to function in the world of professional photography.

CFexpress cards created by Sony can displace the SD standard in the future