Towards the end of last year, Apacer announced its first UHS-1 MicroSD card, finally moving the industry away from the 10-20MB/s limit typically seen on high-capacity MicroSD cards at the time.
Today, Samsung has announced its first UHS-1 line-up of MicroSD cards, featuring capacities of up to 16GB, with the cards able to achieve read speeds of up to 80MB/s. The technology is based on 20nm toggle DDR 2.0 NAND, with mass-production expected to begin in one to two months.
For those who are unaware, UHS-1 is part of the new SD 3.01 standard and is typically seen in full-size SD cards for use in video and image capture. The protocol boosts the 25MHz clock of a standard SD card to 100MHz, enabling a four-fold increase in speed, whilst also supporting double-data-rate transfer, allowing an entire byte to be transmitted in a single clock cycle. Variations of the standard do also exist supporting 208MHz frequencies.
It wasn't so long ago that reports were floating around on the internet, claiming that SD speeds played an ever increasing roll in system slowdown, acting as a bottleneck for data transfer; with 4G hitting speeds of up to 100Mbits, it's clear that faster SD cards are required in the mobile segment. Let's hope that as firms like Samsung and Apacer push out UHS-1 products, the industry standard will begin to move forwards; of course, we'll all need to go out and buy UHS-1 compatible devices.
