Say hello to microSD Express — the new fastest memory card for smartphones

The SD Association has today announced microSD Express, a new storage format for mobile devices. The association revealed the product during MWC 2019, and it’s calling it the “fastest memory card for mobile devices.”

MicroSD express supports the PCIe 3.1 and NVMe v1.3 specifications via its second pin-row, delivering theoretical transfer rates of up to 985MB per second (yes, almost one gigabyte every second). This far exceeds older microSD cards (the previous max is on the 3rd gen Ultra High-Speed UHS-III at 624MB/s) making these comparable to miniature removable Solid State Drives.

The tech is arriving in capacities like microSDHC Express, microSDXC Express, and microSDUC Express; you can see these and the new “express” signage in the images below.

Best of all, microSD Express card will be backward compatible with “billions” of existing microSD card products, so you may not have to go out of your way to buy a device that’s built specifically to support them.

The SD Association believes these cards are prepared to meet the demands of the evolving tech world and sees not just applications for the mobile industry but for automotive, photography, VR, video, and more. In the future, they could lead to manufacturers making design decisions with these new cards in mind.

We don’t have any details on when we’ll see these hit the market or how much they’ll cost just yet but we’ll let you know when we have more. Give us your thoughts on the new cards in the comments and find out what else we’ve seen at MWC 2019 at the link.