Sony Announces SF-G UHS-II SD Cards: Up to Nearly 300 MB/s Read/Write Performance
by Anton Shilov on February 24, 2017 2:00 PM ESTSony has announced its new lineup of SD cards for advanced 4K/8K, DSLR, and mirrorless cameras. The new SF-G-series memory cards use the UHS-II bus and one of Sony’s proprietary technologies to offer the company's highest read/write performance to date — up to nearly 300 MB/s. The cards will hit the market in the coming months.
The Sony SF-G-series memory cards will be available in 32 GB (SDHC), 64 GB (SDXC), and 128 GB (SDXC) configurations. The key selling point of the new Sony SF-G cards is their performance: up to 300 MB/s read speed and up to 299 MB/s write speed, which a quick look finds is around 15% faster compared to competing products (such as the SanDisk Extreme PRO SD UHS-II or the Lexar Professional 2000x UHS-II, both of which offer up to 260 MB/s writes). The new cards from Sony are compatible with various types of SD-supporting devices (cameras, card readers, etc.), but to take full advantage of their speed one needs a device that fully supports the UHS-II bus and has the extra pins the wider bus requires.
Sony is not reveaing how they're getting up to 299 MB/s sequential write performance in an SD card, instead only saying that it is enabled by its firmware. One possibility is that the cards use NAND flash memory with very large block sizes (supported by the SD 5.0 standard), which helps to boost write performance. In addition, the NAND controller inside the card may have a special pSLC cache with very fast writes and rather low usable capacities of the devices imply on that, but this could be verified only by testing one of these products.
Sony UHS-II SD Cards at Glance | |||||
32 GB SF-G32 |
64 GB SF-G64 |
128 GB SF-G128 |
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Usable Capacity | 28.8 GB | 57.6 GB | 115.2 GB | ||
Read Speed | up to 300 MB/s | ||||
Write Speed | up to 299 MB/s | ||||
Minimum Sequential Write Speed | 30 MB/s | ||||
Interface | UHS-II | ||||
Availability | Spring 2017 | ||||
SDA Labels | UHS-II, Class 10, U3 |
The new cards from Sony carry the Class 10 and U3 labels to show that their performance does not drop below 10 and 30 MB/s when used with those standards' respective workloads. Being positioned for professional use, the Sony SF-G cards are also waterproof, static-proof, temperature-proof, and shock-proof, which is beneficial for people who travel a lot and/or have to use memory cards in tough conditions. In case the data on cards is lost, Sony supplies its File Rescue tool with them.
Sony’s SF-G-series SDXC cards will be available this spring. Pricing is to be determined, but it will vary depending on capacities. In addition to the flash memory cards, Sony will also offer its clients a UHS-II-capable MRW-S1 card reader with USB 3.0 interface, whose price is also unknown.
Related Reading:
- Edge Memory Announces Video Speed Class SD Cards
- The SD Card Association to Classify IOPS Performance of Memory Cards via Logo
- SD Association Announces SD 5.0 Specification: SD Cards For UHD and 360° Video Capture
- Western Digital Shows Off Prototype 1TB SDXC Card at Photokina 2016
- Samsung Rolls Out Its First UFS Cards: SSD Performance in Card Form-Factor
Source: Sony
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samer1970 - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
would do is one thing. and is doing it is another. show me please laptop card readers using 2 lanes.DanNeely - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
For 4/8k video recording an SLC cache wouldn't help much except for occasional short clips, the card's steady state write speed needs to be able to match the data rate that the video is being created at .samer1970 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
The problem is : where is the card reader that can support this speed ? and which Camera and which mobile phone ? it is not all about the card itself , we still need a card reader that can support that speed both in USB connection and inside gadgets .HomeworldFound - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Magic. These specific cards seem to be full size. The mobile phone market is not a target. Read the first sentence. Sony has announced its new lineup of SD cards for advanced 4K/8K, DSLR, and mirrorless cameras.samer1970 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
again , where isthe card reader that can support this speed ?and micro size will follow soon ...
phoenix_rizzen - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Keep reading. Sony will be releasing a USB 3.x reader for it.HomeworldFound - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Nearly 300 MB/s Read/Write performance and 500% addition to the price. Sony.watzupken - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
I am unsure to be honest. So far, I have not come across a fast SD card reader built on phones and mobile devices. Considering that this likely won't be cheap, I don't think I will want to waste my money buying something that may go up to 300MB/s, when the bottleneck is likely the card readers on the devices.Alexvrb - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
I'd really like to see smartphones start using UHS-II or III capable microSD slots. If they were more popular we'd see prices drop a bit.