Kingston SDXC
June 2nd, 2010
Kingston has announced that they are now shipping their 64GB SDXC Class 10 memory cards in America this week. The SDXC standard is the next standard from the Secure Digital Association for SD[Secure Digital] cards with storage ranging from more than 32GB up to 2TB. This standard replaces the SDHC standard which reached a maximum capacity of 32GB. The SDA had detailed back during CES that they would be delivering up to 2TB capacities with SDXC, although we do not expect to see these sizes anytime this year.
The SDXC standard, in addition to larger capacities, also allows for exponentially faster data transfer rates reaching speeds up to a maximum transfer rate of 104MB/sec., and 300MB/sec. in the future. SDXC cards utilize the exFAT file system and are not backwards compatible with SDHC or SD cards. Kingston’s offering has read speeds up to 60MB/sec. and write speeds of up to 35MB/sec., placing it among the fastest SD cards available on the market today. Having this kind of speed can enable users to quickly transfer their pictures and moves from their DSLR camera directly to their computer with little to no time wasted. In addition to that, it can enable users to expand their existing storage on devices such as netbooks and mobile phones, even though to our knowledge there are no SDXC supported mobile devices at the moment. This will likely only happen once the Micro SDXC cards are available as there is no need for Micro SDXC support quite yet.
Camera and camcorder manufacturers are working on further implementing SDXC into their future products. Other consumer electronic product roadmaps will also start to include support for SDXC. Some other mentioned possibilities where SDXC’s improvements could be used would be in Blu-Ray devices as well as GPS devices. Our biggest hopes, though, remain in the SDXC arena where we could potentially see mobile devices getting enough storage space that internal memory would almost seem inadequate.