We’re seeing a war of speed escalation at the moment and the equipment is memory cards, the very unifying blood between photographers. From varying levels of SD, to CF, CFast, CFexpress, XQD there are no shortage of storage mediums and performance but the rate at which they each evolve is playing a role in where the markets move from here. CFast we know has a SATA limitation of 500-600MB/s which makes the departure from the type a certainty eventually.

XQD on the other hand could theoretically be pushed passed 1000MB/s and the proposed CFexpress would have a PCle system of 8 lanes capable of 1GB a lane. That’s a whopping 8GB/s transfer speed. But I digress, as that’s not a certainty and not right now, and SD cards are still by far and away the most common type of card, so it’s interesting to hear that the SD Card Association has announced a SD 6.0 UHS-III standard that would see a doubling of max data rates of current UHS-II cards. That means, a transfer up to 624MB/s on both SD and MicroSD which represents a doubling of the UHS-II limits.

“UHS-III answers the demand for bus speed enhancement for 8K videos and 360-degree/3D cameras/drones, and data- intense high-speed wireless communication such as 5G mobile networks, or IEEE802.11.ax, recorded on higher capacity SD memory cards. UHS-III includes all UHS-II functionalities plus 3.12/6.24Gpbs FD modes and Quick Recovery function. The major modification in UHS-III is the adoption of high-performance PHY. If the host device implements 6.24Gbps UHS-III PHY, UHS-II devices are relatively easy to upgrade to UHS-III” – SD Association

All of this news comes off the heels of a Sony SD card announcement that made waves lately about it being the world’s fastest SD card which would see a 299MB/s transfer. Of course you’d need to be using a UHS-III compatible camera come the time, but at least we know the cards will be backwards compatible.

The CFA’s New Card Depicts The Near Future Of Memory Cards (8GB/s) & CFAST Isn’t In It]

SOME OF THE FASTEST CARDS ON THE MARKET

If you were to go to B&H or Amazon and search for fast memory cards your results would be, well, overwhelming. There is an absolute bounty of cards out there and unless you’ve tested them or know precisely what you’re looking for it’s hard to know which are the real performers. As such, here’s a short list of some of the fastest cards around:

*Note that not all cameras can take these cards and you should verify which your camera is able to use. Also, despite what’s written on the cards for read/write speed, and write in particular, you can expect that to be lower in practice. In fact, many cards will just issue the read speed and not specify the write speed.