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Sandisk reveals world's fastest 128GB SDXC Card

By Paul Ridden
January 13, 2012
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SanDisk has announced that its new 128GB Extreme SDXC UHS-I card, which boasts read/write speeds of up to 45 MB/s, is now shipping
SanDisk has announced that its new 128GB Extreme SDXC UHS-I card, which boasts read/write speeds of up to 45 MB/s, is now shipping

About eighteen months ago, SanDisk revealed the world's fastest 32GB SDHC media card, pushing the format's data transfer speeds up to a rather lively 30 megabytes per second (MB/s). Since then, the SDXC standard has been let loose on the world, with the promise of theoretical capacities of anything up to 2TB and file transfer rates up to 104 MB/s for the UHS-I flavor and 312MB/s for UHS-II. While we're not quite there yet, SanDisk is again claiming the "world's fastest" crown with its new 128GB Extreme SDXC UHS-I card, which boasts read/write speeds of up to 45 MB/s.

Now that today's high end digital cameras are capable of churning out 30 megapixel images in quick succession, professionals and enthusiasts are driving media card manufacturers to produce storage that offers shot-to-shot performance to suit. SanDisk has responded to this call by creating an Ultra High Speed storage card claimed to be capable of transferring an hour's worth of full HD video in five minutes, or 500 high resolution photos in just one minute.

The new Extreme SDXC card also carries a Class 1 speed designation, which means that it supports real-time full 1080p video capture on UHS-I enabled host devices. It's temperature proof, water proof, shock proof, and x-ray proof, and benefits from advanced error correction engines for greater data integrity and card reliability. Even though there's an included write-protect switch to guard against accidental deletion of content, the new media card also comes shipped with a year's worth of data recovery goodness in the form of a RescuePRO Deluxe download.

The 128GB SanDisk Extreme SDXC UHS-I card is shipping now for US$399.99. There's an equally brisk 64GB version available, too, for $199.99.

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PhotographySanDiskSDXC CardsWorld's FastestCES 2012
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Paul Ridden
While Paul is loath to reveal his age, he will admit to cutting his IT teeth on a TRS-80 (although he won't say which version). An obsessive fascination with computer technology blossomed from hobby into career before hopping over to France for 10 years, where he started work for New Atlas in 2009. Now back in his native Blighty, he serves as Managing Editor in Europe.
7 comments
Adrien
woo hoo... soon we\'ll be able to get rid of HDs and common HD-format (e.g. SATA) SSDs, and just use these puppies instead.
Ethan Brush
Overkill, but awesome. I remember buying a 60 gig playstation 3 for $600 a few years ago and thinking I could never possibly use that much space. I was in absolute awe. This is truly amazing. Though, it makes me wonder if technology is veering too far towards this direction, making data storage larger instead of making the data consume less space. It has got to plateu eventually, and then where will we be?
Michael Mantion
My 3 year old tablet has a 32 gb ssd.. I so want this.
Eric Woodmansee
These large capacity SD and Flash Drives scare the hell out of me. When the capacity rises but the form factor stays the same or even gets smaller that means that the density of the sectors is higher, only makes sense right? WELL, what happens when a sector fails? Well more data is lost per damaged sector because they are packing more information into a smaller space. And with only so many pre-allocated sectors to replace the bad ones (this is typically why the drive has slightly less capacity than advertised.) But you only have a finite amount of these \"replacement sectors\" and when they run up you are much more likely to loose large amounts of data. Spend your money on this but i would highly recommend not having it be the only source of information, nor should anyone assume these are stable devices.
Roomie
@Ethan Brush - We\'re not even close to overkill in storage space. There\'s no such a thing as too much space when it comes to storage. Further more there\'s a lot of development of making data more compact, think zip files, video codecs and other compression formats.
@Eric Woodmansee - What you want is redundancy. No matter how much data a single storage device can contain it can still fail. It\'s a good thing memory is cheap. But in the future you will most likely use web bases or cloud storage.
But I feel that SSD:s need to drop closer to regular HDD:s in price per byte. I thought it would go faster.
And just as a last note if you think this is a lot of data in small format: http://www.gizmag.com/worlds-smallest-magnetic-data-storage/21104/
joe1946
SSD will never be close to the price of HDDs since this 128GB SDXC card cost more than a 4TB (4,000 GB ) ext HDD. Do the math.
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-FireWire-External-STBC4000100/dp/B005ORPQ1M
phillyry
@joe1946 SD cards are not SSDs. yes, SSDs cost more per GB but the prices are dropping. we've gone from over a thousand dollars for 512GB down to $350 on sale. still more expensive than an HDD but continuing the downward trend, decreasing cost by ~40% per year.
@Roomie again, this is not an SSD. if you want speed you'll need an actual SSD that either goes in your computer or is attached via USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt. Otherwise, you're just not gonna get SSD speeds. Some USB drives are getting close, especially on the sequential read and write speeds but they still have a long way to go on random reads and particularly random writes. i'd like to see the ATTO results on one of these babies but i'll guarantee you it's nowhere near an SSD (e.g. Intel 330, Crucial M4, Samsung 830/840).
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