The Lexar Professional SD 8.0 memory card has speeds up to 1700 MB/s — but no camera supports it

The Lexar Professional SD 8.0 memory card is too fast for all modern devices. None will provide the maximum speed it is capable of.

The new SD card offers read and write speeds of up to 1700MB/s and 1000MB/s respectively. It is ahead of its time because it is not fully compatible with cameras and any other devices that use this format. Most likely, in a real-world application, the speed will be reduced to the UHS-I standard.

Lexar has recently released a series of flash-based cards, including a Gold and Silver Pro stainless steel variant, that are UHS-II compliant. But the SD 8.0 standard uses PCIe 4.0 lines to achieve speeds of up to 2GB/s.

Only card readers or cameras that comply with the SD 8.0 standard can realize the full speed of Lexar Professional SD 8.0. However, none currently exist, as the standard was only finalized a month ago. The SD 8.0 standard is designed for use with PCIe: PCIe Gen 4 x1, PCIe G3 x2, or PCIe Gen4 x2. The SD card will work with existing cameras and devices, but with a corresponding limitation.

Lexar probably introduced the SD 8.0 card to demonstrate its performance as a concept. No other storage manufacturer has yet demonstrated an SD 8.0 card. The fact is that the standard actually corresponds to SD Express, a high-speed memory card standard that was never supported by the industry.

High-speed storage is important for cameras because of large file size 8K RAW video or creating high-resolution images. But for now, you can’t speed up file processing. It’s not certain that such devices will appear in the near future. Despite the announcement, the card is not available on Lexar’s website, although its new UHS-II SDXC cards are.

Sources: PetaPixel, Tom`s Hardware