UHS-III SD card interface capable of 624MB/s bursts announced: Digital Photography Review

UHS-III SD card interface capable of 624MB/s bursts announced

Published Feb 24, 2017 | Richard Butler

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M Chambers

Ironically many people that buy these do so because their SLR has a slow processor. A fast memory card isn't going to make it any faster. The camera is still limited by the speed of its processor.

5 months agopermalink

sirhawkeye64

Yes I get people that like to argue with me on this... thinking that a UHS-II or III card will make their Nkkon Coolpix faster.... I've read even for my D750, using anything faster than a UHS-I card may in fact impact (negatively) write speeds. Don't know why that would be, but it has shown up in some tests I found online. IDK for me, since I don't shoot video, my UHS-I cards are plenty fast for my needs (i do get the 90MB/s cards, which tend to write around 50-60MB/s, which ,again ,is still plenty fast for me). The only people I can see that really need super fast cards would be those doing video (and HD/4K video).

4 months agopermalink

GRUBERND

it's nice how the speed _CURVE_ in the graphics tries to reflect the reality of such standards, all talking about theoretical limits (remember "USB2: Up to 480Mb/s"?) which hardly any device ever reaches even under lab conditions.
although i dont think that was the real intention behind it. ;-)

5 months agopermalink

mick232

What else should they show? Real-world devices don't exist yet and anyway would always just show one specific sample.

5 months agopermalink

sirhawkeye64

The one thing that many charts and advertisements (etc), fail to take into account (and thus you not getting a full 480Mb/s) is two things: a.) some of these transfer speeds are total, but the data flows in both directions, so they advertise USB 2.0 as 480Mb/s, but it really caps out at maybe 250Mb/s EACH DIRECTION (up and down stream combined gives you 480)). Secondly, they don't mention overhead, which is about 10% of the total bandwidth, so taking these two into account, your USB 2.0 device really only operates at around 220-230 0Mb/s (megabits), which is about 26-28 MB/s (megabytes), which I have really only seen during reads of SD cards, but never when writing to a card (perhaps the UHS-I/II cads can write beyond 30 MB/s. Wireless routers are labelled the same way: They advertise 1300Mb/s, but really it's two dual 450Mb streams +another that's probably around 300-450 Mb stream, so you're not really getting 13000Mb in any single direction... that's both directions.

4 months ago*permalink

Fujica

What is the use of these highspeed cards other then 8K video and be able to shoot a full card of RAW files in one go with continuous high speed?

5 months ago*permalink

ThorstenMUC

Sports photography, where you want to empty the buffer as fast as possible... the next-gen pixelrace or 3D images with even bigger files maybe (this standard is not defined for today, but must be usable the next years)...

But otherwise video is probably the main target-usage for these high bandwidths.

I for sure currently have no use-case - I'm still completely satisfied with my 95MB/s cards.

5 months ago*permalink

Impulses

Who likes waiting for a buffer to clear before being able to shoot again? Files get larger, cameras shoot faster, cards get faster, it's pretty simple...

5 months agopermalink

Fujica

Yes waiting for bufferclearing can be terrible, but looking at the D500 it can shoot RAW for over 20 seconds or so. I'll think within that timeframe you must have had your moment? - My guess though.

5 months agopermalink

EDWARD ARTISTE

@ fujica

Dude cmon...for i/o speeds, faster is ALWAYS better. Point, blank. That is, if you know anything about hardware...its all about moving that data back and forth. It's the same rule for every single data system ever.

So, "..what do we need this for?" becomes a seriously dumb question in this instance.

forest / trees bro

5 months agopermalink

eno2

That's nice!

5 months agopermalink

Fotoni

Sandisk 32-512GB Extreme Pro 95 MB/sec SDXC UHS-I cards can write at least ~ 73MB/s non-stop with BMPCC and for example 64GB could hold about 15 minutes of RAW video (stored as DNG frames) so they are small files like 2 MB each. Those cards are at least couple years old tech. These details can be found from the link below.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/faq/43083

5 months agopermalink

EDWARD ARTISTE

But who cares is the real question. It doesn't compare to whats in the article.

5 months agopermalink

yslee1

I don't even have a UHS-II card yet and they're coming out with this already. As it is only a handful of cameras have UHS-II support...

5 months agopermalink

Impulses

It's way more than a handful, unless you're only looking at the couple brands that have dragged their feet on this.

5 months agopermalink

EDWARD ARTISTE

Thats thier job, to keep pushing on. Literally.

If canon wants to put an age old i/o system on the VERY expensive 5d4, thats another (messed up) story.

5 months agopermalink

Edmond Leung

Look forward to hearing the related products from Sandisk.

5 months agopermalink

GodSpeaks

UHS-II cards have barely entered the market and now they are bringing out UHS-III.
It would be nice if the SD Association was better organized.

5 months agopermalink

Impulses

A spec HAS to precede actual products by a decent amount of time, how else would they be properly manufactured and tested to meet said spec otherwise? They're doing their job by adding headroom for products to grow into. Whether some camera manufacturers are failing to leverage all this is another story.

Dunno what you mean by UHS-II cards having barely entered the market anyway... If by barely you mean a couple years ago, sure. My Amazon order history shows I bought a 128GB UHS-II U3 Lexar Pro 1000x SDXC card back in June of 2015 (15, not 16); and I didn't pay an eye for it either ($57.95, seller was actually Adorama).

So they've been around longer than most of the cameras people are currently fawning over.

5 months agopermalink

joelR42

Part of the barrier to UHS-II adoption was that UHS-II Requires an extra set of pins. The slots of physically backwards compatible but the upgrade is more complicated. I suspect the adoption of UHS-III will be faster because it uses the same interface as UHS-II. Time will tell of course.

5 months agopermalink

JonathanFV

It's about time Sony cameras use faster card readers/writers, isn't? My $3000 A7R II would be perfect with faster write speeds.

5 months agopermalink

meanwhile

Ha. Is this the SD Association trolling Sony?

(Yes, I know Sony is on the board too)

5 months agopermalink

Fujica

I think Sony knew this was coming their announcement last week was just to get the scoop.

- Interesting still as that card is a UHS-II card -

5 months ago*permalink

Chaitanya S

Adoption of uhs-ii cards has been slow at best now sda announces uhs-iii standard. Lets see well this standard gets adopted in industry.

5 months agopermalink

Zoom Zoom Zoom

I'm so sick and tired of the BS speed ratings of ALL the cards in the market that are all "..speeds of up to xxxMB/s". These quotes and misleading marketing mean positively and absolutely nothing, zilch. The real world is not made of best case scenarios, fantastic lab testing or theoretical maximum speeds. Plus the fabulous speeds quotes are not legally regulated, anyone can say and claim whatever they want along with some disclaimers to make sure everyone actually doesn't understand what the the product can and will deliver. And of course there is always the added "cushion" that it all depends on the card's receiving hardware R/W capabilities.

Real world performance of all these cards is typically always about a fraction of what is claimed, some like by a 10 fold. My bet? I'd be awed if these can even do stable 30MB/'s sustained like they do now.

Endless BS..

5 months agopermalink

Impulses

It's actually nowhere near the dire, the camer side of the equation is a bigger mess than the cards are, unless you're buying cards from a shady brand. The one area they do obfuscate often is write speeds, Sandisk in particular loves hiding the write speed of lower end cards and drives but higher end ones usually feature it prominently.

When they say "up to" it's not really about perfect lab conditions or playing games with the consumer... That wording just means the card will reach that speed when dealing with larger sequential transfers (and video streams fit that usage case to a T). All flash drives and even hard drives have a tougher time dealing with random I/O.

Yeah it's a bit of marketing gamesmanship but you can blame the PC industry for it as much as anyone. Saying "10,000K IOPS" or "100MB/s random IO" has never sounded as sexy as claiming the performance possible during sequential transfers, which tends to be a larger and easier to grasp number.

Back to the original point tho, I've never bought a card that couldn't reach the number they claim for sequential transfers, in many many cases they actually surpass it.

Random I/O (probably more relevant for still burst shooting) is another story, you just have to be aware of that. The camera industry could come with a standard that deals with random I/O just like the video industry has their U/V ratings for sustained (ie sequential) speeds... But that would probably reveal how poorly many bodies leverage the fastest cards, probably why they don't.

5 months agopermalink

Sunshine7913

Come on. Most of cameras does not even support UHS-2 yet.

5 months agopermalink

Impulses

Maybe it's time to vote with your dollar then. My E-M5 II came out in 2015 and it can absolutely leverage UHS-II. It was never even marketed as a body partucularly adept for action shooting yet it can sustain about 5fps indefinitely witha fast enough card, the buffer is basically irrelevant until you ramp it up to 10fps. Honestly, any body $700+ that wasn't taking advantage of it by last year is failing hard IMO.

5 months agopermalink

PhotoUniverse

Totally.

5 months agopermalink

ThorstenMUC

Really?
Has there been any relevant SD-card camera released in 2016 without UHS-II?

My 2014 Fujifilm already supports UHS-II.

5 months agopermalink

princecody

Ninja fast 😮

5 months agopermalink

brycesteiner

I remember when we DSLR photographers would laugh at the people using 'puny' little SD cards. Real photographers and 'Pro' cameras use only CF cards!

5 months agopermalink

Impulses

High end pro bodies still do, CFast etc... There's been a split between those and consumer bodies using SD for a while, with some optionally using both.

5 months agopermalink

brycesteiner

>>High end pro bodies still do
At one time there was a reason. Now there is not considering that current SD cards are twice as fast as the fastest CF cards. The only reason that exists now is because the high end C&N models are many times the most conservative to get the newest technologies other than sensors.

5 months agopermalink

brendon1000

High end pro bodies do use CF cards but now SD cards are getting much faster while CF cards are not getting much development in speeds.

With UHS III the gap (theoretically) between SD and other faster cards like Cfast are all but obliterated or at least down to differences in a lab with very little real world difference.

5 months agopermalink

brycesteiner

SD had surpassed CF in every measurable way except size.

5 months agopermalink

brendon1000

^^ The problem is that most camera manufacturers from the big 3 are not very keen on offering UHS-II card slots with their cameras as that requires a new processor chip to support it.

That is why dual cameras like the Canon Mk IV still use UHS-1 card slots along with a faster standard UDMA CF slot.

If the Canon was equipped with a UHS-II slot I wager the SD slot would have been faster.

5 months agopermalink

Impulses

UHS SD is only now catching up with CFast, as a standard (ie the headroom for the most expensive card possible but probably still not in production yet); and it's entirely possible the larger form still makes it easier to actually produce really fast cards that maximize that standard.

Both standards will go by the wayside eventually anyway in favor of something UFS based, probably in an SD-like form factor. We can look forward to all the same complaints and random hysteria when DPR posts a news story about the (natch, it already happened).

5 months agopermalink

mais51

Configure my D800 to send Raw file to CF and JPG to SD
Raw file at 45MB is 3 times larger than the correspondent JPG. Until Nikon can eliminate camera body noise picked up by the on-board Mic video is not considered.

5 months agopermalink

Satyaa

The backward compatibility thing on UHS-II cards has not been good. There are not many cameras that work well with UHS-II. They insist on using UHS-I.

The backward compatibility mentioned in this announcement is a key thing. I hope cameras can now move on to faster cards.

Phones are the mass market for these cards. Once phones get on to 4K and start demanding faster cards, the others may follow.

5 months agopermalink

Impulses

Phones have been offering 4K for a while, tho at lower bitrate, and they're not any faster than cameras at adopting the newest standards... They're barely using UHS-I and often top out at something like 50MB/s in writing to cards. Phones have an advantage in that their internal storage is much faster tho.

Internal phone storage used to be eMMC based (basically the same core tech as these cards) but over the last two years they've moved to UFS solutions that can easily manage several hundred megabytes in read/write speeds and (more importantly) way faster random read/write speeds. In all likelihood UFS is probably the future for removable media too but it's several years out from adoption.

5 months agopermalink

EDWARD ARTISTE

Is this the true reason why canon made that 'on its face' awful decision?

There just isnt enough info nor articles detailing why cameras are stuck using these old standards. xqd and cfast- well those need new hardware and have proprietary tech so at least there's for those two stalling

5 months agopermalink

Impulses

Is there actually a V60 rating? Like officially? Maybe the reason it's not being displayed is because it doesn't exist, because there's definitely several U3/V30 UHSHI cards that can manage sequential writes at double and triple their rating...

The ones that can do 60MB/s aren't even that expensive (90MB/s for writes does gets a little more expensive).

Usually new standards are all about increasing headroom well in advance of actual need. Cameras haven't been fully leveraging UHS-II until pretty recently (granted my E-M5 II took advantage of it and it's over a year old).

5 months agopermalink

Richard Butler

The V60 (and V90) standards were announced a year ago.

However, we've not seen any cameras wear the branding yet. To the best of my knowledge, that's because no cards that are dependably fast enough have yet been made: if the '90MB/s (peak)' cards could reliably write faster than 30MB/s, you'd expect the SD Card Association's members to push for there to be a way for them to show that off.

5 months agopermalink

Impulses

Hmm, I guess it comes out to what they mean by peak then and how the spec is detailed (if it is...)... Usually card ratings and performance isn't so much peak/bursts vs sustained as much as it is about the size of transfers. A lot of cards can easily sustain 60-90MB/s reliably, but only when dealing with larger files (like a video stream). Absolutely no card (even those rated V30) can sustain 30MB/s when writing smaller/random files (like JPEGs possibly).

5 months agopermalink

uRebel Rob

It's more that just sustained speed. V60 and V90 speed ratings will only be on UHS-II (and now UHS-III) cards: the official specs paper states that UHS-II FD support is mandatory for all V60 and V90 cards. So even if a UHS-I card meets all the other V60 requirements (sustained speed, simultaneous multiple files writes, continue partially used blocks after power off, specific block sizes, etc), it can't claim V60. See the (simplified) Physical Layer Specification Version 5.00 from the SD Association, pg 121, table 4-67.
That same paper shows how much more complicated the Video Speed Classes are to get that the others, by page count: 7 pages for SD + SDHC normal speed classes, 6 pages for SDXC normal speed classes, 2 pages for UHS speed classes (much of it "see SDXC pages", though), and 18 pages for the video speed classes!

5 months agopermalink

bubblyboo

Maybe it's finally time for Sony to finally hop off that UHS-I crap.

5 months agopermalink

SHood

Just to give some perspective, the UHS-II standard was announced in January 2011 to support 312mb/s.

https://www.engadget.com/2011/01/05/sd-association-triples-sdhc-and-sdxc-speeds-with-uhs-ii-standard/

6 years later the fastest cameras (E-M1ii and D500) can support 163mb/s. That would suggest in 6 year from now (2023) the faster cameras would be able to support ~300mb/s.

It seems like we are going at a snails pace in supporting new SD standards

5 months agopermalink

Mssimo

The weak link may have been memory modules/cost and not the bus. 4k and 8k video will be a good push for everyone to dump UHS-1

5 months agopermalink

Impulses

It's not so much the memory speed per se as the controllers, the way to make faster/larger flash drives is usually to access more NAND in parallel, but that requires a larger and more power hungry controller which obviously doesn't work as well in a tiny card.

Storage standards have ALWAYS outpaced devices and even the actual media, I wouldn't be so hard on camera companies. The standards and protocols are supposed to come well in advance, so they're vetted and ready by the time products are ready to use them.

The camera companies I'd be hardest on would be the ones that are not even leveraging UHS-II yet, and there's several of them that haven't, specially on midrange bodies.

5 months agopermalink

Matsu

First. Yay. I appreciate backwards compatibility.

5 months agopermalink

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