With Lexar’s latest announcement, we’re faced with one of those hard-to-believe situations where a product is so good on paper that it seems like a lie, and then it turns out to be a flop of epic proportions. But let’s start at the beginning: it’s all about the new SD card 8.0 of Lexarwhich promises speeds of up to 1,700MB/s read and 1,000MB/s write, the fastest on the market…
The fact is that it seems that this memory card is, to say the least, ahead of its time, since it is not fully compatible with any device on the market that uses this standard, especially video cameras, and at best it works as if it had the UHS-I standard.
An SD card so fast it’s ahead of its time?
Lexar recently announced a new batch of SD storage cards, including some of the ones we told you about last week that were made of stainless steel, also compatible with the UHS-II Standard. But of course, the one who wins the palm for his latest outings is the one who carries the standard SD 8.0which uses PCIe 4.0 lanes to achieve the promised speeds (this standard theoretically reaches 2 GB/s).
All this means that only devices that comply with the SD 8.0 standard can take advantage of the speed of this memory card… and currently there is none. Keep in mind that the SD 8.0 standard was finalized just a month ago, and apparently while Lexar rushed to release its first compatible memory card, the manufacturers of compatible devices it can be used in are moving slowly.
The SD 8.0 standard was designed to use multiple PCI-Express interfaces: PCIe 4.0 x1, PCIe 3.0 x2, and PCIe 4.0 x2. While this memory card is fortunately backward compatible with previous standards, performance is reduced to a minimum in these cases: will work as a UHS-I SD card which only provides 30 MB/s speed… look at the difference, from the promised 1700 MB/s it drops to 30 MB/s, about 56 times less.
This fast SD card from Lexar has been designed to work similarly to its CFexpress 3.0 counterpart, which is part of the Lexar Professional series, to have read and write speeds similar to those used by PCIe 4.0. But that’s about the similarities, since as we explained, there is no device in which you can use it, and what’s worse, its backward compatibility turns this professional-grade SD into a cheap memory card like the one you can even buy. in Chinese
Of course, even though the manufacturer sent a press release mentioning its launch, it still hasn’t listed it even on its website, and likewise, it’s not in stores yet and can’t be purchased. We assume that now, knowing the problem it’s currently having, Lexar will want to wait until the first SD 8.0 compatible devices are available on the market to start shipping them to stores…
