Sony has announced its new lineup of SD cards for advanced 4K/8K, DSLR, and mirrorless cameras. The new SF-G-series memory cards use the UHS-II bus and one of Sony’s proprietary technologies to offer the company's highest read/write performance to date — up to nearly 300 MB/s. The cards will hit the market in the coming months.

The Sony SF-G-series memory cards will be available in 32 GB (SDHC), 64 GB (SDXC), and 128 GB (SDXC) configurations. The key selling point of the new Sony SF-G cards is their performance: up to 300 MB/s read speed and up to 299 MB/s write speed, which a quick look finds is around 15% faster compared to competing products (such as the SanDisk Extreme PRO SD UHS-II or the Lexar Professional 2000x UHS-II, both of which offer up to 260 MB/s writes). The new cards from Sony are compatible with various types of SD-supporting devices (cameras, card readers, etc.), but to take full advantage of their speed one needs a device that fully supports the UHS-II bus and has the extra pins the wider bus requires.

Sony is not reveaing how they're getting up to 299 MB/s sequential write performance in an SD card, instead only saying that it is enabled by its firmware. One possibility is that the cards use NAND flash memory with very large block sizes (supported by the SD 5.0 standard), which helps to boost write performance. In addition, the NAND controller inside the card may have a special pSLC cache with very fast writes and rather low usable capacities of the devices imply on that, but this could be verified only by testing one of these products.

Sony UHS-II SD Cards at Glance
  32 GB
SF-G32
64 GB
SF-G64
128 GB
SF-G128
Usable Capacity 28.8 GB 57.6 GB 115.2 GB
Read Speed up to 300 MB/s
Write Speed up to 299 MB/s
Minimum Sequential Write Speed 30 MB/s
Interface UHS-II
Availability Spring 2017
SDA Labels UHS-II, Class 10, U3

The new cards from Sony carry the Class 10 and U3 labels to show that their performance does not drop below 10 and 30 MB/s when used with those standards' respective workloads. Being positioned for professional use, the Sony SF-G cards are also waterproof, static-proof, temperature-proof, and shock-proof, which is beneficial for people who travel a lot and/or have to use memory cards in tough conditions. In case the data on cards is lost, Sony supplies its File Rescue tool with them.

Sony’s SF-G-series SDXC cards will be available this spring. Pricing is to be determined, but it will vary depending on capacities. In addition to the flash memory cards, Sony will also offer its clients a UHS-II-capable MRW-S1 card reader with USB 3.0 interface, whose price is also unknown.

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Source: Sony

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  • samer1970 - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link

    would do is one thing. and is doing it is another. show me please laptop card readers using 2 lanes.
  • DanNeely - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    For 4/8k video recording an SLC cache wouldn't help much except for occasional short clips, the card's steady state write speed needs to be able to match the data rate that the video is being created at .
  • samer1970 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    The problem is : where is the card reader that can support this speed ? and which Camera and which mobile phone ? it is not all about the card itself , we still need a card reader that can support that speed both in USB connection and inside gadgets .
  • HomeworldFound - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Magic. These specific cards seem to be full size. The mobile phone market is not a target. Read the first sentence. Sony has announced its new lineup of SD cards for advanced 4K/8K, DSLR, and mirrorless cameras.
  • samer1970 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    again , where isthe card reader that can support this speed ?

    and micro size will follow soon ...
  • phoenix_rizzen - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Keep reading. Sony will be releasing a USB 3.x reader for it.
  • HomeworldFound - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    Nearly 300 MB/s Read/Write performance and 500% addition to the price. Sony.
  • watzupken - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link

    I am unsure to be honest. So far, I have not come across a fast SD card reader built on phones and mobile devices. Considering that this likely won't be cheap, I don't think I will want to waste my money buying something that may go up to 300MB/s, when the bottleneck is likely the card readers on the devices.
  • Alexvrb - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link

    I'd really like to see smartphones start using UHS-II or III capable microSD slots. If they were more popular we'd see prices drop a bit.

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