Toshiba launches world’s fastest SDHC cards

Are actually SDXC cards with a twist

Sep 3, 2010 by

THE SD CARD standard has so far been shunned by most professionals as the SD media has been considered too slow to be used in professional DSLR cameras and camcorders. However, it seems like that’s all about to change with Toshiba’s announcement of some “really fast” SDHC cards. In fact, the only reason that these cards are labelled as SDHC appears to be a 32GB capacity cap, where a 64GB version would’ve been an SDXC card.

Confused? Well, these new cards use the new UHS104 standard that SDXC cards use, but if you have a camera that supports SDXC cards these new SDHC cards will give you the same benefits as an SDHC card in terms of performance. However, they will still work in cameras that only support SDHC cards but at reduced performance to the level of a Class 10 SDHC card.

In an SDXC compatible device or card reader Toshiba’s new cards will offer write speeds of up to 80MB/s and read speeds of up to 95MB/s which makes these the fastest SD cards to date. This also means that the SD card standard has near enough caught up with the fastest CompactFlash cards which offer 90MB/s read and write speeds. The new cards will be available in 8, 16 and 32GB sizes.

Toshiba also launched three new micro SDHC cards with support for the slightly slower UHS50 standard. These cards will be available in 4, 8 and 16GB sizes and offer read speeds of up to 40MB/s and write speeds of up to 20MB/s. Again, these cards will operate as a Class 10 SDHC card in devices that don’t support the UHS-I standard.

No pricing was announced, but expect a serious price premium on these cards until someone else comes up with a competing product. The micro SDHC cards and the 32GB SDHC card will go into mass production in November, with the 8 and 16GB SDHC cards following in December.S|A

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Lars-Göran Nilsson