ADATA Announces Premier Extreme SD 8.0 Express, the Industry's First SD 8.0 Express-Compliant Drive with Maximum Read Speed of 1.6GB/s and Write Speed of 1.2GB/s

ADATA, a memory manufacturer headquartered in New Taipei City, Taiwan, has announced the industry's first SD card that complies with the SD 8.0 Express standard , the Premier Extreme SD 8.0 Express . The Premier Extreme SD 8.0 Express supports PCIe Gen 3x2 connections and the NVMe transfer protocol, achieving a maximum read speed of 1.6GB/s and a maximum write speed of 1.2GB/s.

ADATA Launches New SD 8.0 Express Memory Card, UFD, and M.2 Enclosure to Fully Upgrade Remote Work Efficiency - NEWS | ADATA (Global)
https://www.adata.com/en/news/1214/

New SD Express 8.0 cards double the speed of today's fastest microSDs | TechSpot
https://www.techspot.com/news/107646-new-sd-express-80-cards-double-speed-today.html

512GB ADATA Premier Extreme SD 8.0 Express memory card delivers up to 1600MB/s read speed - CNX Software
https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/04/22/512gb-adata-premier-extreme-sd-8-0-express-memory-card-delivers-up-to-1600mb-s-read-speed/

The Premier Extreme SD 8.0 Express announced by ADATA has a capacity of 512GB, supports PCIe Gen 3x2 connection and NVMe transfer protocol, and has a read speed of up to 1.6GB/s and a write speed of up to 1.2GB/s. ADATA claims that this is twice the speed of the SD 7.0 Express standard, seven times that of UHS-I , and four times that of UHS-II. It also supports U3 and V30 video speed classes , and is said to be compatible with 4K video recording and RAW image processing.

SD Express is an SD card standard that uses the PCIe and NVMe protocols of SSDs, and was defined in the form of being introduced into the SD 7.0 standard in 2018. At the time of the SD 7.0 Express standard, read and write speeds of approximately 1GB/s were advertised.

Introducing the new SD card standard 'SD Express' capable of high-speed transfer of about 1GB per second and 'SDUC' with a maximum capacity of 128TB - GIGAZINE

Subsequently, 'SD 8.0' was announced in May 2020, and it was revealed that SD 8.0 Express is a standard that achieves read and write speeds of up to 4GB/s, comparable to PCIe 4.0/M.2 connected SSDs.

New SD card standard 'SD 8.0' appears, adopting PCI Express 4.0 to achieve read/write speeds of up to 4GB/s - GIGAZINE

The biggest feature of SD Express is its read/write speed, but the number of connection pins on the terminal is different, and there is a problem that it is not backward compatible with conventional SD card standards. Even if you purchase a card that conforms to the SD Express standard, if the device you use, such as a PC or camera, does not support it, you will not be able to experience the read/write speed of 1GB/s. However, it can be used as a conventional SD card.

In addition, there are very few portable devices that require read and write speeds of over 1GB/s, so very few devices support SD Express. Due to the low demand, the selling price of SD Express cards is somewhat higher than that of conventional SD cards.

However, the technology news site TechSpot says that the SD Express standard may finally see the light of day as demand increases due to the adoption of microSD Express cards for external storage on the Nintendo Switch 2 , which is scheduled to be released on June 5, 2025.

At the time of writing, the only major memory manufacturers selling microSD Express cards were SanDisk and Lexar, as well as Samsung, which plans to sell microSD Express cards for the Nintendo Switch 2 as official Nintendo products. It will be interesting to see whether ADATA will also release a microSD Express card.

The price of Premier Extreme SD 8.0 Express has not been disclosed at the time of writing.