microSD Express unlocks hyper-fast data speeds for mobile devices

As these write speeds get faster and faster, I’m starting to envision storage more like how we saw it on TNG. A bank of isolinear chips!!

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Haven’t read the article. Okay, are microSD cards slow? I want to be excited about isolinear chips (okay, I am!), but I’ve never had an issue with a mobile device reading from memory slowly.

Granted, I don’t watch video, but I’ve read FLAC from microSD, and it was only an issue for my first gen Android device.

It does make for interesting device ideas, where w/r ops are not a bottleneck. Think mesh of devices routing data…

It depends on what you’re using them for! I recently learned this.

That is actually a really great guide on all the different types of microSD cards out there.

I had always thought Class 10 was the best, because it has the fastest read/write speeds. BUT! Turns out that is just for continuous reads/writes. Like, reading one big video file, or some such. If you’re trying to use it as more of a hard drive, for, say, a Pi or something, you want speed in how many reads/writes it can do in one sec. Enter the Application Performance Class (IOPS = “Input/output operations per second”).

Class Min. Seq. Writes Min. Random Read Min. Random Write Ideal Workload
A1 10MB/s 1500 IOPS 500 IOPS Editing and updating app data, not just storage
A2 10MB/s 4000 IOPS 2000 IOPS Higher performance, special uses
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