Kingston's New UHS-I U3 SDXC Cards Can Write at 80 MB/s

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Kingston's new SD cards are Speedy!

Kingston has announced a new lineup of SD cards, which are rather speedy. They are to be known by the part numbers SDA3/16GB, SDA3/32GB, and SDA3/64GB.

The cards match the SD Association's newest specification, UHS-I  U3, though go well beyond the required performance numbers. Kingston claims that the SD cards can read and write at 90 MB/s and 80 MB/s, respectively. The U3 specification guarantees you at least 30 MB/s for both reading and writing. Of course, to meet these speeds when accessing the cards from your PC, you'll need a USB 3.0 capable card reader.

The 16 GB and 32 GB models are based on the SDHC technology and feature a FAT32 file format. The 64 GB card is an SDXC card, initialized with the exFAT file format.

No word on availability or pricing yet.

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • chicofehr
    Been using the 128GB Sandisk Extreme doing 45MB/s for almost 2 years and love it. 64GB is the least I would go for if any type of HD video is involved but for pictures, 16 or 32GB would be more then enough. 80/90MB/s would be great for 4K video at HQ settings. 45MB/s might be able to handle 4k at medium quality settings. Of course, no one except movie studios and the rich kids have those yet so 80/90MB/s is more then most people would need at this time but its more future proof which is good.
    Reply
  • merikafyeah
    This is nice and all but Kingston (and most other companies) are behind the times. UHS-II cards are already here, like the Toshiba Exceria Pro SDXC cards.
    -
    Read speeds: 260 MB/s
    Write speeds: 240 MB/s
    -
    Not a typo, those are BYTES per second, not BITS per second. They're insanely fast. But they currently cost an arm and a leg at about $185 for a 16GB card and just about double that for a 32GB card, and currently they can only be bought directly from Japan off ebay, but the point is you can still own one RIGHT NOW if cost is no issue.
    -
    Incidentally you can also get rewritable triple-layer (100GB) BD-RE XL discs off ebay (also from Japan) at similarly exorbitant prices, but again, they ARE available.
    Reply
  • damianrobertjones
    I'd just simply like a 128GB MicroSD card :(
    Reply
  • c123456
    80/90MB/s would be great for 4K video at HQ settings.
    They'd actually use a hard drive for this. Check out black magic cameras. They actually have a hot swap ssd camera iirc, where a 500GB SSD is good for about an hour of footage. That said, the camera will cost significantly more than these, but now you have an idea of how much actual data your talking about.While sdxc is conveniently small its getting way behind the times, and honestly, with the way electronics are going, I could picture integrated ssds as commonplace in the future.
    Reply
  • Murissokah
    I'd just simply like a 128GB MicroSD card :(
    Which you will get, eventually. I remeber using 128MB flash drives not that long ago, which makes me feel kinda old.
    Reply
  • K2N hater
    The speed is impressive but I don't see how useful these cards would be in practise. For instance, photography would do fine but not many would pay (much?) more just to transfer/sync the files faster. Video, on the other hand would greatly benefit from the speed but then the capacity would be a limiting factor.
    Reply