W.D Demos PCIe NVMe powered SD Card - 880MB/s speeds goodness in a SD card form factor

[GoodBytes]

Western Digital demos at MWC a new SD card format, which uses PCIe with the NVMe protocol.

Of course, the SD card itself sports a really fast memory chip to take advantage of the extra bandwidth available.

 

 

Called "SD PCIe" it uses UHS-II/III pins of an SD card to be able to connect to a, so far, a custom PCIe adapter with little information about it, as pictured bellow. It is able to achieve max read speeds of 880MB/s and 430MB/s writes based on CrystalDiskMark
 

AnandTech reports:

Quote

Western Digital is demonstrating a system featuring an M.2-to-SD adapter with an SD card that offers 880 MB/s sequential read speeds as well as up to 430 MB/s sequential write speeds, according to the CrystalDiskMark benchmark. The drive uses the existing UHS-II/III pins to construct a PCIe 3.0 x1 interface with the system (via a mechanical adapter) and probably standard PCIe voltage with a converter. The company is not disclosing the type of memory or the controller that power the SD PCIe card, but it is clear that we are dealing with a custom solution. Meanwhile, Western Digital claims that the implementation costs of a PCIe interface is not high as one might expect, as a PCIe x1 PHY is not all that large.

 

 

The company is not revealing more, so we will over time. SD Card Association, which Western Digital is part of among other companies, are  still hard at work behind this technology before it is finalized. So speed could be better, especially as single SSD chip can be made for the form factor.

 

Quote

The company believes that once the SD standard moves to PCIe, its evolutionary path will be pretty straightforward: after PCIe 3.0/3.1 come PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 that increase performance per lane from 8 GT/s to 16 GT/s and 32 GT/s, respectively. 

In the meantime, the SD Card Association is calling for interested parties to participate in the creation of a proper PCIe SD/microSD card standard. The organization outlines key features of the upcoming standard on a banner in its booth:

• Existing form-factors.
• PCIe interface, NVMe protocol.
• Support of legacy SD interface for backward compatibility (since the existing SD/PCIe card uses UHS-II/III pins, it is logical to expect the upcoming standard to support appropriate signaling too).

The Secure Digital interface has evolved greatly over the time of its existence in terms of performance: from 54 – 104 MB/s supported by the UHS-I all the way to 624 MB/s (full duplex) supported by the UHS-III. PCIe 3.0/3.1 can increase performance further to around 985 MB/s, beating the UHS-III.

 

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12487/western-digital-displays-sd-card-with-pcie-interface

 

Well, this is exciting news. Sounds expensive to me, but real cool none the less.

[captain_to_fire]

I’m guessing no SD card readers can take advantage of those read and write speeds. It might be useful for cameras when recording 4K video. 

[ProjectBox153]

Wow, I wonder what the life expectancy of these cards would be. 

[Trixanity]

It seems like we have a standards war going in the making. I think the SD card standard is still in development, we have UFS on the rise and we have various PCI-E based standards. They need to make up their mind. It's going to be a clusterfuck if they don't.

[Sniperfox47]

What are the expected benefits of this over UFS cards?

 

Also why is it being called SD PCIe if it's not using the SD Bus? Why not just have its own form factor if it's not going to be compatible with existing SD devices anyways?

 

I really don't understand what niche this is supposed to fill, especially since the controllers for UFS are smaller and simpler than those for PCIe.

[zramsey11]

This will be really cool once cameras have a native SD PCIe I/O or on phones if they can implement the tech in microSD.

[Energycore]

8K+ cameras with SD cards coming?

 

 

[The Benjamins]

8 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

What are the expected benefits of this over UFS cards?

 

Also why is it being called SD PCIe if it's not using the SD Bus? Why not just have its own form factor if it's not going to be compatible with existing SD devices anyways?

 

I really don't understand what niche this is supposed to fill, especially since the controllers for UFS are smaller and simpler than those for PCIe.

They could build a controller that takes old SD cards and the new SD PCIe so keeping the physical slot would make sense to have backwards compatibility.

[suicidalfranco]

bring it to phones!

[Trixanity]

29 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

They could build a controller that takes old SD cards and the new SD PCIe so keeping the physical slot would make sense to have backwards compatibility.

Samsung supposedly has a hybrid controller that accepts both SD and UFS cards.

[bcredeur97]

this has a good deal of uses. raspberry pi is the first thing that came to mind.

if they would implement something like that we wouldn't have to deal with painfully slow storage on little mini PC's

[bcredeur97]

Just now, suicidalfranco said:

bring it to phones!

or this. I'd really like this.

[ProjectBox153]

7 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

this has a good deal of uses. raspberry pi is the first thing that came to mind.

if they would implement something like that we wouldn't have to deal with painfully slow storage on little mini PC's

Would you really need PCIe storage on a Raspberry Pi though?

[BuckGup]

3 minutes ago, Jamiec1130 said:

Would you really need PCIe storage on a Raspberry Pi though?

YES 

[ProjectBox153]

Just now, BuckGup said:

YES 

Why though?

[dizmo]

I want to say I'm excited, but I'm not. UFS SD storage was also pretty impressive, and we haven't seen that implemented either.

[BuckGup]

Just now, Jamiec1130 said:

Why though?

Uncompressed Blu-Ray rips. The CPU probably can't keep up I don't really know. Why do people need 3.3Gb/s as a boot drive when it boots the same at 500Mb/s

[Silentprototipe]

Sweet mother of god 

[Energycore]

35 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

or this. I'd really like this.

Technically a phone is a mini PC so same use case

[Sniperfox47]

2 hours ago, The Benjamins said:

They could build a controller that takes old SD cards and the new SD PCIe so keeping the physical slot would make sense to have backwards compatibility.

Yeah, but the Host still needs PCIe to benefit from it is the point.

 

UFS and SD controllers are both *waaaaaaaaaay* simpler and smaller to implement in the SoC than PCIe is, and the chances of PCIe being integrated into any consumer ARM chipsets other than Tegra are next to none.

 

1 hour ago, Jamiec1130 said:

Would you really need PCIe storage on a Raspberry Pi though?

Except there's no PCIe lanes on any of the chipsets used by the Raspberry Pi boards. Nor is there for that used by most SBCs. So this wouldn't have an application there.

 

It's more likely to see UFS with the VC5 board coming in the next couple years than it is to see PCIe.

[The Benjamins]

8 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Yeah, but the Host still needs PCIe to benefit from it is the point.

 

UFS and SD controllers are both *waaaaaaaaaay* simpler and smaller to implement in the SoC than PCIe is, and the chances of PCIe being integrated into any consumer ARM chipsets other than Tegra are next to none.

 

Except there's no PCIe lanes on any of the chipsets used by the Raspberry Pi boards. Nor is there for that used by most SBCs. So this wouldn't have an application there.

 

It's more likely to see UFS with the VC5 board coming in the next couple years than it is to see PCIe.

but this is not just for those, their are plenty of device that can use/need that speed.

 

Windows based laptop/tablet, High end cameras, ect.

 

[Sniperfox47]

15 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

but this is not just for those, their are plenty of device that can use/need that speed.

 

Windows based laptop/tablet, High end cameras, ect.

 

Yeah, but you're missing my point. For the speed that you'll be getting out of a card that size, with the limited controller size, number of nand dies, and thermal constraints you might as well just use UFS (over PCIe on laptops) at that point.

 

Unless there's some totally unprecedented advancements in density (allowing more nand dies and more complex controllers) we're not going to be maxing out UFS bandwidth in a card sized media anytime soon.

 

P.S. Just for reference that's 2900MB/s with 2x UFS 3.0 after overhead. Vs 3940MB/s for a 4x PCIe 3.0 connection *before* overhead. You can definitely saturate that with an m.2 sized drive, but an SD card? **Correction... This card is 1x PCIe? So it's not even 1000MB/s. It's slower than UFS...

[samcool55]

14 hours ago, Jamiec1130 said:

Why though?

Random reads and writes.

Most SD, microSD and usb drives perform ok-ish in sequential reads and writes. But when it goes random it usually turns into a big turd.

This SD card is REALLY good in random reads (and probably also writes) so it would feel a lot faster.

Yes it might not make a massive difference but i'm sure it will help making it more useable for basically everything.

 

Don't forget phones used to have similar issues, animations in android weren't only there to make it look nice but also to mask loading times. These days it's no longer an issue.

[Doobeedoo]

That's cool though. Also reminded me, when are those new Samsung SD cards coming. 

[Sniperfox47]

5 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

That's cool though. Also reminded me, when are those new Samsung SD cards coming. 

If you mean their UFS cards, they're not being sold yet because there's literally 0 devices that can use them.

 

And I have to assume nobody's making devices that can use them because there's no cards for them.

 

Which is the exact same problem a PCI based card would have.

 

And before people say that it would be easier with PCIe because they have the same form factor and the ports could be dual-role, UFS can also be dual-role. Samsung's components division offers a port that can take both.