Samsung doubles speed of microSD card for smartphones

Computerworld - Samsung Electronics today announced that it is manufacturing a high-performance microSD card with twice the data transfer speeds as its previous generation cards designed for smartphones.

Samsung's new microSD card holds up to 32GB of data and has read data transfer speeds of up to 24MB/sec and write rates of up to 12MB/sec, more than double the maximum write speeds of a class 4 32GB microSD card.

Samsung's new microSD card

The new microSD cards have a class 10 speed rating suitable for data storage and transmission of full HD video, a feature that's becoming highly popular among 4G smartphone users.

SD cards are classified by four speed levels: Class 2, 4, 6 and 10. Classes 4, 6 and 10 are rated for use with high-definition video recorders, with class 10 being rated for high-speed bus interfaces, such as FireWire.

"The industry demand for high-class-rated memory cards addresses the growing performance push for next-generation mobile applications in more advanced smartphones including 4G models," Wanhoon Hong, executive vice president of memory sales & marketing for Samsung, said in a statement.

"As the industry adopts microSD cards with a class 10 rating, the superior data transfer speeds are expected to improve the mobile user experience tremendously," Hong added.

The new 32GB memory card uses Samsung's 3-bit-per-cell, 20-nanometer NAND flash memory chips. Samsung said that by using its smaller 20nm class circuitry, instead of the previously used 30nm class process, the productivity of the chips was raised over 30%.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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