Sony & SanDisk Name New Memory Card

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SanDisk Corporation, best known for their successful range of high-speed flash memory cards, and Sony Corporation, best known for…well, pretty much everything, have announced that they intend to jointly develop a new memory card standard for use in professional camcorders.

Named SxS (“S by S”), the new card specification uses flash memory, and complies with the ExpressCard industry standard. It will connect to computers using the PCI Express bus, used by high-end gaming graphics cards, which has a maximum data transfer rate of 2.5 gigabits per second, twice as fast as the PC Card standard currently in use. The target transfer rate for the new cards is 800 megabits per second, and is optimised for the transfer of large files, such as high-definition video. By comparison, the fastest class of SDHC cards has a transfer rate of 6 megabits per second.

Physically the cards will be half the size of PC cards, measuring 34 x 5 x 75mm, so don’t expect to see then being used in mobile phones or MP3 players any time soon.

Sony will adopt this high-speed SxS memory card specification in its XDCAM EX series professional camcorders. SxS memory cards from SanDisk and Sony are expected to be available later in 2007.