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SD Association Unveils microSD Express Format That Promises Transfer Speeds of Up To 985 MB/s (engadget.com)

The SD Association has unveiled microSD Express, a new format that will bring speeds of up to 985 MB/s to the tiny memory cards used in smartphones and other devices. From a report: Like SD Express, it exploits the NVMe 1.3 and PCIe 3.1 interfaces used in PCs to power high-speed SSDs. The tech is incorporated onto the second row of microSD pins, so the cards will work faster in next-gen devices while maintaining backward compatibility with current microSD tech. PCIe 3.1 allows for low power sub-states, so the cards will not only offer much (much) higher transfer speeds, but consume less power than regular microSD cards. It'll also open up features like bus mastering, which lets memory cards communicate with other components without going through the CPU first.

72 comments

  1. Countdown to... by WoodstockJeff · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... bus mastering being used in an Intel processor exploit in 10, 9, 8 ...

    1. Re:Countdown to... by DarkOx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This was my first thought as well. It seems to me extending to the PCIe bus to all kinds of untrusted hot plugged devices has bad idea written all over it. USB 2.x we "permissive" enough in terms of memory access.

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    2. Re:Countdown to... by gweihir · · Score: 2

      Well, those that prefer speed over security will at least not have security. The funny thing is that these morons are the ones to complain loudest when they get hit because of their own stupidity...

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re:Countdown to... by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This was my first thought as well. It seems to me extending to the PCIe bus to all kinds of untrusted hot plugged devices has bad idea written all over it.

      We already did, twice. First was ExpressCard, which is a card version of a x1 PCIe slot. Second time was Thunderbolt, which I believe the current iteration is up to x4 PCIe.

      And yes, I believe there are Thunderbolt RAM attacks though because of the IO controller, it's somewhat mitigated.

    4. Re:Countdown to... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Didn't firewire have some exploits as well due to direct access to system memory?

    5. Re:Countdown to... by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      ... bus mastering being used in an Intel processor exploit in 10, 9, 8 ...

      If you buy a modern system without a IOMMU, you deserve exactly what you get. We figured out that this was a problem back in the firewire days, and first servers and then desktops sprouted IOMMUs to solve it.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:Countdown to... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Don't worry Intel is immune. They don't provide enough PCIe lanes to attach useful peripherals.

    7. Re:Countdown to... by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      It seems to me extending to the PCIe bus to all kinds of untrusted hot plugged devices has bad idea written all over it.

      Do you bolt your TV down to your house, or do you lock the front door? I agree that there are security implications with exposing a bus like this, but none that can't be managed externally.

      But in reality how is this any worse at all than Thunderbolt or ExpressCard?

    8. Re:Countdown to... by nateman1352 · · Score: 1

      For this reason, Windows now has IOMMU virtualization enabled to prevent DMA attacks (starting with Windows 10 RS4/1803/April 2018 Update): https://twitter.com/AmarSaar/status/985618204184768513

      In conjunction, tianocore also has IOMMU based DMA protection for 2 years now: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/tree/master/IntelSiliconPkg/Feature/VTd. So even if the OS isn't up yet DMA attacks are still locked out.

      Assuming you are running a recent OS and firmware, this is now a non-issue.

    9. Re:Countdown to... by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      I don't know if there were actual exploits, but FireWire absolutely had direct memory access.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    10. Re:Countdown to... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uhhhh, does anyone remember BadUSB? I know its not the same, BadUSB exploited the ability of firmware on USB devices to be updated.

  2. You're not allowed to touch the contacts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... by the way.

    They already write that on current microSD card packaging.

    How you're supposed to actually grab them, let alone where to put them when taking them along... is probably a secret they only told the makers of bezel-less splmartphones.

  3. MB/s not Mb/s by Vairon · · Score: 5, Informative

    microSD Express format supports up to 985 MB/s not 985 Mb/s.

    MB/s is megabytes (1,000,000 bytes) per second.
    Mb/s is megabits (1,000,000 bits) per second.

    References:
    https://www.sdcard.org/press/T...

    1. Re: MB/s not Mb/s by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      With a dozen of these in RAID 0 you should be able to burst more data than the usual PCIe x4 slots used for current NVMe devices to get a couple of GB per second for sequential transfers. Might get quite hot moving enough to saturate a 40 Gbps link though. Can't wait till 10 Gbps and above becomes more commonplace/affordable for domestic use.

    2. Re: MB/s not Mb/s by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Do they fit comfortably in a rectum for smuggling or spying purposes?

    3. Re: MB/s not Mb/s by artemis67 · · Score: 1

      Some people are more comfortable with that than others.

    4. Re:MB/s not Mb/s by Rhipf · · Score: 1

      Technically a megabit is 1,048,576 bits but for marketing use they like to use 10 to the 6th power to represent a megabit (megabyte would be 1,048,576 bytes). I have no idea if they are using the true megabit in this case or the marketing megabit though.

    5. Re:MB/s not Mb/s by Rhipf · · Score: 1

      Sorry I forgot they call those Mebibits now.

    6. Re: MB/s not Mb/s by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Super Kendoll will be the first to volunteer.

    7. Re:MB/s not Mb/s by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      Networking speeds have always been measured in base 10.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  4. Yay for hacked card bus mastering! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Let's see when the first Chinese (and NSA, Mossad, FSB, GCHQ, BND, Facebook, Google, etc) microSD hardware trojans will end up in our shopping baskets.

  5. limits by blackomegax · · Score: 4, Interesting

    NAND is limited by how many chips are stacked behind the controller. microSD is limited to a single chip. This is why, even with current 90MB/s rated microsd, you still get 7MB/s speeds from it once you fill up the controller buffer. NVMe on a single chip shitNAND? lol. this is pure marketing bullshit.

    1. Re:limits by MobyDisk · · Score: 1

      Why is MicroSD limited to a single chip? Is this a physicals space limitation?

    2. Re:limits by williamyf · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Until they begin making (micro)SD cards out of 3DxPoint, ReRam, Phase Changing RAM or Mermistors...

      You see, the (micro)SD format is not tied to Flash, therefore, the need to future-proof the bus...

      --
      *** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
    3. Re:limits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      shitNAND

      Whoa dude, that's pretty clever and edgy

    4. Re:limits by tonywong · · Score: 1

      This is incorrect. Junk cards will exhibit the behaviour you claim, but genuine full speed UHS-II cards can hit (near) their claimed read and write speeds.

      This F-Stoppers video shows some 1.5GB transfers with times on various cards and readers. 88MB/sec write on a 95MB/sec claimed write speed.

      https://youtu.be/ZlWhvc-UCOA?t=500

    5. Re:limits by wierd_w · · Score: 2

      There are some cards with more than a single flash chip inside them, but they are always full size sdcards.

      Here's an example.

      https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

      Most will only be a single chip though.

      The big bottleneck is the controller itself, which manipulates the flash. SDCard uses a serial protocol, not a parallel data IO direct to the flash chip. The flash chip could be hella fast, but if there is a cheap and slow controller driving it.. That's like putting an SSD on a SATA I interface.

    6. Re:limits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It has to be future-proof so that your iPhone X 3.14 PI Day Edition and Samsung Galaxy 20 devices can read this.

      It has to not be completely backwards compatible so that you have to upgrade.

      Does anyone seriously think that paying upwards of a $1,000 USD for your phone means it can read those $50 premium SDXPLQRSTUV format SD cards at Best Buy?

      That's next years iPhone 3.1415 and Galaxy 21 phones, sir. But you can always use those peasant class $15 cards with their tiny amount of storage and slow speeds.

    7. Re:limits by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      NVMe on a single chip shitNAND? lol. this is pure marketing bullshit.

      Hmmm I have only 2 chips on my NVMe SSD and I can do 3400MB/s so as usual there is more to technology than counting the number of black things on the bigger thing that is plugged into the other thing.

      And I'm genuinely surprised. I think I have a 256GB SD card with a 256GB controller buffer on it. Who knew. After all I can sustain 88MB/s on my SSD card just fine when copying massive amounts of data to and from it. I guess all those people who actually record 4K footage also have those magical SD cards you've never seen.

      Have you considered not buying shit from China?

    8. Re:limits by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ignore the OP. He's buying cheap Chinese shit. Most reputable cards will happily max out the SD card's current bus for a sustained write across their entire capacity and despite his assertion that NAND is the limiting factor to 7MB/s you'll find most SSDs have either 2 or 4 NAND chips on them and happily crank out several gigabytes per second of data.

    9. Re:limits by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      It's hilarious that you think any iPhone ever will be able to interact with external storage of any kind.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    10. Re:limits by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      It's hilarious that's you haven't seen the iXpand drives on the flash drive shelf at Walmart, where normal non-techies buy them for everyday use.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    11. Re:limits by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      Ok, so the "of any kind" was inaccurate. However, having that thing hanging off your lightning port isn't exactly convenient if you were to use it for every-day storage like you can with an SD card equipped device.

      Not that Google has been doing Android any favors with how Android 8 handles SD cards, but you know what I mean.

      Hang on, this test Android device on my desk has told me that external storage has stopped responding again...

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  6. IOPS by lobiusmoop · · Score: 0

    It would be interesting to know the IOPS of the new cards, SD card latency is traditionally a fraction of embedded flash.

    --
    "I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
    1. Re:IOPS by extra88 · · Score: 1

      I don't know about these new cards but "A1" and "A2" cards have higher IOPS than others. SanDisk Extreme microSD Cards with A2 IOPS are at least 4000 read and 2000 write.

  7. Bus mastering microsd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Where nothing can possiblye go wrong!

    1. Re:Bus mastering microsd? by slipped_bit · · Score: 1

      "Possibly" go wrong.

      Huh. That's the first thing that's ever gone wrong.

  8. Long lasting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I want an SD card that lasts long and fails gracefully, I have a few Raspberry Pi projects that can't seem to work without read/write and don't have enough RAM for temporary storage, as well as my phone which ate one of my SD cards even though I only use it (to my knowledge) to write video and pictures to, as well as saving podcasts.

    I'm just glad I didn't follow my phone's suggestion and use it to extend my internal storage, if my SD card failed and my files were all spread out between both then the failure would have been much more costly.

    I wonder why they can't use whatever memory is used for internal phone storage for SD cards. The internal storage seems to withstand a lot more writes.

    I tried various ways to mark bad blocks on my failing cards but can't come up with a way to use whatever space is free and working on them.

  9. Larger cards by CastrTroy · · Score: 0

    Am I the only one who would want larger cards in exchange for similar speeds to desktop storage? Something about the size of Compact Flash, but with the ability to work as similar to an actual SSD found on a desktop or laptop. 985 Mb/s is quite slow in comparison to the 500 MB/s we have with desktop storage media. Maybe the power requirements are too high or there are other reasons it won't work. I'd love to be able to take a standard M.2 drive and stick in my phone or camera, even if we have to increase the size of the devices by a bit to accommodate this.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    1. Re:Larger cards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Not sure if the article was updated, but it's 985 MB/s, so almost double the 500 MB/s you listed for desktop storage. So the small size should be fine for speed.

    2. Re:Larger cards by Vairon · · Score: 3, Informative

      The speed is actually 985 MB/s not 985 Mb/s. The article was wrong. See https://www.sdcard.org/press/T...

    3. Re:Larger cards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're not the only one. I sincerely hope, that organisation won't have anything to do with it. It wasn't in the summary or the article, but i bet those numbnuts included patent encumbered filesystems in their format again

  10. No they actually meant 985 megabarns! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So the cross-sectional area of the smallest carbon nanotube.

  11. 985MB/s Sustainable Into or Out of the Card? by mykepredko · · Score: 2

    When you see "985MB/s transfer speeds", I suspect that you're assuming that the card can read and write data at this speed all day long.

    But, I suspect that there are limits in terms of writing and accessing data. I'm sure burst speeds of 985MB/s is possible (with longer read bursts than write) but the overall/average speed will probably be 20-50MB/s, which is still very good, but not what you're being lead to believe.

    1. Re:985MB/s Sustainable Into or Out of the Card? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      985 MB/s for 1ms.

    2. Re:985MB/s Sustainable Into or Out of the Card? by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

      Depends on the lithography process, but my Samsung 950 Pro will eventually get heat-soaked and throttled if slinging sustained R/Ws long enough. Casual use and bust access won't be an issue.

      Basically, the small cards have such as small thermal mass that you won't be using them to record slow-mo video in 4k anytime soon - they're overheat!

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    3. Re:985MB/s Sustainable Into or Out of the Card? by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      Interestingly the heat throttling of modern NVMe SSDs has nothing to do with the memory and everything to do with the controller. I would highly recommend a heatsink, and when you get the heatsink you want to apply the pad so it touches only the controller. NAND works better when it's hot which is why it has a minimum temperature rating.

  12. The secret lies in the wear leveling and cell type by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you have the same cell type (e.g. SLCs), and the same wear levelling (SD cards typically have none, but there are file systems that can do it themselves), they should last just as long. Especially if made by the same manufacturer.

    Somebody should do a big test on this. It would likely get some clicks.

  13. Almost... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...as fast as the emails were downloaded from the DNC server.

  14. Probably due to heat limitations. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I guess at some point they will overheat. They would probably have to make the cases and slots out of aluminium and spread the heat to a bigger area, or you'll burn your hand.

  15. Re:Socialism (so true!) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    W.C. who? Fields? I never heard him say that!

  16. Re:The secret lies in the wear leveling and cell t by wierd_w · · Score: 0

    wear leveling is indeed part of the solution.

    The other, is assuring that write operations are efficient. If you write 1MB of data as a barrage of 512 byte sectors (such as with some variants of NTFS), you will burn the card up very quickly, because the controller inside the card natively writes a much larger chunk than 512 bytes. (often closer to 2 or 4 MB, depending on the card!)

    Peppering the drive with shitloads of 512 byte writes causes the card to overwrite 2 to 4 MB of flash cells EACH TIME YOU WRITE.

    Traditional file systems are not good for these consumer flash devices. exFAT allows for massive allocation unit sizes to alleviate the problem, but comes at the expense of a single FAT, and other problems.

    PROPERLY FORMATTED EXT4 works fine for the most part, but what you really want is something like JFFS2.

  17. As bad ideas go, minimally bad by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    I am personally OK with the tradeoff of much better local performance, for an increased security risk around physical presence.

    After all, a hardware maker can do things to make sure ports are disconnected when systems are locked, or in the most drastic cases you can physically render external ports inoperable.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:As bad ideas go, minimally bad by omnichad · · Score: 1

      One, if the hardware maker is not the OS maker, they can only provide hooks and leave it up to the OS. Two, I don't want all my storage unmounting every time I walk away from my desk.

    2. Re:As bad ideas go, minimally bad by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      if there's already a storage device mounted, there's very little reason to unmount if the system is locked. It's already been mounted and had a chance to do it's bad deeds if it's bad.

      He's talking about the idea of not enumerating newly plugged devices if the system is locked, which is 100% in the OS ballpark. I don't want the hardware maker involved in that decision at all, or else the hardware starts doing shit the OS doesn't know about, and a patch to the OS can't fix. That's where bad security problems start (see: Intel AMT).

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  18. Re:Socialism (so true!) by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 0

    the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy

    Also known as MAGA?

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  19. Just why is 10 Gbps still so expensive? by LostMyAccount · · Score: 1

    I mean, what is has it been -- 5 years at least that 10GBase-T has been out, and it's still expensive?

    Are network gear makers just charging a premium because there's still a lot of business/enterprise upgrading to be done or because they don't have anything else "premium" to offer once 1 Gbit becomes as obsolete as 100 Mbit?

    Or is it just the industry not bothering to mass produce it because 1 Gbps is like 640k, it ought to be enough?

    1. Re:Just why is 10 Gbps still so expensive? by omnichad · · Score: 1

      Because nobody's buying it. Economies of scale don't kick in until you have scale. And not just a bunch of R&D costs.

    2. Re:Just why is 10 Gbps still so expensive? by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

      The big problem with 10gbps is that it's too fast to handle with more than a few feet of copper, and fiber is a BITCH to terminate.

      The other problem with 10gbps is that it's simultaneously too fast AND too slow.

      From the perspective of a single endpoint device (like a computer), 10gbps is absurdly fast for Ethernet... but the two things you might actually WANT to wrap up and transmit over Ethernet -- HDMI and multi-lane PCI Express data -- blow past 10gbps and keep going without looking back.

      So... as a transport medium for connecting switches with gigabit ports, a 10gbps backbone is a nice, sensible speed. But for the few things that genuinely outstrip the capabilities of gigabit Ethernet, 10gbps is ALREADY obsolete and inadequate.

      Think of it this way: suppose that circa 2008, you had an old laptop with 128mb of PC100 RAM that could be expanded to a gigabyte of PC100 RAM at staggering cost(*)... except by that point, Windows could barely boot without thrashing itself to death with anything less than 2 gigabytes, so spending ANYTHING to expand its RAM at all would be largely pointless because even the most expensive expansion possible would still be inadequate to solve the problem that motivated its expansion in the first place.

      (*) For those who remember, high-capacity PC100 RAM was a weird era in PC history... lots of computers could ONLY use it, and not PC133... but by the time the chips to make 256mb modules had become semi-affordable, the market for those modules had largely dried up, so we had a period when smaller sizes were basically worthless... but 256mb PC100 modules pulled from a scrapped computer sold for more on eBay than brand new DDR(2/3) modules with 1-4 gigabytes at Best Buy.

    3. Re:Just why is 10 Gbps still so expensive? by LostMyAccount · · Score: 2

      The big problem with 10gbps is that it's too fast to handle with more than a few feet of copper, and fiber is a BITCH to terminate.

      Maybe its misinformation? The spec lists it at 100 meters over Cat-6a and 50 meters over Cat-6. I've had zero problems with it using Cat-6 at ordinary data center lengths up to about 10 meters.

      It's advantage in many environments isn't just the added speed -- it adds a ton of performance for even rotational media SAN, but the fact that its running on a 10x faster clock, cutting latency times as well, even for applications which aren't exceeding 1 Gbit throughput limitations. As for too slow, well, you can already run 1080p HDMI over Cat 6 and any other "video" you may want to run over network cable distances would be best handled as an ordinary network video stream using existing streaming media encoding. Anything else needing more speed already has datacenter speeds 25/40/100Gps over twinax or fiber.

      Its marginally overkill at the desktop, but 10GBase-T has the advantage of being 10x faster, cheaper, simpler cabling than fiber or twinax, and backwards compatible with 1 Gbps.

    4. Re:Just why is 10 Gbps still so expensive? by LostMyAccount · · Score: 1

      Chicken and egg, then? Odd that 90% of the desktop use cases didn't need 1 Gbps, either, but the economies of scale made sense to bake it into the chipsets anyway which drove down costs.

      The parts costs for 10Gb must be high enough that razor-margin industries just don't feel pressed to step it up vs. paid-for commodity 1 Gbit parts.

    5. Re:Just why is 10 Gbps still so expensive? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

      When most non-business network traffic is WAN-link limited by a shitty ISP that can't even do gigabit, 95% of non-business customers don't need more than gigabit.

      There's still a lot of rotating-rust drives out there that can barely saturate 100Mbps. 10GbE and higher are still the domain of the server room, so volumes are low; thus price is high.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  20. Re:Socialism (so true!) by omnichad · · Score: 1

    It was said in a water closet.

  21. Should be possible to do something by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    One, if the hardware maker is not the OS maker, they can only provide hooks and leave it up to the OS.

    For desktops that is probably true, although they could have a "lock system" button... you could put it right next to the "Turbo" button some systems used to offer. :-).

    For laptops though, the hardware maker could easily have some kind of physical interlock that disabled anything but power (or even that) to outside ports until the case was opened. The problem there of course, is people that want to run laptops docked which is probably why no-one has done that....

    Two, I don't want all my storage unmounting every time I walk away from my desk.

    That is the problem with that approach, if you controlled both hardware and software you could disable all ports not actively connected, and disable that if anything was unplugged.

    In the end though how IOS does it is probably a pretty good compromise, if nothing is connected for several hours disable the hardware port until the system is unlocked (there again on desktops it would have to leave anything already connected from system lock).

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  22. annuda shoah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    MIGA actually

  23. rub your sterile wriggling womb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    one hundred million brains
    shining with utmost
    devotion

  24. The only "bus" you need... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...is the bang bus

  25. High-Endurance SD cards. by Guppy · · Score: 1

    I want an SD card that lasts long and fails gracefully

    Go for a "High Endurance" card. They're designed and marketed for use in dash-cams and other loop-recording devices, where constant heavy writing is expected to occur.

    Transcend was formerly the gold standard for these, although it now looks like Samsung is the current top performer.

  26. SD-NVMe RAID PCIe card by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Imagine a ghetto RAID setup using a PCIe switch and a host PCIe card with a boatload of SD slots. Windows Storage spaces, or ZFS on linux, could wrangle the devices together into a sane setup without the RAID5 hole.

    How deep of a rabbit hole can you go? Well, most OS don't like PCie switches more than 2 or 3 deep, and the big ones are 96+1 PCIe lanes available (uplink included). If you start with a 16x uplink for the host card, you have 80 downstream (5x16), next layer do the same 16up+80down (so have 25 16x connections), then final layer is 16 up and 1x to each SD card (80, or 81 if you take the straggler 1x normally used for diagnostics). Total is 25x80=2000 SD devices. Storage Spaces and ZFS would easily handle that, and actually prefer higher device counts. Would prefer to have an Optane based device for the write log device though, or a NVDIMM.