Toshiba will soon launch the world's fastest SD cards, which will offer write speeds of up to 240MBps.
The Japanese electronics giant said Tuesday that its new Exceria Pro memory card will be aimed at power users such as photographers and have the speed to allow high-resolution photos to be snapped and saved continuously. The cards will have read speeds of up to 260MBps and will come in 16GB and 32GB sizes.
Toshiba's new SD memory cards, to go on sale this year, will offer 240MBps write speeds, the world's fastest.
The company aims to have the cards on the market from October. It didn't release prices, but Japanese media reports said the 64GB version will cost around 25,000 yen (US$250) domestically, with the smaller-sized card priced at around 15,000 yen.
Flash storage makers like Toshiba are eager to differentiate themselves from the competition as NAND flash prices fall steadily over time. SD flash cards with 64GB of memory that support slower standards now sell for as little as 3,500 yen online.
Toshiba said its latest memory is the first to use a controller that is compliant with the UHS-II (Ultra High Speed) specification, which theoretically offers speeds up to 312 MBps. The specification was first announced by the SD Association in January 2011, at the annual CES Electronics show in Las Vegas.
Toshiba is the world's second-largest maker of NAND flash behind Korean Samsung in terms of revenue. In the first quarter of this year, Samsung had a 37 percent market share and Toshiba a 29 percent share of the total NAND flash market, which was about $5.2 billion.
The company also said it will launch a pair of SD memory cards based on the same specification but slower and with more storage. Those will offer write speeds of up to 120MBps and read speeds up to 260MBps, in 32GB and 64GB versions. The larger size will sell for about 35,000 yen.
