SD Cards with the A2 logo on them should support random read speeds that are twice as fast as cards with the A1 logo. There’s just one catch: while the A2 specification was introduced more than a year and a half ago, there weren’t actually any A2 cards available for purchase… until now.

Western Digital subsidiary SanDisk just announced that its first A2 cards will be available for purchase in Japan in the next week or so.

It look like they’re also coming to the US soon. B&H is taking pre-orders for $30 and up.

The newest SanDisk Extreme microSD cards support sequential read speeds up to 160MB/s, sequential write speeds up to 90MB/s and come in capacities ranging from 32GB to 400GB (although it’s worth noting that you’ll get the fastest sequential read/write speeds if you opt for a 128GB or larger card.

In order to meet the new A2 specification, the new cards also support random read/write speeds of 4,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and 2,000 IOPS, respectively.

By comparison, A1 cards only had to hit 1,500 random read and 500 IOS random write speeds.

SD Association

The speed boost come in handy if you have a smartphone with a microSD card reader and want to install apps to the removable storage card. You probably don’t need a card this fast if you just want to store photos, videos, and other documents on an SD card.

But… you might have to wait a little while to find a phone that can actually take advantage of the extra speed. When SanDisk started showing off its new cards earlier this year, PC World noted that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 processor doesn’t support A2 cards. So we may have to wait for next year’s flagships before we can take full advantage of the new cards.

via AnandTech and Hermitage Akihabara

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10 replies on “SanDisk’s first A2 microSD cards are coming soon (4K/2K IOPS)”

  1. The slow speeds of SD and micro cards have been the prime reason for me abandoning the format. This is good news if OEMs will only support the standard. Sadly, external storage has been badly neglected by phone and pc makers for years in anything other than usb flash drives. Try copying a 600 mb video file onto a card and you will see what I mean.

  2. FYI, there’s a typo “By comparison, A1 cards only had to hit 1,500 random read and 5000 IOS random write speeds.” I think it’s supposed to be 500 IOS ramdom write.

  3. What’s the point of these cards, if UFS cards destroy them in speeds??

      1. Well, UFS was meant to be both an internal and external card storage…..

        But damn phone makers getting rid of external storage, seems to have put a stop to external UFS needs.

  6. What about using the cards in PCs? Are Core i5 CPUs of Broadwell
    (Core ix-5yyy) vintage fast enough for these cards in the SD/microSD
    care slots?

    1. I was thinking the same thing. Maybe some of those mini PCs that can boot from a SD card? What about Raspberry Pi? Probably it cannot take advantage of the speed?

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