microSD Express doubles speed but Steam Deck & handheld PC owners beware

The SD Association has announced a new specification for its microSD Express format, and you really shouldn’t take any notice.

Announced yesterday, the SD Association which manages the standards for SD cards, introduced an update to its microSD Express format. The SD Express update brings double the speeds for read and write, theoretically making them incredibly fast.

Now sat at “1969 megabytes per second (MB/s)”, it improves on the previous version which launched with 985 MB/s by harnessing a PCIe Gen4 x1 lane. This not only increases the performance but also the stability of the card.

However, for those of us on Steam Decks, the Asus ROG Ally, or one of the many, many different handhelds on the market, you shouldn’t bother with SD Express at all. In fact, if you’re a photographer, you shouldn’t bother with it either.

The SD Express format has essentially been dead on arrival, with most manufacturers not bothering to include support for it. Valve’s Steam Deck, for instance, only supports UHS-I, while the ROG Ally can apparently support UHS-II. Neither is built for SD Express and doesn’t even include it, meaning it’d still work but only at the slower speeds offered by the SD card slot itself.

SD Express update means very little for gaming or photography

Dexerto

Apple’s return to including the SD card port on MacBooks in 2021 also didn’t include the needed support and Lexar – who produce one of the most popular 1TB microSD cards for gaming – hasn’t even produced the one they announced.

SD Express has been around for some time now but has picked up little to no attention from manufacturers. Meanwhile, competing overseers who manage CFast cards, have already worked with the likes of Sony to get support for newer formats in their cameras.

Despite offering the luxury of 2GB/s for transfer speeds, those on handhelds that support microSD cards, needn’t bother trying to track one of these new or existing Express cards down. You won’t see any benefit, and it seems that most manufacturers haven’t even bothered to support it to begin with.