Panasonic 8GB and 16GB SDHC UHS-I Cards Write at 60MB/s

The SDHC USH-I specification was only recently finalized but the first two cards based on it, made by Panasonic, seem to have finally broken cover, with capacities of 8GB and 16GB, respectively, and writing speeds that are approximately twice as fast as the company's current top-end offerings.

The UHS-I is a standard that defines high-speed Bus interfaces defined by the SD Association within the SD Memory Card Specification Ver. 3.01.

This specification allows memory cards to write at up to 104 MB/s, and while Panasonic's new products don't exactly reach this upper limit, they definitely work faster than previous cards.

To be more specific, the newcomers can write at up to 60MB/s, which is about twice the speed of the current Memory Cards that Panasonic has on sale.

This data rate comes in addition to the stability inherent in the Class 10 speed specification, which means that Full HD and reliable 3D recording is supported.

“With the higher reading speed of up to 60MB/s, the 8GB and 16GB Memory Cards can transfer data to a PC more than two times faster than Panasonic's current Memory Cards,” the announcement states.

“These also offer stable writing performance with Class 10 speed specification, ensuring highly-reliable 3D and full HD video recording,” the press release added.

The 8GB and 16GB SDHC go by the names of RP-SDY08G and RP-SDY16G and boast the SICS (Super Intelligent Controller), which offers high-level data protection.

Also, the Power Failure Protection function retrieves data in case of power failure, and the effectiveness of this feature is assured by the TUV Rheinland certification.

Furthermore, rewrite frequency is equalized on each writing area of the cards, by means of Smart Data Writing, and this reduces the defect risk of the storage solutions.

Basically, the newcomers are superior to their predecessors in every way and will start to ship sometime during November, 2010.

Unfortunately, the official press release, despite containing the full rundown of the feature set, did not hold any sort of information on pricing.