Will SD cards become SSDs for the rest of us?

Last night, I came across this interesting article on the ZDNet site about SD cards possibly replacing SSDs. The article’s timely because of the recent announcement made earlier this month by the SD Association about new standards that will increase I/O speeds in future SD card interfaces (previously covered in this blog here). The new SD card interface standards announced by the SD Association set I/O rates nearing 100 Mbytes/sec for SDHC and SDXC UHS-I cards. At that rate, the SD card I/O speeds approach those of today’s low-end SSDs but we can expect such SD cards to be much less expensive than SSDs built to mimic hard-drive form factors. After all, there’s not much material in an SD card beyond the silicon, the plastic molded package, and some I/O pins. And cost is the major stumbling block for SSD adoption at the moment. However, the ZDNet article made me realize that the real tipping point here might well be the 4.0 SD specification--due out next year--which will boost I/O rates to as 300 Mbytes/sec by adding a second row of pins on the SD card to implement additional I/O parallelism through additional I/O channels. Now we’re talking.