INTRODUCTION

   Thanks to the first SDXC type (Secure Digital eXtended Capacity) models introduced by Panasonic roughly 9 years ago SD cards secured their place in the market as the "dominant" digital storage media for both digital cameras and camcorders and the rest as they say is history. Back then the SDXC format/type introduced theoretical maximum numbers of up to 2TB in capacity and 300MB/s in performance but it wasn't until last year that the first consumer oriented models managed to come even close to that performance while in terms of capacity the first 512GB models are now just rolling out of factories (so I’d say we have at least 2 years before we see 2TB SD cards in the consumer market). Toshiba just updated their Exceria Pro line of SD cards aimed at demanding photographers, videographers and Xtreme sports enthusiasts to include UHS-II models (N502 line) with capacities up to 256GB and today we'll be testing both the 64GB and 128GB variants.

   Toshiba Memory Europe GmbH (TME) is the European business of the Toshiba Memory Corporation (TMC). Our company offers a broad product line of high-end flash memory products, including SD Cards, USB sticks, micro SDs and embedded memory components, in addition to solid state drives (SSD). TME maintains offices in Germany, France, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

   The new Exceria Pro N502 line of SD cards is currently available in 32/64/128/256GB capacities (we should be seeing a 512GB model soon from Toshiba) and features the latest UHS-II interface (version 5.0) with read and write performance numbers of up to 270MB/s and 260MB/s respectively which in turn translate to Video Speed Class 90, UHS Speed Class 3 and SD Speed Class 10 (rendering them more than capable of 8k video recording and photos shot in RAW format even in burst mode). This is still somewhat far from the theoretical maximum performance of the SDXC format and worlds apart compared to the upcoming SD Express format (version 7.0 - PCIe 3.0 / NVMe) with its theoretical maximum of 985MB/s but for now things don't get much better than this (upcoming UHS-III version 6.0 cards however should surpass 300MB/s in both read and write). Unfortunately we weren't able to get a sample of the 256GB variant to have a more complete view of the N502 line (especially since the highest capacity models usually offer the highest performance) but the 64GB and 128GB capacity models should suffice.