Toshiba Corp., one of the world’s largest makers of flash memory, on Tuesday said it would start mass production of its next-generation SDHC and SDXC flash memory cards with improved performance and up to 64GB capacity in Spring 2010.

Toshiba’s new Secure Digital memory cards boast with 60MB/s read speed and 35MB/s write speed, which is faster compared to cards available today. Furthermore, the company’s upcoming SDHC memory cards will be available in 16GB and 32GB capacities, whereas the SDXC card will offer leading-edge capacity of whopping 64GB.

The new SDXC and SDHC memory cards are the world's first memory cards compliant with the SD Memory Card Standard Ver. 3.00, UHS104, which brings a new level of ultra-fast read and write speeds to NAND flash based memory cards. Users interested in getting the new memory cards should ensure that their SD devices support the new specification.

SDXC Memory Card is the next-generation SD memory card standard defined by the SD Association in April 2009, in order to meet the ever-growing demand for high-capacity memory media, offering higher transfer rates for content rich storage applications. The new SDXC memory card standard applies to cards with capacities over 32GB and up to 2TB compared to the SDHC standard, which applies to cards with capacities from 4GB to 32GB.

Sample shipments of the new SDXC Memory Cards for OEM manufacturers will start this November, and of the new SDHC Memory Cards in December. Both products will be available at retailers next spring.

Tags: Toshiba, Flash, Secure Digital