In February of 2014, Kingston announced the availability of the "fastest SDHC/SDXC UHS-I Speed Class 3 (U3) card for 4K and Ultra-HD video capture". Despite not owning a camera that shoots in 4K or Ultra-HD, this card still appealled to me for capturing HD video in a different way. Perhaps a card like this could be a solution to recording HDTV in a small form factor system running something like Windows Media Center or XBMC. In a Mini-ITX system or one of Intel's NUCs, you may just have room for a single drive which might be an SSD running the operating system. Having a second drive for the live TV buffer and HDTV recording space would be nice, but may not fit inside the case. A card slot or USB 3.0 based reader with at least a 64GB SDXC would be a good fit... if it could keep up with the bandwidth requirements of multiple HD streams.

The promotional image above shows off the Kingston UHS-I U3 64GB SDXC card, where plenty of information is provided in a very small area. Some of the key points featured on the face of the card are the read and write speeds, which are far above the typical ratings for what would be considered a "fast" Class 10 card. With a claim of read speeds up to 90MB/s and write speeds of up to 80MB/s, this card should fly. We will put these claims to the test after taking a closer look at the basics of the card first.