Sandisk, one of the leading makers of flash memory cards, launched SanDisk Extreme Pro SDHC UHS-I card that features Ultra High Speed (UHS) technology from the newly released SD 3.0 specification and offers read/ write speeds of up to 45 megabytes per second (MB/sec).

The company said the latest memory card is extremely useful for high megapixel continuous burst shooting and high-definition (HD) video capture. The card has a video-rated minimum sustainable write speed of 10MB/sec.

SanDisk claims that its Extreme Pro card is water proof, temperature proof, shock and vibration proof, x-ray and magnet proof.

The card, which comes in 8GB to 32GB capacities, is being shipped to major retailers worldwide for retail prices ranging from $109.99 to $349.99.

Last but not the least, unless one has a UHS supported digital camera, the 30MB/sec version of SanDisk's 32GB card that comes for about $170 does the job for most cases. Currently, camera such as Nikon D7000 supports UHS.

Among the competitors, Kingston launched their SDHC UHS-I memory cards at CES 2011. The cards, named as UltimateXX, offers read speeds up to 60MB/sec and write speeds of up to 35MB/sec. The cards will be shipping later this month.

UHS is the fastest performance category available today that can be found exclusively on Secure Digital eXtended Capacity (SDXC) and Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) products.

SDXC or SDHC products with the UHS-I capable of supporting data transfer speeds up to 104MB/sec. UHS-I quadruples the existing maximum possible speed of 25MB/sec.

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