A growing number of PCs, phones, and other gadgets can support microSDXC cards with capacities as high as 2TB. There’s just one problem: nobody actually makes 2TB microSD cards yet.

But we’re getting closer. More than two years after the first 1TB cards began shipping, Micron has unveiled the first 1.5TB microSDXC card.

The new Micron i400 is the world’s first microSD card to use 176-layer 3D NAND storage technology for increased storage density, allowing Micron to offer 256GB, 512G, or 1TB versions of the card… plus, for the first time, a 1.5TB version.

The removable storage card comes from Micron’s industrial division and it’s designed for use in video security systems. Micron says you can store up to 120 days (four months) of video on a single 1.5TB card, and the storage cards are fast enough to save 4K video recordings while processing “up to eight AI events per second, such as object detection and classification like license plate or facial recognition.”

Micron says the cards should also be long-lived: you should be able to record video continuously 24-hours a day for up to 5 years and the cards are shock-proof, water-proof, and able to function at temperatures as low as -25 degrees Celsius or as high as 85 degrees Celsius (-13 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit).

All of which is to say that while Micron hasn’t announced price tags for its new i400 microSDXC cards yet, I wouldn’t expect them to be cheap… particularly if you want the top-of-the-line 1.5TB model. But this could eventually pave the way for more consumer-friendly cards with more than 1TB of storage.

via The Register and Micron (PDF)

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,546 other subscribers

20 replies on “Micron introduces the first 1.5 TB microSD card”

    1. Yeah…..when it comes to Wish, I assume everything is bootleg and not really as described.

  2. Now the question is, why are 4Tb USB SDDs so physically big and top out at 5Tb?

    1. There’s a long and complicated technical explanation that I’m not qualified to give, but I’m sure part of it is that as much controller circuitry as was thought possible is shoved into the device that reads them, and even that would have been minimized to take up less space. The trade off is that external SSDs are faster.

  3. Holy smokes, we’ve come along way from my Cingular flip phone. I wish they made those tiny phones again… with this chip!

  5. No, the actual problem is flagships keep ditching the SD slot so no one except a Nintendo Switch can actually use a microSD anymore because for some reason, manufacturers like taking features away from your phone the more expensive they get.

  6. And now we wait to see which devices get called out for not supporting this capacity, when they claimed it did back in the early SDXC days.

    I recall when memory card manufacturers finally reached SDHC’s limit of 32gb, several devices I owned failed to support a 32gb SDHC card, despite advertising support up to 32gb.

  7. Getting closer to that 2 TB that seemed so far away when I first heard of SDXC. Although there’s SDUC now with its 128 TB limit. I wonder when 2+ TB cards will come out.

      1. Well one review says if you move a file bigger than 16gb it erases… so I’d be careful.

      2. It’s not. A lot of the usb and sd cards have them coded for memory spaces of that size, with out the actual storage hawdware. The silk screen on 2Tb 4Tb, etc, and you have a SD card or USB drive that reads as 2Tb but only has 512Tb. So files will fail when copied.

  8. Perfect for my Steam Deck to get 2TB total storage without messing with replacing the SSD. Sure the SSD replacement procedure is simple enough, but I’ll opt to keep mine unopened as long as I can.

    1. Huge amounts of portable storage are definitely a plus for me, although I couldn’t imagine loading a AAA game from a sdxc card LOL. Isn’t the interface slower than SATA III?

      I wonder if they are resilient enough to be considered long-term backup storage.

      1. There have been tests done (with AAA titles) that have shown that the slowdown is minimal, though it depends on what game.

        1. I believe it was a 2 second load time increase on average if memory serves.. not sure how that translates to loading assets on the fly though.

      2. They say it can handle 8 4K videos. But yeh its a better feeling when game is on SSD.

      3. AAA games are still mostly designed with an HDD in mind. You’re very rarely going to be saturating the sata bus even with an ssd when loading games. Game loading requires more iops than sequential speed and are often cpu bottlenecked for decompression and shader compilation. SDXC is still better for random io than an HDD.

        My steam deck can’t even sustain more than 70MB/s when installing games on the nvme ssd over gigabit ethernet. Valve definitely cut corners on storage and wifi speed because you’d be cpu bottlenecked most of the time.

Comments are closed.