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It’s been half a year since Micron unveiled the world’s first 1.5 TB microSDXC cards and there’s still not widely available for purchase yet. But TechRadar recently noticed that they’re starting to show up at a handful of wholesale retail sites.
That means you could theoretically order one now… but it’ll be very expensive and might not ship for months. Now that wholesalers are taking orders though, it’s just a matter of time before they start to show up at consumer-oriented retail shops.
Micron’s i400 microSDXC card uses 176-layer 3D NAND storage technology to pack as much as 1.5TB of storage capacity onto a card that’s about the size of a fingernail.
But there’s a high price for early adopters. Some wholesalers are charging over $600 for a single card. Newark is offering the best price so far: you can pick up a single card for $421 or save when you buy in bulk (the per-unit price for 25 or more cards is $384).
Eventually we could see prices for 1.5 TB or higher capacity cards fall. The first 1 TB microSD cards sold for around $400 and up when they launched in 2019. These days you can pick up a Silicon Power 1 TB card for as little as $80, a SanDisk Ultra 1 TB card for $108, or a SanDisk Extreme for $121.
Right now you might be better off picking up a couple of those cards if you need more than 1 TB of portable, removable storage though. Micron is the only company to launch a 1.5 TB microSDXC card to date and it’s not yet widely available. So it’s likely to remain expensive at least until it’s available in large quantities and/or Micron starts to face some competition in this space.
One of my old computers back in the day had a 10mb MFM drive you had to drop on the desk to get going. It cost thousands and I never was able to fill it up.
1.5TB in something the size of your pinkie nail is just astounding.
This is stupid a plane only takes upwards of 12 hours to get from there to here.
I give them a week or start world war 3 an blow them to smithereens
It’s hard to justify sd cards now, and certainly not flash usb, now that external ssd is half the price, several times faster, and more reliable, -provided that fitting it inside an sd card slot isn’t a make or break criteria for you.
Even my raspberry pi runs from just ssd now, which is ironic considering the first pis were a break-through because they ran from sd cards instead of more expensive hdds. That world has gone full circle!
Analog will always be the more authentic and direct form. Imagine converting digital to chemical analog. You can doctor chemical format too though, jut not nearly as much as digital.
This appears to be a UHS-I card (max read speed is 104MB/s)… 4 hours to read the entire card. I would expect triple that time to write to the entire card.
My main use case for SD cards nowadays is for expanding the storage of PC gaming handhelds for non-important or re-downloadable data.
With these increasing sizes, I do wonder how much more reliable SD cards are now. I never had one fail on me but that might be because I upgraded to larger/faster cards before they failed.
I recall reading some years ago about SMART type features were proposed for health monitoring like with standard HDDs/SSDs but I think it never made it into the SD spec.
Nearly every MicroSD card I’ve purchased over 128gb in capacity has failed on me in less than 2 years time (maybe 4-6 cards since 2015ish). Either they outright fail to be recognized, or they allow reads but not writes, or they just start corrupting files and I toss them.
I play lots of emulation on handhelds, and I keep a 10k+ ROM set on several cards.
Out of curiosity, I sometimes run an MD5 check between the ROMs on my cards, and my master copy on my PC, and it’s pretty shocking how many files go corrupt over the course of 1-2 years of use. I retired a 128gb card recently that was about 1.5 years old, and it had over 20 files corrupt.
Until the prices have settled more, this might only appeal to videographers, and other people who need to handle extremely large individual files.
I imagine there’s some appeal to not having to stop a recording to swap out between multiple cards.
Although I’m not sure how many videographers use MicroSD, many of them likely use cameras that use Compactflash/CFast cards, which are already available in 1tb and 2tb sizes.
I was wondering the same thing. What is the use case for these large capacity micro SD cards?