SanDisk unveils huge capacity 4TB microSD and 8TB SD Cards

SanDisk/Western Digital has broken capacity barriers once again. Not satisfied with releasing the world’s first 1TB microSD cards, they’ve now massively crushed the competition who’ve been catching up. One or two companies have released 1.5TB cards now, but SanDisk just dropped a 4TB microSD card.

They also announced a new 8TB full-sized SD card. Interestingly, both the microSD and SD cards run on UHS-I speeds, which isn’t very quick these days. But if you need a lot of capacity in a tiny memory card, what are your options?

4TB and 8TB SDUC microSD and SD Cards

We’re going into new territory with these new memory cards. We started off with regular old SD (Secure Digital), then once cards 2GB, we had to switch over to SDHC (SD High Capacity). From 64GB on up, we went to SDXC (SD eXtended Capacity). These larger capacity cards started to be supported by cameras in around 2010.

SDXC carried us on well for the next decade and a half, but now even that is meeting its capacity limits. SDXC tops out at 2TB. From 4TB and up, we need SDUC (SD Ultra Capacity). SDUC should see us good for up to about 128TB of storage.

I wouldn’t expect those 128TB cards to come in UHS-I flavour, though, or perhaps even UHS-II. By that stage, SD Express will hopefully have become the new standard.

No specifics beyond capacity yet

Western Digital unveiled the new SanDisk cards at the Future of Memory and Storage Conference, offering a “First look”. But beyond that, they haven’t said much else about the cards.

There’s no mention yet of minimum or maximum read and write speeds. So, it may keep up with their current model 200MB/sec SanDisk Extreme Pro cards (in a compatible reader), or it may be a little slower. It might even only conform to the standard of a maximum of 104MB/sec (typically hovering around 96-98MB/sec) at full read.

We may also see a slower card followed up by the release of a faster card. This happened with SanDisk’s 1TB cards, too. First, we saw the 1TB SanDisk Extreme, and a short time later, we saw the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Pro. The release of subsequent cards, like those from Silicon Power, drove the prices of such capacity cards down very quickly.

But with SanDisk 1TB cards still averaging around $150 each, I think we can expect a significant cost for the 4TB microSD cards, not to mention the 8TB SD cards, even if they are only UHS-I.

I also expect that quite a few cameras will not support such capacities just yet. SDXC capabilities took a little while to arrive, and many older cameras never received a firmware update to take SD cards larger than 32GB. Hopefully, we’ll see better SDUC adoption in cameras than we did with SDXC as data storage needs continue to grow.

Coming… who knows?

The company also did not state a price for the new cards nor exactly when they’d be available. When SanDisk first showed off their 1TB SD Cards at Photokina in 2016, it took three years for them to actually come to market. Hopefully, it won’t take that long for the 4TB and 8TB cards to arrive – for those that can take advantage of them.

I could see the 4TB card potentially being quite handy in something like a Raspberry Pi acting as a portable memory card backup device. The 8TB card… I think I’d need to be shooting to a pair of them in a dual card slot camera to feel safe!