microSD

sd-cards-finally-expected-to-hit-4tb-in-2025

SD cards finally expected to hit 4TB in 2025

microSD, SanDisk, SD cards, Tech, Western Digital / /

Not quite at 128TB yet —

For media pros’ cameras and laptops.

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Two SD cards on a wood surface

Enlarge / Generic, non-Western Digital SD cards.

Western Digital plans to release the first 4TB SD card next year. On Thursday, the storage firm announced plans to demo the product in person next week.

Western Digital will launch the SD card, which follows the SD Association’s Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard, under its SanDisk brand and market it toward “complex media and entertainment workflows,” such as high-resolution video with high framerates, using cameras and laptops, the announcement said.

The spacious card will use the Ultra High Speed-1 (UHS-1) bus interface, supporting max theoretical transfer rates of up to 104 MB per second. It will support minimum write speeds of 10 MB/s, AnandTech reported. Minimum sequential write speeds are expected to reach 30 MB/s, the publication said.

With those specs, the upcoming SD card should be able to fit storage-hungry video formats, including 8K, although the card won’t be speedy enough to support raw 8K video recording. That helps explain why Western Digital is initially previewing the offering at The National Association of Broadcasters’ annual event for broadcast and media professionals, which starts tomorrow in Las Vegas.

“Attendees will get a preview of the 4TB SD card’s full capacity and learn more about how it will expand the creative possibilities for cameras and laptops,” Western Digital said.

Hopefully, Western Digital will provide more information about the SD card at the event, as this week’s announcement didn’t go into further details, such as the type of NAND the card will use or whether it will support the SanDisk-created DDR200/DDR208 mode, which could enable higher data transfer speeds of up to 170 MB/s (but only with a host that supports that mode).

Western Digital didn’t say what the SD card would cost, but with its advanced capabilities and targeted audience of professional creators, the offering will likely have premium pricing. The 1TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I Card currently has a $140 MSRP.

WD’s announcement comes six years after the SD Association, which writes SD standards, announced the SDUC standard that bumped the max possible capacity for SD cards from 2TB to 128TB. As with many releases of new standards, some were eager to believe that “SD cards could soon hold 128TB of storage.” But with 4TB not expected to arrive until 2025 (assuming there are no delays), “soon,” even today, is unrealistic. The 2018 standard only made such capacities a possibility. At the time, the max theoretical capacities for an SD card had been 2TB for about nine years, but the most spacious SD cards actually available for purchase at the time were 512GB.

Today, the highest capacity SD cards readily available are 1TB (Western Digital also this week announced plans to release a 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I memory card at an unspecified date), while 2TB microSD cards only became available this year.

With Western Digital’s announcement, the industry inches closer to SD cards’ maximum potential. For professionals with high-storage needs, that’s exciting news, as having more capable technology opens more possibiltiies, like working with high-res media.

However, Western Digital’s announcement also comes as SanDisk’s reputation for reliable storage is in serious question by professional and long-time customers. There are multiple lawsuits about SanDisk Extreme portable SSDs reportedly failing unexpectedly. These alleged failures, combined with frustration around Western Digital’s limited response to reported data losses, could have professionals with work-critical storage needs consider waiting for another brand to make the leap to 4TB.

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speedy-“sd-express”-cards-have-gone-nowhere-for-years,-but-samsung-could-change-that

Speedy “SD Express” cards have gone nowhere for years, but Samsung could change that

microSD, samsung, Tech / /

fast, but for whom? —

Compatibility issues and thermals have, so far, kept SD Express from taking off.

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Samsung's SD Express-compatible microSD cards.

Enlarge / Samsung’s SD Express-compatible microSD cards.

Samsung

Big news for people who like (physically) small storage: Samsung says that it is sampling its first microSD cards that support the SD Express standard, which will allow them to hit sustained read speeds of as much as 800MB per second. That’s a pretty substantial boost over current SD cards, which tend to top out around 80MB or 90MB per second (for cheap commodity cards) and around 250MB per second for the very fastest UHS-II-compatible professional cards.

As Samsung points out, that 800MB/s figure puts these tiny SD Express cards well above the speeds possible with older SATA SSDs, which could make these cards more useful as primary storage devices for PCs or single-board computers that can support the SD Express standard (more on that later).

Samsung is currently sampling a 256GB version of the SD Express card that “will be available for purchase later this year.”

Because this is a tech company announcement in 2024, Samsung also makes an obligatory mention of AI, though there’s absolutely nothing specific the cards are doing to make them particularly well-suited for generative AI tasks other than “be faster.” Adding extra storage to phones or PCs could be useful for on-device generative AI—storing larger language models locally, for example—but most software companies that are offering generative AI features in their OSes or browsers are mostly using server-side processing to do all the heavy lifting for now.

What’s the SD Express standard, again?

The SD Express standard allows SD cards to take advantage of a single lane’s worth of PCIe bandwidth, boosting their theoretical speeds well beyond the 104MB/s cap of the UHS-I standard or the 312MB/s cap of UHS-II (UHS-III exists but isn’t widely used). The SD Express spec was last updated back in October 2023, which bumped it up from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0; it also defines four speed classes with read/write speeds of between 150MB and 600MB per second—a target these Samsung cards claim to be able to surpass.

But the original version of SD Express goes back to mid-2018, when it was added to version 7.0 of the SD specification. And adoption from SD card makers and device makers has been slow to nonexistent so far; AData makes full-size SD Express cards in 256GB and 512GB capacities that you can buy, but that’s about it. Lexar announced some cards back in 2021 that never ended up being released. And even if you had a card, you’d have trouble finding devices that could actually take advantage of the higher speeds, since most cameras, phones, and computers have opted to stick with the more common UHS.

One issue blocking SD Express adoption is that the card and the device have to support SD Express to get the promised speeds; an SD Express card inserted into a regular run-of-the-mill UHS-I SD card slot will be limited to UHS-I speeds. And because both the slots and the cards are visually identical, it’s not always easy to tell which slots support specific speeds.

Heat may also be a major limiting factor when using these SD Express cards to move around hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of data or when using the SD card as the primary storage device in a computer (as you might in a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computers). There’s no room for this kind of thing within the confines of a microSD card slot, so the sustained read and write speeds of Samsung’s new cards could be a bit lower than the promised 800MB-per-second maximum.

The SD Express spec does have mechanisms for keeping thermals in a reasonable range. Samsung also mentions a “Dynamic Thermal Guard” technology that promises to manage the temperatures of its SD Express cards, though it’s not clear whether this is different from what’s already in the SD Express spec.

Samsung jumping into SD Express cards may be what the format needs to take off, or at least to become a viable niche within the wider market for external storage. It’s certainly not difficult to imagine a scenario where something with SSD-ish speeds in an SD card-sized package would be useful. But SD cards are mainly useful because they’re cheap, they’re widely compatible, and they’re fast enough for things like recording video, taking pictures, and loading games. SD Express cards have a long way to go before they can check all the same boxes.

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