In another episode that exposes the fascinating madness for solid-state storage of recent months, SanDisk has taken a huge step toward pushing the SDXC standard to its limit with a memory card that can store a terabyte of data. For now, this little beast is only a prototype, but if it took the company barely two years to double the capacity in the same format, it is not far-fetched to imagine it will hit the market soon, and that there are plans to keep advancing.
According to version 3.01 of the Secure Digital specification, the SDXC (short for Secure Digital eXtended Capacity) format supports a maximum capacity of two terabytes, which is an impressive jump in quantity and quality when compared to the old 32 GB limit in version 2.0. We haven't reached that two-terabyte mark in SD cards yet, but if we follow the latest information from SanDisk at the Photokina 2016 convention, we are halfway there. Two years after shaking the market with a 512 GB card, comes the new one-terabyte prototype that promises to solve all the storage demands an enthusiast or professional might have... for now.
This last point is especially true if we consider the advance of 4K video, and the desire to capture content with the least compression possible, thus guaranteeing its final quality for virtual reality and 360-degree environments. In other words: users need more and more space, with the advantage of a compact format like SD cards. Unsurprisingly, SanDisk declared its product "the world's first terabyte SD card", but it did not share any technical details on durability or transfer speeds. As it is in the prototype stage, we imagine SanDisk (and by extension Western Digital) still have to smooth out some rough edges in the design and optimize those parameters as much as possible.
How much can this card cost? Let's see: the 512 GB edition debuted at $800, but today we can find it for less than half ($300). I calculate that SanDisk will repeat the pattern and aim for a cost of $800-900 for its new creature. Will Kingston and Samsung respond with something similar? A terabyte on the surface of a stamp. Welcome to the future, sometimes it's not that bad...
