Today is the last day of COMPUTEX 2015, and the event has been packed with innovations. Among them, Microdia has announced the world's first microSD card with 512 gigabytes of storage.
The need for storage keeps growing. I remember when filling a 40-megabyte hard drive was a real challenge, but today high-definition videos take up whole gigabytes, photos come in dozens of megapixels, and lossless music formats leave MP3s in the dust. Fortunately, storage is getting cheaper. You can already get microSD cards with 32 GB for under 20 euros. And it's a microSD card that brings us here: from COMPUTEX 2015 comes the Microdia Xtra Elite.
Capacity and speed
Microdia didn't have samples on the convention floor, but the official box leaves no doubt: the new card will offer 512 gigabytes. In March, SanDisk presented a 200 GB microSD card, and that already seemed surprising, but the new Microdia card wipes that design from the map, increasing capacity by 150 percent. These recent jumps between microSD cards are just an essential part of their evolution. The SDXC format allows cards with a maximum of two terabytes, and in its latest version 4.0 with the UHS-II bus, transfer speed can be above 300 megabytes per second. The Microdia card announces both things on the box (the UHS-II bus and the 300 MB/s), but we'll have to wait for working units to run benchmarks.
As for price, well, Microdia isn't hiding the dagger. The final number hasn't been decided, but its representatives talk about approximately $1,000. The idea of investing so much money into something so small worries us quite a bit, but the combination of capacity and high performance in this microSD card will surely tempt specific markets, such as photography. Its launch is expected in July.
