Running out of storage for cameras or games could soon be a thing of the past – SanDisk owner Western Digital has announced two groundbreaking memory cards: the world’s first 8TB SD card and the world’s first 4TB microSD card. Whether you’re shooting photos or videos, both capacities could give you tremendous creative flexibility – provided you use them well.
Memory cards have always been a race for space, and with these new cards, Western Digital is at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of portable storage—and they come hot on the heels of the announcement of the first 4TB SD card in April.
With a SanDisk 8TB SDUC UHS-I card in one of the best mirrorless cameras, you could capture around 165,000 24MP RAW files. No matter what industry or genre you’re in, that’s a huge amount of still images on a single card. Similarly, with a SanDisk 4TB microSDUC UHS-I in a Nintendo Switch, you could store a library of more than 660 games with a file size of 12GB. That’s significantly more than anything else on our list of the largest microSD cards.
Announced at the Future of Memory and Storage Conference in California, the two SanDisk cards set a new benchmark for digital storage. Both use the Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard, which theoretically allows storage capacity of up to 128 TB.
Western Digital has already raised the bar once again this year, announcing a 4TB SD card and a 2TB microSD card at the NAB Show in April. These new cards go a step further, offering twice the capacity again – although we don’t yet know when they’ll be available or how much they’ll cost. For comparison, the 1TB Extreme Pro card is available from Amazon for $140/£135, so expect an 8TB version to cost significantly more.
More space than most people need?
In today’s age of 8K video and high-resolution stills, storage capacity is critical to a smooth workflow. High-capacity memory cards mean you can shoot for longer before needing to switch to another card. For professionals, an 8TB SD card offers the tantalizing prospect of using a single card for an entire shoot.
A 4TB microSD card will do the same for the best drones, most of which use microSD storage. The same goes for many of the best smartphones and handheld gaming devices, including the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck. With the new SanDisk card, you no longer need to carry around a wallet full of microSD cards.
There are a few caveats here, though. Both of Western Digital’s new memory cards are UHS-I, which means they’re slower than many of the best SD cards and best microSD cards, which are rated UHS-II. So while you’ll get a lot more storage, the transfer speeds will be slower.
Western Digital hasn’t disclosed the V rating for any of its cards. The existing SanDisk 1.5TB Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card has a V10 speed rating, meaning a minimum transfer speed in the low 10s of MB/s. The SanDisk 4TB Extreme Pro SDUC, announced in April, fares better with a V30 rating, meaning a minimum transfer speed of 30MB/s. But even that can throttle burst speeds and video frame rate.
Speed aside, there is still the concern of loss or failure. It’s long been good practice to use backup cards, but also to spread your data – whether pictures, videos or files – across multiple cards. That way, if one fails or gets lost, you won’t lose your entire library. While 8TB offers a huge gain in convenience, many people will probably prefer to use multiple smaller cards for security reasons.
Still, there’s no denying that Western Digital has done something impressive here. Considering the largest SD cards in 1999 only had 32MB of storage capacity, an 8TB memory card is a big step forward. There’s no official pricing information yet, but don’t expect the new cards to be cheap.
