SanDisk Unveils the World’s First 4TB SD Card

Long gone are the days of measuring memory card capacities in megabytes, and perhaps gigabytes aren’t long for this world either. Not long after Wise introduced the world’s biggest and fastest CFexpress Type B cards, including a 4TB one, Western Digital debuted SanDisk 2TB and 4TB SD cards.

PetaPixel has been vocal about Western Digital and its subsidiary, SanDisk. Despite some claims to the contrary, SanDisk has said that its hardware isn’t to blame for reported issues with portable drives. Nonetheless, users demanding extreme amounts of storage may be very interested in the new 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC, 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro microSDXC, and 4TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC memory cards.

Four terabytes is a lot of photos and video clips. On average, a Sony a7R V’s uncompressed RAW file is about 130 MB, meaning that users can store nearly 31,000 images on a single 4TB SD card. Video demands vary considerably by resolution and bitrate, but a 4TB card can store nearly nine hours of high-quality 4K footage.

Achieving a 4TB capacity for an SD card is no easy feat, as evidenced by SanDisk’s new card being the world’s first 4TB SD card. Western Digital leveraged the Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard to hit the 4TB mark. Theoretically, the technology enables up to 128TB of storage on a single card.

While Western Digital has shown off its latest storage products at NAB 2024 in Las Vegas, the new 4TB SD card isn’t expected to hit store shelves until sometime next year. Western Digital hasn’t shared any pricing information, although it is unlikely to be particularly inexpensive.

The company hasn’t divulged specific speed information either, although WD says the high-capacity card sports UHS-I technology. This means that the maximum data transfer speed is 104 MB/s. This will limit the sort of performance users can expect when using the new card and also impact performance when moving files from the card to a computer and vice versa.

Nonetheless, despite some trepidation surrounding Western Digital and the UHS-I tech in the upcoming 4TB SanDisk SD card, it is remarkable to see how far storage technology has come. Fitting 4TB of data on an SD card that is just 2.1 millimeters thick is a remarkable engineering achievement.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.