New UHS-II V90 2TB SD Card Is the First of Its Kind and Will Not Be Cheap
Taiwanese computer hardware company Team Group, best known for its PC memory products, announced a 2TB SD card. Unlike the few other 2TB SD cards on the market, this high-capacity card promises high speeds and sports a V90 rating.
SanDisk, which PetaPixel no longer recommends, has a 2TB SD card, but it is a UHS-I card with a V30 speed class rating. This card guarantees minimum write speeds of 30 MB/s, which is not very fast.
The Team Group T-Create Expert SDXC UHS-II U3 V90 Memory Card, on the other hand, as its lengthy and descriptive name suggests, is a UHS-II SD card with a V90 speed class rating. Team Group notes that its new 2TB card not only supports read and write speeds up to 300 MB/s and 260 MB/s, respectively but its sustained write speed is guaranteed to never drop below 90 MB/s, making the card usable for high-resolution video recording.
Granted, the card is not up to the task of recording large high-res RAW video, which typically requires faster CFexpress memory cards in many cameras. However, the ubiquitous SD format remains in heavy use across a diverse range of cameras. Something like the T-Create Expert 2TB could store many video files and a ridiculous number of photographs. An uncompressed RAW file from the Sony a7R V is around 130MB, meaning the T-Create Expert 2TB could store nearly 15,400 RAW photos.
“As the first V90 SDXC card in the market to offer a massive 2TB capacity, it is ideal for professional equipment, including cinema-grade digital cameras, full-frame cameras, mirrorless cameras, and DSLRs,” Team Group explains. “For example, when used with the Canon EOS C400 cinema-grade digital camera, the 2TB card can record at the highest 6K, 59.94P format for up to two hours and eight minutes, demonstrating its superior stability and capacity to be a video creator’s go-to memory card.”
The T-Create Expert 2TB SD card is IP67-rated and has been tested for shock, vibration, X-ray, and temperature resistance.
As of now, Team Group has not said when its new groundbreaking SD card will be available or how much it will cost.
However, there is nothing wrong with a bit of speculation. One point of comparison is SanDisk’s 2TB UHS-I V30 card, which has a $330 list price. It’s a safe bet the T-Create Expert will cost much more than that, given its much faster speed and novelty.
There are other 2TB memory cards in other formats, including CFexpress Type B cards from Lexar, OWC, and ProGrade that range in price from around $470 to $600. There are some even pricier options from Exascend and Wise.
One final consideration is the average price per gigabyte of V90 SD cards. The current largest V90 SD cards are 512GB, and the most affordable of these is around $300, although many are $500, including SanDisk’s newest offering and cards from OWC and ProGrade Digital. Basically, a large-capacity V90 SD card costs around a dollar per gigabyte.
If that carried over to the new T-Create SD card, it’d be priced at around $2,000, but this seems absurdly high but not impossible given that it’s the first of its kind. Although that price would make the card a tough sell, customers should not be surprised at all if this first-of-its-kind 2TB V90 SD card eclipses the $1,000 mark, perhaps even something much more expensive than that.
Image credits: Team Group
