Western Digital unveils 4TB SD card

Western Digital, a storage giant that now owns SanDisk, has revealed a new SD card for cameras and laptops with an enormous capacity: 4 terabytes. The card, part of SanDisk's Extreme Pro series, is the first SD card to reach this capacity but won't hit shelves until 2025. The expected price is around several hundred dollars per card.

For anyone grappling with storage limitations in their camera's memory card, Western Digital's announcement this week brings hope. The new memory card, boasting a whopping 4 terabytes, is a game-changer. Part of SanDisk's Extreme Pro series, this SD card is the first of its kind to offer such massive storage in an SD format. However, don't rush to stores - the card won't be available until 2025. And the price won't be budget-friendly either, with current pricing for 1TB cards standing at around $600 or more.

If you're wondering about the interface, yes, it will be fast enough for reading and writing high-resolution videos with a UHS-1 interface, supporting up to 104 megabits per second. The minimum writing speed will be around 30 megabits per second, which is still sufficient for recording 8K video.

The latest updated standard from the SD Association (yes, there is such a thing), called SDUC, was introduced in 2018, theoretically supporting card capacities of up to 128 terabytes. However, there are likely physical limitations to manufacturing memory cards, and it took six years from the introduction of the standard to the unveiling of a physical 4TB card, so the road ahead is still long.