Imagine having one full terabyte of storage capacity on an SD card that you can use in your smartphone or camera.
You can stop imagining, because that card is real and on its way to availability.
And yes, 1TB is about two or even three times the storage capacity of two typical laptops.
SanDisk, inventor of the SD cards for cameras that used to carry a mere 64 MB 16 years ago, on Sept. 20 introduced a prototype of its SDXC card at a trade conference in Europe for photo and video professionals.
SanDisk, enticing conference-goers with the prototype, did not release details regarding pricing, availability or date of release.
Two years ago SanDisk—which was acquired by WD last October—launched its largest-at-the-time 512GB card. Eleven months later, the 1TB card has come about. Does that mean a 2TB model is on the drawing boards, perhaps for next year? Quite possibly.
Increasing the capacity of small, portable memory cards appears to be a necessary move to satisfy increasing demand for high-resolution video content—such as 4K and forthcoming 8K videos—virtual reality, augmented reality and 360-degree videography.
eWEEK expects to find out more details of this development, which is a landmark in the history of solid-state storage, and we’ll have it here when it becomes available.