Without going into too much detail, Western Digital has announced that it’s developing a record-breaking new 8TB SD card.
The announcement by the company was made during the 2024 Future of Memory and Storage Conference and also presented in a recent August 5th press release as one of several other WD developments.
The company will release the SD card under its San Disk brand name but other than that and to announce its expected massive storage capacity, it hasn’t said much else.
Right now, we don’t know what kind of price range this card will have (probably expensive) or where it will be placed in SanDisk’s lineup of storage and memory products.
We also don’t expect to see it appear in stores any time soon mainly because 8TB is well beyond what anyone is yet on the verge of releasing in an SD card. Even Western Digital itself stated earlier in 2024 that SD cards with 4TB of storage probably wouldn’t emerge until 2025.
A card with twice that capacity probably wouldn’t emerge earlier then, unless some radical new development in SD technology is revealed.
The press release by the company is vague in general since it mentions no speed readings except mentioning “UHS-I” but this might not mean much since we are talking about something still at least a year or more away from being released.
If indeed the card were to be rated at UHS-I, it would be pretty disappointing anyhow, despite its hypothetical massive storage size. In current cards, UHS-I, as opposed to UHS-II, provides a fairly modest rating that doesn’t go above 30MBps V30.
For the kind of ultra-high-resolution video that you’d want to use an 8TB SD card for, that’s absurdly slow. For 8K video, in particular, a card would need at least twice or more that speed.
For photographers, 8TB would be pretty awesome though, since it would mean nearly unlimited photo storage in a single card while working in the field.
On the other hand, SD cards aren’t exactly known for their long-term reliability, so you might want to be wary of keeping so many photos on such a card for any length of time.
This applies especially if you keep in mind SanDisk’s fairly recent history of failing storage products and the company’s partial denial of problems with them.
Taking all the ambiguities aside for this announcement by Western Digital, it is cool to see this kind of storage capacity being seriously proposed.
Some of us would love to see SD cards with such an enormous storage rating, even if they’re flawed at first.
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