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15 Years After Announcing the 1GB SD Card, Lexar Unveils 1TB SD Card (theverge.com)
Lexar has just unveiled the first commercially available 1-terabyte SD card. "Lexar's Professional 633x line of SDHC and SDXC UHS-I cards [...] is now listed for sale in capacities from 16GB all the way up to the flagship 1TB," reports The Verge. "That card claims read speeds of up to 95MB/s and write speeds of 70MB/s, though it's only rated as V30/U3, which guarantees sustained write performance of 30MB/s." Unfortunately, you'll pay a premium price of $499.99 for the new 1TB SD card, which is more than the cost of two 512GB cards. Still, the convenience may be worth it.
Joey Lopez, Senior Marketing Manager of Lexar, said in a statement: "Almost fifteen years ago, Lexar announced a 1GB SD card. Today, we are excited to announce 1TB of storage capacity in the same convenient form factor. As consumers continue to demand greater storage for their cameras, the combination of high-speed performance with a 1TB option now offers a solution for content creators who shoot large volumes of high-resolution images and 4K video."
Joey Lopez, Senior Marketing Manager of Lexar, said in a statement: "Almost fifteen years ago, Lexar announced a 1GB SD card. Today, we are excited to announce 1TB of storage capacity in the same convenient form factor. As consumers continue to demand greater storage for their cameras, the combination of high-speed performance with a 1TB option now offers a solution for content creators who shoot large volumes of high-resolution images and 4K video."
Sandisk has out 400GB for 88 dollars now, although I imagine they are much lower sustained write speeds.
But really, who cares about the price premium if you need these capacities in that formfactor?
We're talking about the equivalent of a 1TB 2.5"/3.5" hard disk (that costs ~50 dollars) in the formfactor of a THUMBNAIL, for only 10x the cost. That by itself is insanely impressive.
Given the scale out discussed for the next few years, we can only expect capacities to continue increasing as well. If they can get up to the 80mb/s SPI throughput speeds, I will be quite happy. That is enough throughput for all but datacenter dataset level workloads, or some particularly unoptimized games asset streaming.
Just like the 256GiB and 512GiB cards changed usage patterns for those of us who snap a lot of photos, so will this card. Like you say, you can take long high-quality recordings, and still fit a lot of still images.
For example, a few years back, I filled up multiple 128GiB cards with photos and recordings of the 6 Hours of Spa weekend(and let me tell you, trying to take good photos of cars going 250km/h or more is not easy, hence a lot of 15-20 image sequences etc). Just needing 1 card for the weekend will be nice.