Western Digital plans to release its first 4TB SD card next year. On Thursday, the storage company announced plans to demo the product in person next week.
Western Digital is launching SD cards under the SanDisk brand that comply with the SD Association’s Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard for “complex media and entertainment workflows” such as high-frame-rate, high-definition video using cameras. I will sell it. and laptops, the announcement said.
This spacious card uses an Ultra High Speed-1 (UHS-1) bus interface and supports theoretical maximum transfer speeds of 104 MB/s. Supports a minimum write speed of 10 MB/s. anand tech report. According to the publication, minimum sequential write speeds are expected to reach 30 MB/s.
With these specs, future SD cards should be able to support storage-intensive video formats like 8K, but they won’t be fast enough to support raw 8K video recording. That helps explain why Western Digital will be the first to preview the service at the National Association of Broadcasters’ annual event for broadcast and media professionals, which begins tomorrow in Las Vegas.
“Attendees will be able to preview the full capacity of the 4TB SD card and learn more about how it expands the creative possibilities of their cameras and laptops,” Western Digital said.
This week’s announcement didn’t go into details such as the type of NAND the card uses or whether it supports SanDisk DDR200/DDR208, so expect Western Digital to provide more information about the SD card at the event. I hope. This allows for high data transfer rates of up to 170 MB/s (but only on hosts that support that mode).
Western Digital hasn’t disclosed pricing for the SD card, but given its advanced features and targeted audience of professional creators, the product will likely come with a premium price tag. The current MSRP for the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I card is $140.
WD’s announcement comes six years after the SD Association, which creates SD standards, announced the SDUC standard, which increases the maximum possible capacity of SD cards from 2TB to 128TB. As with many releases of new standards,SD cards will soon be able to store 128TB of storage“However, 4TB is not expected to arrive until 2025 (assuming there are no delays), so ‘soon’ is still unrealistic. The 2018 standard only made such capacity possible. At the time, the theoretical maximum capacity of an SD card was 2TB for about 9 years, but the highest capacity SD card you could actually buy at the time was 512GB.
Currently, the highest capacity SD card available off-the-shelf is 1TB (Western Digital also announced this week that it plans to release a 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I memory card at an unspecified date). Meanwhile, only 2TB microSD cards are now available. this year.
With Western Digital’s announcement, the industry is inching closer to SD cards’ full potential. This is great news for professionals with large storage needs, as more powerful technology opens up more possibilities, including the ability to work with high-resolution media.
But Western Digital’s announcement comes as SanDisk’s reputation for reliable storage is under serious question from experts and longtime customers. SanDisk Extreme Portable SSDs are reported to fail unexpectedly, leading to multiple lawsuits. These alleged failures, combined with frustration over Western Digital’s limited response to reported data loss, have led professionals with business-critical storage needs to make the leap to another brand for his 4TB. You might consider waiting.
