SanDisk Debuts Largest-Ever SD Card At 512GB

Memory specialist SanDisk has announced an SD card with a storage capacity of 512 gigabytes, the largest ever released.

The card is aimed at professionals working in 4K Ultra High Definition video, Full HD video and high-speed burst-mode photography, which require large amounts of storage space – one minute of 4K footage typically takes about 5GB of storage.

Imaging focus

SanDisk has a long history of focusing on digital imaging, working with Kodak as early as the 1980s. The company showed the Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I, which is to sell for $800 (£490), at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, but has not yet announced a release date.

“4K Ultra HD is an example of a technology that is pushing us to develop new storage solutions capable of handling massive file sizes,” said Dinesh Bahal, vice president of product marketing, in a statement.

It occupies the same footprint as the 512MB SD card SanDisk released in 2003, but with 1,000 times the capacity, the company said. A 512GB card could typically hold around 30 hours of HD video, according to the company.

Most SD cards on the market range from 8GB to 128GB in capacity, with some 256GB cards available.

High speed

The card offers write speeds of up to 90MBps, allowing it to offer a recording speed known as UHS Speed Class 3, which enables stutter-free 4K video recording and high-quality colour reproduction. Transfer speeds are as high as 95MBps for quickly moving data to a post-production system, SanDisk said.

The card has been tested for temperature, water, shock and x-ray resistance, and SanDisk is offering software for recovering accidentally deleted images.

Toshiba recently began shipping MicroSD memory cards with what it said are record-setting read speeds of up to 260MBps.

SanDisk, along with major storage makers Seagate and Western Digital, joined the Linux Foundation over the summer, in order to contribute to the software aspect of storage systems.

SanDisk acquired flash storage specialist Fusion-io in June.

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