SanDisk launch largest ever capacity SD card with 512GB of storage

The thumbnail-sized card represents a thousand-fold increase in SD storage capacity in just a little over a decade

James Vincent
Friday 12 September 2014 13:44 BST
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SanDisk has just announced the world’s largest capacity SD card, managing to squeeze 512GB of storage into a chip not much bigger than your thumbnail.

That’s pretty staggering, especially considering that SanDisk’s first SD card came out in 2003 with just 512MB of memory. That’s a thousand-fold increase in capacity in a little over a decade.

The un-exotically named SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I may have more memory than your laptop, but it’s certainly not for average users. SandDisk built it for cameras recording video in 4K resolution – aka ultra HD.

In addition to the phenomenal storage, the new card also comes with a lifetime warranty is temperature proof, water proof, shock proof and X-Ray proof. It goes on sale for $800 (£490).

And to get some historical perspective, the first ever hard drive to have a storage capacity greater than 1GB was the IBM 3380 released in 1980 (that's a single 1GB module below left), while experts believe that SD cards could one day hold 2TB of data (or roughly 2,000GB)

Storage capacity then and now.
Storage capacity then and now.

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