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SanDisk (Western Digital) has announced a 400 GB MicroSD card for $250:
In 2015, SanDisk released the world's first 200GB microSDXC storage media using TLC flash technology. Today the company announced a successor, the Ultra MicroSDXC UHS-I, which doubles capacity to a massive 400GB housed within a card roughly the size of your finger nail.
This form factor is now the de facto standard for several classes of devices that span a wide range of product types. Most modern cell phones and tablets have standardized on microSD, and the technology has also penetrated other devices, such as drones and game consoles.
This new 400GB model can hold up to 40 hours of Full HD video and has a transfer speed of up to 100 MBps. That comes out to transferring up to 1,200 photos per minute. The card also meets the A1 App Performance Class specification built by the SD Association to ensure high random performance. The specification insists that products carrying the logo can meet or exceed 1,500 random read IOPS and 500 random write IOPS for quick loading of mobile optimized applications.
Time to update your sneakernet bandwidth calculations with this and a 787 Dreamliner.
Also at Engadget, The Verge, and PC Magazine.
Previously: Samsung Announces 256 GB MicroSD Card
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 01 2017, @08:04PM
This is for all NAND, not just microSD cards, but it should give you an idea of how much NAND is being produced in bytes by the industry:
Samsung: NAND flash industry will triple output to 253EB by 2020 [kitguru.net] (2015)
NAND that's that... Flash chip industry worth twice disk drive biz [theregister.co.uk] (2017)
July 13, 2015: SanDisk Ships its Two Billionth microSD™ card as Technology Marks 10-year Anniversary [sandisk.com]
That's over SanDisk's entire history of producing the cards. They say that the 2 billion microSD cards could store over 11.1 billion megabytes. So just an average of 5.55 megabytes per card.
But there are some holes in SanDisk's story. This page [sandisk.com] says they shipped 128 MB microSD cards in 2004. That was when they called them TransFlash, before they donated the format to the SD Card Association. And the volume of cards was much smaller back then: "Five million cards are shipped in its first year." There's no way the average size of each over the history of microSD could be as small as 5 MB. The real average has to be closer to 2-8 GB.
So SanDisk has made well over 1 billion microSD cards to date, but is a couple orders of magnitude away from the average being 400 GB per card. Industry-wide the number of microSD cards sold should be substantially higher than 2 billion.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]