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Micron announces 1TB industrial microSD, aimed at surveillance markets

The Micron i300 microSD card is available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities, and is built using its 96-layer 3D QLC NAND. Micron uses the high-capacity NAND in its products, including the aforementioned microSD cards, as well as SATA and NVMe-linked SSDs, as well as selling NAND to other companies to pair with custom controllers in their products.

Micron is positioning the card for edge compute, with surveillance systems increasing storing video on-device, rather than transmitting everything to external storage as it is recorded, eliminating the need for on-site DVRs, lowering TCO costs.

This may be an application where QLC NAND makes sense, if it takes three months to fill the microSD on a continuous write (though increasing the resolution of the storage image could undercut this). Given that QLC is rated for 100 to 1,000 erase/write cycles, for three months per device write, a pessimistic view would put the lifespan at 25 years.

An even more pessimistic view would note that no MicroSD card ever made has survived for 15 years, much less one with crappy QLC NAND, since the MicroSD form factor was finalized in 2005.