back to article SanDisk's record-busting 512GB SD CARD will fit perfectly in your empty wallet

Barely a decade after releasing its first 512MB SD card, SanDisk has unveiled a card capable of storing 512GB of digital material. The Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I memory card can write at 90MB/s and read at 95MB/s; not the speediest if you need to shift half a terabyte in a hurry, but enough it seems for recording 4K video straight …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There are also 128GB and 256GB models available...

    ... if you're not ready to spend $800 for a SD card.

    It's a pity there's not yet a micro SD one available, though...

    1. Gordan

      Re: There are also 128GB and 256GB models available...

      4x more expensive per GB than a proper SSD and 100x slower. Maybe it's time for cameras to start switching to mSATA form factor media...

    2. Tromos

      Re: There are also 128GB and 256GB models available...

      "It's a pity there's not yet a micro SD one available, though..."

      Hence the big photo at the top of the article to remind one of what is not available.

  2. Steven Raith

    Blimey

    'never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tape'.

    Fill a station wagon with these things and I think you'd have a world bandwidth record for a Sneakernet variant...

    Progress - I can remember when the idea of a 10gb HDD, never mind a 500gb HDD, seemed like the fever dreams of a madman. That was only fifteen or twenty years ago as I recall (I had a 120mb HDD back then).

    Now you can get that sort of capacity in something smaller than your thumbnail - and it has reasonable bandwidth too (OK, SSDs are ten times faster, but when you take access times into account, that likely wouldn't be any slower than a chunk of spinning rust)

    Gobsmacking.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Blimey

      You made me feel very old. My first hard drive was 10Mb, and paid about the same for it as this 512Gb SD card.

      1. mi1400

        Re: Blimey

        Can all you "i had a 10Mb hdd (copied from wikipedia)" ... shut the F**** up... your dad had 512kb sdcard/hdd and that was enough for him ... and his dad had 512 bytes of sdcard/hdd and that was enough for him ... and his dad had 512bits of sdcard/hdd and that was enough for him... you child will have a 512TB of sdcard/hdd and it will barely be enough for him.

        1. Lionel Baden
          Unhappy

          Re: Blimey

          @mi400

          I am not old as of yet (i hope) but there is such a thing as reminiscing, and on a public forum they have every right to do so.

          Listen to their words and feel grateful for the world you live in.

    2. jason 7

      Re: Blimey

      I remember having to unzip the Doom folder to play it and then rezip it when I'd finished on my 120MB HDD.

      I thought technology had reached its peak when I bought my first 64MB USB stick and cold finally start to think about leaving my parallel and serial link cables and Laplink V.1 floppy at home.

      1. Steven Raith

        Re: Blimey

        For your entertainment, on the computer noted above, I got some OS/2 install disks, and tried to install it before I had removed/unconfigured doublespace (or whatever it was).

        Cue one wrecked file table, and being about twelve, skint, and living in a tiny village where I was the only person with any real computer chops, that was the computer dead.

        Bah.

        Steven R

  3. Haku

    "and will still work after being run over by a five-ton truck."

    I notice they don't mention how quickly a two year old could destroy one...

    1. Anomalous Cowshed

      Re: "and will still work after being run over by a five-ton truck."

      Well they're no good for me then, with my six-ton truck.

      1. Eddy Ito

        Re: "and will still work after being run over by a five-ton truck."

        Things they never say - what pressure are the tires are inflated to? A typical "monster" truck weighs 5-6 tons but the tires are typically only 15 psi and for water fording events they drop it to 5 psi. Total force on an SD card at the higher pressure would be about 19 pounds so it's less than the ~27 pound average for a 2 year old by a substantial margin.

    2. Anonymous Custard

      Re: "and will still work after being run over by a five-ton truck."

      I notice they don't mention how quickly a two year old could destroy one...

      Or one of the brainless numpties on the Gadget Show (or are the two equivalent these days?)

  4. Phil W

    Waterproof...

    ...maybe, though likely tested by sticking it in a beaker of vlean water. But will it survive a trip through a washing machine at 60 degrees and 1600 rpm?

    1. stucs201

      Re: Waterproof...

      It might...

      http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/27/canon-eos-1000d-washes-ashore-sd-card-reveals-it-was-lost-at-se/

    2. Richard Boyce
      Happy

      re: Waterproof...

      ... but will it blend?

    3. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: Waterproof...

      I've sent several USB sticks through the washing machine and they've all survived, so I think that an SD card would probably be ok.

      And you do all your washing at 60 degrees? Your 'leccy bill must be massive!

    4. Alan Edwards

      Re: Waterproof...

      > But will it survive a trip through a washing machine at 60 degrees and 1600 rpm?

      Should do, provided it's dried out properly before you try and use it.

      My Fitbit Ultra survived that, powered up and all. I thought it was a goner for sure, but I'm still using it now.

    5. Expectingtheworst
      Thumb Up

      Re: Waterproof...

      Don't know about the SD card, but I had a Cruzer 16GB USB stick go through an 80deg C wash/spin cycle and it still works 2 years later.

      My first HDD was 20M but my purchase of an 80M brought tears to my eyes (and wallet) !

      One wonders how long the increases can continue ?

      1. Charles 9

        Re: Waterproof...

        I say with 3D flash on the cards, there's a likelihood of SDXC hitting the 2TB capacity limit in a few years. At which point SD will need to figure out which letter to use next for the next capacity specification. And let's hope this time they settle for a less-encumbered filesystem (though for lack of ubiquitous alternatives, my money for now's on NTFS--any other format and Windows will need a filesystem driver).

  5. Finder Keeper

    It's a bad idea to use one of these cards by itself for storage. If it becomes corrupted, you lose a whole bunch of data at once. I wonder why most cameras don't support dual mirrored card slots. If your use case depends on a high end camera and a big SD card, surely you need live data replication as well.

    1. JEDIDIAH
      Linux

      Not enough paranoids...

      > I wonder why most cameras don't support dual mirrored card slots.

      It's simply not a big problem. There aren't enough people being burned by this and an insufficient number of paranoids to bridge the difference. Plus these devices are generally not archival storage anyways. They're very temporary. This stuff gets quickly dumped somewhere else.

      Multiple card slots might make sense for increasing total storage.

      Don't see a lot of people calling for RAID on consumer appliances though.

    2. Crazy Operations Guy

      Professional photographers will typically use a fresh card every shoot and never delete anything off of it. Cards are so cheap that they either just swallow the cost of new cards or charge them to the client. The card would then be set to read-only and kept in a file box somewhere for the remainder of time (mostly as a secondary back-up). That and professional photographers will carry two cameras anyway to prevent data loss form corrupted cards and a whole host of other potential issues.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        News to me.

        Do we? News to me. Never seen anyone do that at all.

        SD cards are not an archival format. Additionally cards are most likely to fail when new. Most people are happier shooting to cards they know are good and then replace them every year or so depending on the duty cycle.

        I still have an couple of 5 year old cards being used but the duty cycle for them has been very low.

      2. Ol'Peculier

        No they don't - before a shoot they format the cards in the camera and carry on from there.

        1. Crazy Operations Guy

          @ Mr C Hill / @ Ol'Peculier

          Let me re-phrase: the professional photographers I've worked with.

          They tend to be on the younger side and have developed their skills when cards started becoming really cheap where a card that'd last you a whole shoot would cost about $15-20.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Not perhaps most ...but my Nikon D7000 does have dual card slots and can write images to both (not sure if it uses mirroring techniques, but the effect is the same - object goes to each card if I select the appropriate option).

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Smart man

      Damn good observation, mate – many times when I've been out shooting, I've wished for the same thing.

    5. Adam 1

      There are a couple of options. You have SD cards with built in WiFi that can mirror to any android or ios device. You also used to be able to get external card reader + hdd with a one button "clone what's on this card to the HDD" button. I had one about 10 years ago when a 512MB CF card cost would empty your wallet with around 40GB on the HDD.

    6. Ol'Peculier

      Canon 1D's support twin cards, writing RAW to one card and JPG to the other (while since I've used one, so might support RAW to both). Just wish my 5D MkII did the same...

    7. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Because the fail rarely, and you lose one days shooting.

      If you have a smaller card and it fails, you lose one days shooting, but could take less photos.

      Mirrored SD? Why stop at that, raid SD...wifi NAS Sd...get thee to the patent office......

    8. Charles 9

      "It's a bad idea to use one of these cards by itself for storage."

      Most savvy users realize this. The SD card is meant as a transport medium, not a storage medium, though one exception is phones and tablets, where Micro SD becomes a storage medium for noncritical or backup data.

      In any event, the idea is the SD card is only used as a temporary hold for a recording/shooting session. In my case, when I get back to "base," one of the first things I do is take out the card and insert it into my laptop's SD slot, whereupon I offload the contents to a more-permanent storage device. I organize simply by dumping each session into a folder with the date on it. Once it's done and verified, I can slap the card back in the camera, wipe it, and be ready for the next session. And just in case one wears out, I keep a second one as a fallback. By the time it wears out, I'll have already bought a replacement.

  6. Nick L

    >"there's more to come. In the past SanDisk has said that the firm isn't even close to the limits of the form factor and it plans SD cards which will hold up to two terabytes"

    It's close to the limits of SDXC, which is 2 terabytes - so two doublings of where they are now... If Moore's law* still holds true, and assuming 512GB is the highest density they can cram in now, they'll be at SDXC capacity in 3 years.

    * - for pedants, the refinement from David House as 18 months seems to hold truer.

    1. RIBrsiq
      Coat

      ln[1000]/ln[2]=9.9657842846620870436109582884682

      "Barely a decade after releasing its first 512MB SD card, SanDisk has unveiled a card capable of storing 512GB of digital material".

      Not to be pedantic, but that's about a doubling of capacity every year, on average, no...? ;-)

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Windows

    Feeling old

    I can still remember the excitement of finding 2x 10MB Amiga HDDs mixed up on a pallet of bubblejet printers at a Kays stock disposal, so getting them for only £140 each instead of the full price of £399.99 each.

    Gin flavoured "Health Tonic" of course.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Feeling old

      I can still recall the excitement of getting the 256k Flash Datapak for the Organiser II :)

      1. jason 7

        Re: Feeling old

        Or back in 2001/2 pulling a 16MB Compact Flash card out of the new camera I had just bought from Jessops which shouldn't have been there!

        Bonus!

  8. Chris Walsh
    Happy

    In another 10 years

    I wonder if well be seeing a 512TB card in another 10 years. Some how I doubt it! :-)

    1. Charles 9

      Re: In another 10 years

      Maybe not with SD in its current physical dimensions, but perhaps some successor specification, thicker and perhaps a little larger to accommodate 3D Flash and slightly larger chips.

  9. JaitcH
    Go

    A SD chip made for David Miranda

    David Miranda likely wouldn't have spent 9 hours as Her Majesty's government in Heathrow had he used one of these.

    The 'waterproof' feature would have allowed safe passage in, or through, any body orifice.

    Freedom: 1; Border Plod: 0

    1. tony2heads

      Re: A SD chip made for David Miranda

      Stomach acids are quite strong, so you might still need to take prophylactic measures

  10. roger stillick
    Go

    Want 3 of Them, for Disc Rotation..

    By the time my 16 Gb SD cards in 3 disk rotation start wearing out (3 years from now) the price for 3 will be just about what i paid for my 16 Gb SD cards (w/35 Mb/sec transfer rate)... these new puppies exceed the 73 Mb/sec rate of my Samsung EVO SSD...YUM.

    IMHO= 3 years from now Staples will have 3 for under USD. $200.00...RS.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That just invites another fapenning, with 4K video

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We demand a new SI unit

    Call it the "Fapobyte".

    Corresponding to 50GB or one dual layer Bluray full of pr0n (HD obviously).

    So the 128GB card would be 2 FB and the 512GB would be 10 FB due to the formatting.

  13. Andy The Hat Silver badge

    Old? Young'uns don't know what's hit 'em. 40Mb hard dives? Pah! We had 30Mb on 14" multi-platter winchester cartridges ...

    1. Michael Dunn

      ICL EDS30

      Worked on testing these - hydraulic head actuators!.

      Went on to EDS60s with voice-coil head movements, and with "New Range" we had 100Mb drives with bthe platters running in sealed containers with pessurised Helium; the unit was the size of a fridge-freezer.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why were they called Winchesters?

    Just curious.

    1. David Beck

      Re: Why were they called Winchesters?

      At least one reason was the part/model number - 3030.

      The biggest problem was training ops to NOT swap a disk to another spindle if they had a problem. I saw four sets of heads gone before the op twigged it was a faulty disk.

      Also working amongest the drives you could get bumped as MVT decided to open a drawer to swap disks for an upcoming job.

  15. Anonymous C0ward

    I've got a computer in here with a 5MB 5.25" full-height drive... still just about worked last time I tried it too.

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