SanDisk offers half a Terabyte in the palm of your hand

SanDisk has just launched two new products: a full-sized SD card with an incredible 512GB of storage, and a 64GB microSD card with crazy-fast read & write speeds.

All that space

The full-sized SDXC card is called the SanDisk Extreme PRO and can be purchased in 512GB, 256GB and 128GB options.

512GB makes this the world’s largest-capacity SD card. It’s also a good one thousand (1000) times faster than what was on offer a little over a decade ago. That’s almost a 100x increase for each year. A little poking around the web reveals that, in 2003, a 512MB SanDisk SD card would run you US$169.99. These days that much wouldn’t even store your photos.

Squeezing half a terabyte in to something smaller than a thumb and thinner than a wafer is an impressive achievement. It’s also exciting when you compare it to the past and think what might be available in another ten years.

Phone-sized option

Ok, so a full-sized SD card might be small, but it’s not small enough to fit in your phone. For that you’ll need microSD. SanDisk already makes 128GB microSD cards, but they’re not really fast enough to do things like record 4K film and can lag out a little if you’re in to burst-mode photography.

Enter the 64GB Extreme PRO microSD with read and write speeds over 2x as fast as the larger 128GB option. Hard-drive speed is a big factor when it comes to how your phone performs and operates. Writing to a sub-par microSD means bigger delays and more lag.

So, how fast are these figures we’re talking about? The 128GB card reads and writes at a respectable 40MB/s. That’s good for some HD video and will do music just fine, but for the power user it’s not a fool-proof system.

The new microSD Extreme PRO reads at 95MB/s and writes at 90MB/s. That’s very fast for a microSD card, and it should mean a faster real-world experience with using your phone.

Pricing and availability

The 512GB Extreme PRO SDXC (the big card) is yet to receive pricing and availability dates.

The speedy microSD Extreme PROs are set to hit the Aussie market in mid-October at $179 for the 64GB option and $89 for 32GB.

Alex Angove-Plumb

Digital Content Editor

Alex Angove-Plumb is a Digital Content Editor at WhistleOut and an award-winning journalist. He's been in the tech publishing industry since 2010, putting him a few short years away from the title of Grizzled Ancient in his chosen profession. He was an original WhistleOut-er before running NBN Co's corporate blog for two years, then moving on to a lengthy stint at CHOICE. Now he's come home.

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