World’s highest-capacity microSD card can store more than one million floppy disks
1.5TB card is big enough for 350 DVDs, 70 Blu-rays or 15,000 Zip disks
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Micron has unveiled the world’s highest-capacitymicroSD card, the i400, with storage space of up to 1.5TB, 50% more than the former champion, theC200.
The semiconductor giant reached that capacity by using its 176-layer 3D NAND technology (similar to that used inSSDs) and will target the enterprise market, especially anything that has to do with video storage at the edge. In other words, don’t expect the card to be cheap or easy to source, especially as it is designed to handle five years of continuous 24x7 high-quality recording and a whopping MTBF of two million hours.
No details have been provided about its performance, but this is clearly an industrial-grade product - unlike the C200 - which means that write and endurance are likely to be at the top end of the spectrum. The C200 used a 96-layer 3D NAND technology and the i400 (also available in capacities as small as 64GB) is likely to have some spare capacity for wear leveling.
Analysis: What comes next for microSD?
To date,Silicon Power,Lexar,Sandisk,TeamgroupandPNYhave all released 1TB microSD, with Kingston andSamsungquietly remaining on the sidelines.
For most use cases,cloud storage, cheap bandwidth and ubiquitous high-speed connectivity have made high-capacity, high-performance local storage a thing of the past. This is one reason most high-end smartphones no longer offer removable storage.
So, will others follow Micron’s steps with larger-than-1TB microSD cards? Possibly, but they won’t come cheap in an ever-shrinking market.
One feature that didn’t make it into the i400 isSD Express, the high-speed technology that could boost data transfers to 4GBps. The problem is that it is usually a chicken-and-egg scenario where readers/compatible devices are not readily available to justify a significant increase in the cost of components.
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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.
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