Remember those groundbreaking 8TB SD cards that Sandisk first unveiled back in 2024? After two long years, it appears they are ready for prime time. According to a recent report from news outlet Notebookcheck, multiple companies at Computex 2026 have reportedly confirmed that these high-capacity cards will begin shipping soon.

The upcoming 8TB SD cards conform to the SDUC (Secure Digital Ultra Capacity) standard, a category that the SD Association introduced for cards with capacities spanning from 2TB up to 128TB. Therefore, while 8TB of capacity is impressive, there's still headroom for bigger SD cards in the future. Similar to microSD Express, SDUC is an emerging standard and requires new hardware.

From a compatibility standpoint, these 8TB SDUC cards are not backward compatible with older card readers and devices. Sometimes, when new cards launch, they are backward compatible with existing hardware but run at lower speeds. However, that isn't the case for SDUC cards. They will require new card readers and devices that support them.

At the moment, there aren't any devices that support SDUC cards, so you can't use them even if Sandisk or other manufacturers started giving them away. It remains to be seen when, and by whom, the SDUC standard will be adopted. For example, the microSD Express standard was introduced in 2019 and remained dormant until the Nintendo Switch 2, which launched six years later. To date, Nintendo's handheld gaming console is the only device to have embraced microSD Express. Therefore, it will likely take some time before SDUC cards become mainstream.

According to the photograph that Notebookcheck snapped at Computex 2026, Sandisk will launch 4TB microSDUC and 8TB SDUC cards under its Ultra lineup. It's a surprising move since the Extreme Pro lineup is superior and typically offers better performance.

The Sandisk Ultra 4TB microSDUC and 8TB SDUC cards conform to the UHS-I speed class, which means a theoretical maximum read and transfer speed up to 104 MB/s. They also carry the V10 and A1 ratings, equivalent to a minimum sustained write speed of 10 MB/s. Meanwhile, the Sandisk Extreme Pro 4TB SDUC card still maintains the UHS-I certification but flaunts a V30, guaranteeing a minimum write speed of 30 MB/s.

Although several manufacturers reportedly told Notebookcheck that these 8TB SDUC cards will "hit the market shortly," they didn't provide any hints on potential launch dates or estimated MSRP. We've reached out to Sandisk for more details and will update the story when the vendor replies.

For perspective, Sandisk sells the Extreme Pro 2TB microSD card for $569.99 and the Extreme Pro 2TB SD card for $549.99, which are double what the 1TB variant costs. Assuming Sandisk follows the same pricing scheme, the manufacturer's looming 4TB microSDUC and 8TB SDUC cards could be pushing price tags close to $1,200 and $2,200, respectively.

Most of the industry is focused on RAM and SSDs when it comes to the chip shortage that exploded in late 2025, but another storage segment is also being greatly affected by the lack of supply. According to a PCWorld investigation, USB drives and memory cards are showing massive price hikes from last year. In fact, we checked out several memory products on Amazon and compared their price histories on CamelCamelCamel and discovered that the median price increase across formats and capacities is a whopping 123%.

While these storage formats are often slower than SSDs, they still use NAND chips from wafers that could be manufactured from the same production lines, with their differences coming from binning and quality tiers. So, it would make sense for memory chip fabs to optimize their production lines for higher-bin NAND chips for SSDs. These drives are often used by AI data center customers who are willing to pay a premium to secure the storage they need. This optimization, in turn, could lead to a smaller supply of low-bin NAND chips for USB flash drive and memory card manufacturing, leading to higher costs for brands like SanDisk and Lexar, among others.

Because of this, manufacturers are increasingly turning towards more premium products to justify their prices. Just last week, SanDisk quietly released a 2TB variant of its top-tier Extreme Pro UHS-II SD card for $2,000, meaning this card would cost photographers, videographers, and other users $0.98 per GB. By comparison, the lower-tier 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-I SDXC card only costs $440, or about $0.21 per GB. SanDisk isn’t the only company doing this, as other manufacturers like Lexar and Kingston both have premium memory cards that are in a similar price range.

Memory card manufacturers have no choice but to adapt to the current realities of the market. “Facing the shortage of supply, our strategy is to focus on high-end products instead of expanding our factories or manufacturing,” Lexar Senior Marketing Director Lincoln Lin said during a company-sponsored media trip. He also added, “We think this is what we should do in the current supply shortage situation. Because of the supply limitations, we have to release more high-value products and keep some differentiation for our consumers.”

The market response to increasing prices has also been interesting. Lexar EU General Manager Grace Su pointed out that the company has prepared lower-capacity and lower-performance drives to give buyers options. “This is a curiosity for me as buyers have in their mind, ‘I would like a 1TB [drive]. 1TB is the minimum capacity I want to have. Now that I can only afford 512GB, I can wait,’” Su said. While she said this in reference to consumers purchasing SSDs, it could also apply to those looking for memory cards who need a minimum capacity for their specific use-case.

Lexar recently invited Tom’s Hardware, along with several other journalists, to visit its Shenzhen office, which sits north of Hong Kong, as well as its research and development facilities at Zhongshan across the bay. From there, the company took us to their Suzhou factory, about an hour and a half to the west of Shanghai, to explore their automotive storage production line.

The company is primarily known for its flash memory products, particularly for high-performance microSD, SD, and CFexpress cards for cameras and other portable devices, as well as flash drives and card readers. However, the company has recently been making a push towards modern SSDs and RAM modules, and it’s also working on the next generation of AI-ready storage solutions.

We'll start with our factory tour on this page, and then move to the Q and A session with Lexar executives and the history of the company on the second page.

Moving beyond memory cards and flash drives

Lexar has continued producing removable storage solutions after its 2017 acquisition by Longsys. Just one year after the purchase, the brand was the first to commercially release a 1TB SD card. The company also claimed that it had the world’s fastest CFexpress Type B cards in 2022, which is crucial for both photographers shooting in burst mode and videographers shooting at high-resolution 4K video. Just last year, the company also released the world’s first stainless steel SD cards, featuring an IP68 environmental protection rating while also providing much more strength than regular plastic SD card models.

But now that Lexar was under the wing of Longsys, the company had access to formidable resources for research and development, as well as the nearly two decades of experience that its parent firm had in working with flash storage. Although the company had already been making USB flash drives before 2017, it was only after the Longsys purchase that the company started making and selling proper drives.

One of the first Lexar SSDs we’ve seen is the NM600 M.2 NVMe SSD, which, although it did not offer mind-bending performance, was an affordable and efficient SSD that offered a great solution for those looking for relatively affordable storage. Since then, Lexar has released several NVMe SSDs, like the NM790, which offered excellent sustained read and write speeds while staying power efficient and is priced competitively, especially at the 4TB capacity, as well as the 1TB Lexar Play M.2 2230 SSD, which is one of the best solutions for expanding storage on gaming handheld devices.

The company has also started building its own storage controllers, which manage how data is stored, moved, corrected, and retrieved from the NAND flash chips used by memory cards. This would allow Lexar to have more in-depth control of how its memory products would perform and differentiate its offerings from the competition. At the moment, Lexar’s Silver Plus microSD, Blue microSD, Silver Plus SD, and Silver SD cards already use in-house controllers.

Aside from building its own storage controllers and expanding into solid state drives, the company also ventured into RAM with its basic DDR4-2666 C19 memory modules in 2020 and the Hades gaming RAM the following year. By 2023, the company made the Ares RGB DDR5-6000 C34 gaming RAM, which supports both Intel XMP 3.0 and AMD EXPO.

Of course, Lexar also saw the need for specialized storage in the age of AI. Because of this, it’s planning to release its AI Storage Core solution, which is more than just a faster, more performant memory solution. Of course, these will have higher read and write speeds, which is crucial for the massive amounts of data that AI handles, but will also have better encryption to protect the sensitive data handled by AI models. Lexar also says that they’ll be more robust, especially for applications in AI-powered vehicles and robots, as well as having hot-swapping capabilities to make it more convenient to switch devices without requiring a reboot.

The company says that it will offer multiple configuration options for AI Storage Core devices, ensuring that manufacturers and end-users can pick one that’s optimized for their application. It’s also working with various AI vendors, ensuring that Lexar’s storage solutions will be supported in future AI applications, allowing for easier and direct access to the data stored within them. There’s also development of supporting snapshots directly on the storage device’s firmware, giving users a secure backup directly on the device and making it easier to restore their data in case something goes wrong during the AI workflow, making it easier to roll back to an earlier snapshot.

Of course, Lexar cannot achieve all its plans without putting in the effort to develop new technologies. So, the company invited us to explore their various sites to see what it’s doing to achieve its goal of “Bridging Continents and Powering the World.”

Research and development for next-generation storage technologies

One of the first places we visited was the Longsys Innovation Laboratory, located in the Foresee Building at Zhongshan. This is where Lexar’s parent company works on developing next-generation products, including DDR5 and LPDDR5/5X memory modules, PCIe 5.0 storage solutions, UFS4.1 memory cards, as well as CXL2.0/3.0 for data centers and AI systems. The lab covers an area of over 9,000 square feet and is staffed by over 50 personnel, of which 20 are full-time engineers, scientists, and researchers.

Everything begins at the Design Simulation & Signal Analysis Lab, where new Lexar products are developed, validated, and engineered. The Design Simulation Lab is where upcoming storage solutions are tested for thermal performance, structural rigidity, and signal and power integrity, while the Signal Analysis lab looks at the high-speed signals being sent throughout the entire system to ensure everything stays in spec and operates reliably.

Since Lexar relies on third-party suppliers for NAND and DRAM supplies, it must ensure the quality of the dies it receives and know exactly what’s inside each product it manufactures. This is where the Chip Resource Analysis Lab comes in, where multiple high-end machines test timings, memory redundancy, and the memory core, as well as running accelerated aging under stress (also known as burn-in testing), to ensure the quality and reliability of Lexar products over time.

There are several labs that deal with completed products. There’s the System Verification Lab, where finished storage and memory items are tested for their power draw and timings, ensuring that Lexar DRAM meets JEDEC specifications. Lexar has a high-end gaming PC installed in the lab so that they can run their hardware on various benchmarking apps like AIDA64, 3DMark, and PCMark.

The Reliability Lab is where things are getting interesting, as Lexar puts its various products through their paces here. It has various testing machines, including the Drop Tester for simulating dropping an item from a height of up to 1.5 meters or 4 feet to a concrete or steel floor and the Roller Drop Tester, which continuously tumbles items between 5 to 25 RPM. There’s also the Plug-in/out Force Test machine, which simulates plugging in a memory card into a slot thousands of times and with various levels of force, the Tensile Test machine, which basically pulls on materials to see how much strength it takes to break them apart, and several other devices that check the durability of their prototypes and other products.

Aside from physical strength, the company also tests for electrostatic discharge resistance in its ESD lab, ensuring that its memory cards, storage drives, and memory modules aren’t killed by everyday static that people build up from their environment.

The tests we’ve mentioned above are mostly limited to day-to-day use. At the end of the hall sits the Environmental Lab, where Lexar puts its prototypes and products through the wringer. There are four testing machines here — the Salt Spray Test, which accelerates aging through a corrosive environment, the Precision High-Temperature Oven, where Lexar products are exposed to high temperatures while they are running, the Highly-Accelerated Stress Test, for reliability failure analysis, and the Dye Penetration Test, which looks at the effects of thermal shock on various components.

Besides the ESD Lab, you’d find the X-ray Lab, where the tiny wiring and connections in the chip are analyzed. Inside it, you’ll find a combined 2D X-Ray and CT Scan machine, allowing Lexar engineers to find minute, microscopic defects. There’s also the Failure Analysis Lab, which looks at how the items fail after this series of tests, allowing Lexar to figure out what went wrong with them and rectify their shortcomings, ensuring that they do not fail once out in the real world.

Last, but not least, we visited the Materials Analysis Labs, where the scientists and engineers visually inspect the chips. Note that they do not just place them under a microscope — instead, this is an involved process where they would put the memory or storage module they want to inspect in resin and then use a precision cutter machine to exactly slice the material and reveal the area where the suspected damage is.

Now, all the testing here is done directly on the Lexar products and prototypes. However, storage and memory do not exist in a vacuum — instead, they must work with a massive number of different devices, like cameras, drones, security cameras, gaming handheld devices, desktops, laptops, tablets, dashcams, and so much more. So, our next stop was the Longsys Quality Labs.

An extensive compatibility testing lab

Lexar has an extensive portfolio of memory and storage products, including CFexpress cards, SD cards, microSD cards, the NM card for some Huawei phones, portable SSDs, USB flash drives, M.2 and SATA SSDs, DDR4 and DDR5 memory modules, card readers, enclosures, and more. If Lexar plans to release any new product, it must ensure that it will work across a wide range of devices already on the market. Because of this, Longsys Quality Labs keeps more than 1,200 different gadgets across 35 categories to ensure that it can test its products before release.

For example, we saw more than 30 handheld gaming consoles on one desk, featuring popular brands and models like the Steam Deck, ROG Ally X, Lenovo Legion Go, and the Nintendo Switch 2, as well as from more niche brands like OneX Player, Ambernic, and more. There are also several drones and action cameras from DJI, as well as shelves of DSLRs, mirrorless, and point-and-shoot cameras from Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Fujifilm. The Lexar team also had multiple phones, including those from Chinese brands like Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo, as well as popular international brands such as iPhone and Samsung. Aside from these flash devices, other rooms also stored a ton of more mundane gadgets, like dashcams, security cameras, and even automotive modules.

After exploring the lab, we visited the Memory History Museum, where Lexar showed how storage technologies developed from prehistoric knots to the SSDs that we know today. We ended our day there, as our next stop would be the company’s manufacturing base in Suzhou, a two-hour flight from Shenzhen, which we took the following day.

Exploring the Longforce automotive storage production facility

Our entire group landed in Shanghai, and we took a one-and-a-half-hour drive to the Longforce Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd., which is the company’s manufacturing arm. We then made our way to the company’s production line for automotive storage, where we saw how NAND silicon wafers are turned into automotive-grade storage solutions. Since this is a silicon production line, we all had to wear cleanroom suits and get blasted with air jets before entering the actual production area. That way, we minimize the chances of bringing in contaminants that would affect yield rates.

The NAND arrives from the suppliers in wafer form, where it must first undergo taping, which is the mounting of the wafer to a backing material to ensure its rigidity during processing. That’s because a silicon wafer is extremely thin, and the backing material will protect it from cracking. From here, the wafer first undergoes pre-grinding, which thins out the wafer and makes it ready for cutting. It’s then cut into pieces with a laser using a technique called stealth dicing, because the cuts were made under the surface. From there, the wafer is finally fully ground to bring the wafer to its final thickness.

Once all of that is completed, the wafer is then finally mounted, and the tape is removed through DDS. It then goes through various processes until the die is mounted onto a substrate. From there, it will go through wire bonding, which connects all the layers of the die to the substrate, and be packaged via a C-Mold process. From there, it receives branding, and solder balls are attached to the underside of the substrate to make it ready for attachment to a PCB.

Note that the process does not end there, as the chips are all built together into a single molded panel. They must first be cut into individual pieces through singulation. Once that is done, they go through final testing and quality control, and then the chips are packaged for delivery to clients.

Let's move to the executive Q and A on the following page.

We visited a lot of places in so little time, so we did not get a chance to get to know Lexar’s leadership team a bit deeper. Nevertheless, some of the journalists who joined the tour were still able to ask them a few questions regarding the brand and the state of the memory and storage market today.

30 years of Lexar

Before we dive into anything else, let’s look at the quick history of Lexar. The storage company was founded in 1996 in San Jose, California, after it was spun off from audio semiconductor company Cirrus Logic. The company focused on flash memory technologies, tapping into the massive opportunity presented by the booming digital camera landscape, which began in the late 90s and exploded in the early 2000s. After nearly 10 years as an independent company, Micron Technology bought the firm in 2006.

Lexar partnered with Kodak in 2004 to produce a Kodak-branded 64MB SD card, which the two companies extended for another five years in 2007. It was during this period that the latter started producing 1GB and 2GB SD cards for the American camera brand, as well as the 128MB Picture Card UFC Drive, which worked both as a memory card and as a USB flash drive.

Aside from this push on consumer-grade memory, Lexar also developed storage media that focused on professional photographers with its CompactFlash (CF) cards. Many pro-grade DSLRs relied on this form factor during this time, which was larger, more robust, and often delivered performance better than comparable SD cards. The company was the first to deliver a 256GB CF card in 2012, which it released alongside an SDXC UHS-I card. It then doubled down on this focus the following year by releasing the Professional Workflow solution — a docking station that allowed you to mix-and-match card readers and portable SSD modules on a single high-performance base station, keeping all your portable memory needs in one place.

However, Micron decided to discontinue the Lexar brand by 2017, saying that it wanted to focus on higher value markets and channels. One of the reasons behind this move is the reduced popularity of dedicated cameras, especially as smartphones, with their built-in cameras, became more popular in the early to mid-2010s. Furthermore, Android smartphones started losing their expandable memory feature around 2015, with Samsung being the first one to drop it with the Galaxy S6.

These changing market conditions, alongside increasing competition, meant that Micron wanted to exit the consumer memory market and focus its attention on more profitable products. Fortunately, the company didn’t shutter the brand — instead, it offered the entire division for sale, with Longsys acquiring it completely in 2017.

Longsys is a China-based flash storage company founded in 1999, focusing on research and development, design, testing, packaging, manufacturing, and sales of storage solutions. It already had a strong presence in industrial and embedded storage solutions with its B2B Foresee brand, so the company saw a unique opportunity when Micron decided to sell Lexar. The purchase gave the Chinese company a chance to gain a foothold in Lexar’s market, while at the same time continuing the brand’s legacy of high-quality, high-performance removable devices.

PicoIDE launched earlier this week, touted as “an open source IDE/ATAPI drive emulator for vintage computers.” This single 3.5-inch bay fitting device can replace those aging optical drives (and media) and HDDs, that your retro-PC relies on, with the convenience and capacity that modern microSD cards provide. It uses an appropriate retro-design aesthetic (in beige or black). You can back this project for as little as $69 for the base model, will free shipping in the U.S. and an expected June 14 dispatch date.

Polpotronics LLC, the outfit behind the PicoIDE, highlights the increasing issue of “worn out lasers, crashed heads, or bad sectors,” that even the best maintained vintage PCs can be prone to. At the same time like-for-like hardware replacements are getting scarcer, so a modern retro-embracing, transparent, open-source alternative becomes a compelling project.

Two versions of the PicoIDE are being made available, the PicoIDE Base ($69, beige), and the PicoIDE Deluxe ($110, beige or black). Whichever you choose, you get the following features:

• Full 3.5-inch drive bay enclosure (injection molded)
• Standard 40-pin IDE connector
• 4-pin Molex power connector
• Headers for external activity LED and action button
• SPI header for future expansion
• Emulates ATAPI CD-ROM drives and IDE fixed hard drives
• Images stored on microSD card (FAT32 or exFAT)
• CD-ROM formats: .bin/.cue (with audio track support), .iso
• HDD formats: .img, .hda, .vhd (with CHS geometry), .hdf
• LBA and CHS addressing modes for maximum compatibility
• Configurable vendor/model strings for compatibility with picky systems
• Supports PIO modes 0-4 and multi-word DMA modes 0-2
• Powered by Raspberry Pi RP2350
• IDE bus operations accelerated with PIO state machines
• Double-buffered read-ahead for optimal throughput
• Hot-swap image selection when inserting mickroSD
• Configuration via ini file on microSD
• Firmware updates from the micoSD
• High-quality TI PCM5100A DAC for audio out
• MPC-2 header for internal sound card connection
• 3.5 mm line-out jack for external audio

A killer convenience feature of the PicoIDE is its ability to hold multiple drive images, say with different DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other installations, and on-the-fly switch to load your chosen image at next-boot – all from a single micoSD card. Moreover, PicoIDE emulates a multitude of drive geometries.

PicoIDE is also truly open source. That permeates the hardware, firmware, and documentation. With all design and source files promised to be available via GitHub before the device begins shipping. Documentation is already there.

In the intro, we mentioned that you can back this project for as little as $69 for the base model, with free shipping in the U.S., and an expected June 14 dispatch date. But please remember that crowdfunding a project is not a guarantee of receiving a finished product within the timescale highlighted, if at all. Backing a crowdfunded project is more like an investment; you believe in the project and want it to succeed. You are not purchasing a retail product.

New reports are now coming in from Japan, courtesy of IT Media, highlighting that customers are starting to pivot to high-capacity microSD cards to meet their storage needs. As a result, high-capacity MicroSD cards are now also encountering shortages.

We're currently traversing through one of the worst memory shortages in recent times, a situation that's expected to only get worse next year. Alongside DRAM, storage is also affected on an unprecedented scale, as data centers need every bit of flash they can get, leaving scraps for consumers to sift through.

"The larger versions of the popular series keep running out of stock," commented Technohouse Toei, a popular computer vendor in Tokyo. "This might drag on for a while." The models affected are 512 GB, 1TB, and 2TB microSD cards that offer a real substitute to SSDs and HDDs. Now that microSD Express is a thing, leveraging the PCIe interface and NVMe protocol with proper HBM support, it's actually feasible in these dark times that compact flash storage is replacing M.2 drives, at least when archival duties are not in the picture.

Speaking of drive shortages, Japanese stores also mention how large-capacity HDDs are being swept up and anything that remains on shelves is increasingly overpriced. One shopkeeper said, "It looks like large-capacity models are getting sucked up for AI use, so we aren't getting any stock at all. Everyone knows what's going on, so even if the price goes up, the drives sell out immediately… and the cycle repeats." In comparison, SSDs are "not as bad as HDDs," according to the retailer PC SHOP Ark in Chiyoda.

Memory is still the worst outlier, with DDR5 prices on the rise exponentially, racing to beat all records. The same 64GB Corsair Vengeance 5600 MT/s kit that cost ¥40,000 (~260) in early November, now costs ¥70,000 (~460) just three weeks in. That's an almost doubling on top of the already inflated $260 price tag it was sitting at. Still, these numbers are not as harrowing as the situation in the West, at least for now. Graphics cards, on the other hand, are relatively stable, but the rumor mill suggests they'll also be hit in 2026.

"Even when we finally get a shipment, the wholesale price has gone up by tens of thousands of yen. It’s happening all the time," said Tsukumo eX when referring to the ongoing DDR5 memory shortage. The number of physical price tags or stickers is visibly shrinking in stores because there's just not enough stock to sell. The AI boom is singlehandedly responsible for creating this landscape, and it's showing few signs of stopping anytime soon.

The Small Capacity Memory Card Championship (Japan), in which participants submitted their smallest memory cards, has been a tightly run race, but now the results are in. The smallest memory card found by the retro-computer-loving followers of X68PRO-HD on X was a 0.5MB SmartMedia card. While entrants such as the 1.44MB Flash FDD stick and Casio 2KB battery-backed RAM card didn’t make the cut (they didn’t quite fit the category), we were intrigued to see them.

Without further ado, the full list of tiny-capacity winners was as follows (machine translation):

• SD card: 8MB (SD, miniSD, microSD)
• MMC card: 4MB
• CF card: 2MB
• Memory Stick: 4MB
• SmartMedia card: 512KB (5V) / 2MB (3.3V)
• xD-Picture Card: 16MB
• PCMCIA card: 10MB / 2KB (SRAM)

If I were to join in this low-capacity competition, the best entrant from my drawers of detritus would be the 1GB xD-Picture card I found (see top picture). I also remember spending far too much on a 64MB CF card (and PCMCIA adaptor) back when digital cameras were cutting-edge tech objects of desire. Even that, though, seems massive compared to the 0.5MB SmartMedia card found by X68PRO-HD and their social media acquaintances.

The competition poster tipped a hat to other interesting small-capacity flash storage card entrants, but several were disqualified from the final list. Formats like PS1 memory cards, ‘bubble memory,’ USB thumb drives, and battery-backed flash RAM cards didn’t make the grade. Some of these were out of bounds as they weren’t ‘general-purpose’ flash memory cards.

Nevertheless, the rejects pile offered up some very interesting artifacts from earlier computing eras. Probably the most remarkable small-capacity entry that didn’t make it was the Casio 2KB battery-backed RAM card. This was a type of memory card exclusively for the Casio ‘Pokecon’ (ポケコン) range of pocket computers from the 1980s and 90s.

Another entry that didn’t quite make the grade was a 1MB PCMCIA card that was produced before it became a standard – that was a near miss.

Last but not least, it was interesting to see pictures and information about a 1.44MB ‘Flash FDD’ stick. This was a flash drive with the same capacity as a standard HD floppy. Moreover, it was designed with firmware to emulate a real floppy disk and could be booted from, like a floppy, by Windows and Linux users.

Samsung has introduced its P9 Express to contend with the best microSD Express cards available for the Nintendo Switch 2. They are available now with a price tag of $54.99 for the 256GB model and $99.99 for the 512GB variant.

Samsung has already released a Nintendo-licensed Super Mario Edition microSD Express 256GB card, coinciding with the launch of the Switch 2. However, the P9 Express represents the company's formal entry into the microSD Express market.

The P9 Express offers sequential read speeds of up to 800 MB/s, aligning with some of the fastest microSD Express cards currently available. The random read and write speeds are rated for 65,000 IOPS and 52,000 IOPS, respectively. The P9 Express is specifically designed for devices that support microSD Express, such as gaming handhelds, action cameras, drones, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. However, the current usage is likely limited to the Switch 2, the only device to have hopped on the microSD Express bandwagon.

MicroSD Express uses the PCIe 3.0 x1 interface, enabling significantly enhanced transfer performance. A ballpark figure is approximately 4X faster than standard microSD UHS-1 cards. As with all microSD cards, microSD Express cards are also backward-compatible with older devices. Nevertheless, this compatibility limits speeds to UHS-1, or, in the case of the P9 Express, to up to 90 MB/s for sequential reads and 2,000 IOPS for random reads and writes.

Samsung P9 Express Specifications

Samsung's P9 Express cards demonstrate durability comparable to that of microSD Express cards from other manufacturers. They are temperature-, magnet-, X-ray-, drop-, water-, and wearout-proof, so the P9 Express should survive even in the most rigorous conditions. While the P9 Express card is highly resilient, it is advisable to handle devices, such as the Switch 2, with care and avoid using them in adverse weather conditions.

A distinguishing feature of the P9 Express is the incorporation of Samsung's Dynamic Thermal Guard (DTG) technology, originally developed for its SSDs. The manufacturer claims that this advanced technology intelligently monitors and regulates the card's temperature, effectively preventing overheating and ensuring consistent performance during long gaming sessions.

The P9 Express is compatible with the Samsung Magician software, which is included with Samsung's SSD product line. This software provides several crucial features, including verifying the authenticity of the P9 Express, monitoring the card's health, and benchmarking its performance. Given the prevalence of counterfeit Samsung products in the market, the authenticity verification feature is particularly valuable.

Samsung offers a limited three-year warranty for the P9 Express. This warranty is longer than that provided by some competitors, who may only offer one year; however, it is not as extensive as the lifetime warranties supplied by a few other brands. The P9 Express is available for purchase in 256GB and 512GB capacities, priced at $54.99 and $99.99, respectively. Currently, Amazon is promoting a $5 discount on the 512GB version, reducing the price to $94.99 for a limited time.

Recovery teams working on the Titan submersible have found the vessel's specialist stills and video camera intact. Fascinatingly, while there was some damage to the camera’s housing and internal components, tech and science enthusiast Scott Manley reveals that the internal SD card was “undamaged.” Contents of the memory card have since been investigated, and 12 stills and nine videos have been recovered.

Click 'See more' for images.

In the images, you can see a SubC-branded Rayfin Mk2 Benthic Camera, recovered from the wreckage of the ill-fated submersible operated by OceanGate. This still and video camera is rated to withstand depths up to 6,000m (19,685 feet, 3,281 fathoms). The titanium and synthetic sapphire crystal constructed device features both onboard and expansion memory (the titular SD card).

Casing intact, lens shattered but remained in place

Inside the camera's tube-like form, it is observed that the PCBs had suffered some slight damage. For example, connectors between two boards were sheared off, and some surface mount components were similarly damaged.

In some images of the PCB that are shared, you will notice details are blurred at the request of the Canada-based underwater imaging specialist and Rayfin Mk2 Benthic Camera manufacturer. However, SubC’s requested trade secret obfuscation hasn’t stopped internet sleuths asserting that they know exactly what components have been redacted.

Picking through Manley's Tweet thread replies, the key PCBs in the camera were likely an Inforce 6601 System on Module (SoM) based on the Qualcomm SD820 processor, which comes with 4GB of RAM on board and 64GB of UFS storage. Another component is thought to be the Teensy 4.0 or 3.2, which acted as an MCU. Last but not least, the undamaged SD card is almost certainly a SanDisk Extreme Pro 512GB ($62.99 at the time of writing), though it was de-branded in the photos.

Data recovery process and results

With an undamaged SD card, of course, investigators (and others) were interested in what details of the tragedy may have been captured and stored by this camera system. The first step was to make “an exact binary image of the SD card” so the original could be left untampered.

Check out Manley’s Tweet thread, containing investigator report screengrabs, to take in the full gamut of back and forth between the data forensics investigator, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB), and SubC. To cut a long technical story short, though, the parties eventually met up at a lab/office in Newfoundland, where a recovered NVRAM chip and SD card image were interfaced with a “surrogate SoM board.” This did the trick, and 12 still and nine videos were recovered!

Recovered images were at a resolution of 4,056 x 3,040 pixels, implying a pretty common 12.3MP sensor was used by the SubC Rayfin Mk2 Benthic Camera. Videos were at a more standard 3,840 x 2,160 pixels – commonly referred to as 4K Ultra HD (UHD) video.

Somewhat disappointingly, the images and videos shared in the report were taken in the vicinity of the ROV shop at the Marine Institute, also in Newfoundland. The location was the logistical base for Titanic dive missions. No deep-sea shenanigans around the Titanic wreck were revealed. Manley explains in his Twitter thread that “the camera had been configured to dump data onto an external storage device, so nothing was found from the accident dive.” Nothing particularly pertinent to the tragic accident, that is.

I'm constantly tracking the Nintendo Switch 2, and it's must-have accessories and storage options since their release. Stocks of anything Switch 2 have been flying off retailer shelves faster than you can shake your fist at the sky in frustration. The Switch 2 has proved to be an insanely popular games console, and there's currently no end in sight for when the console and microSD cards will be readily available at the correct price point.

Today, PNY's 256GB microSD Express card is back in stock at Amazon with a list price of £59. This isn't a deal, as the price hasn't changed since the launch of this microSD card, but it is in stock; for how long though is the question. If you're looking for extra storage for your Switch 2 console, then this is a good microSD Express card to snap up. There are also options from SanDisk on Amazon, but the shipping lead times are one to two months, so they might as well be listed as out of stock.

The Nintendo Switch 2 makes use of the latest microSDXC Express technology, which is a far faster storage option than the previous microSD cards that have been used for earlier iterations of Nintendo's Switch console. Using PCIe Gen 3x1 NVMe tech, the latest microSD Express technology allows speeds more similar to laptop and desktop SSDs with performance up to 890MB/s read, and 750MB/s write speeds.

The native storage capacity of the Nintendo Switch 2 is 256GB, so this 256GB microSD Express card from PNY doubles the amount of software that you can install on your console. It's microSD express technology means installation, load times, and data streaming are much faster, for a better gameplay and user experience.

Check Amazon for all microSD Express cards available for the Nintendo Switch 2 games console.

Memory and storage manufacturer Silicon Power just released the Hypera microSDXC Express Card designed for the Switch 2, arriving in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities. The company says that this memory card can hit read speeds of up to 800 MB/s and write speeds of up to 700 MB/s — this reduces download, install, and load times on the new handheld, allowing you to seamlessly play AAA titles without worrying about buffering. It was also tested for reliability, ensuring that it will withstand the rigors of daily use so that you don’t lose data due to the card’s failure.

• Where to buy Nintendo Switch 2 microSD Express cards during Amazon Prime Day 2025

The Nintendo Switch 2 supports older microSDXC standards, so you can view screenshots and watch videos. However, if you want to expand its paltry 256GB built-in storage and install multiple AAA titles, you need a microSDXC Express Card. This standard is far more expensive than the older UHS-I and UHS-II standards, but you’d need the SSD-like performance it delivers to avoid frustration with your new console. Most manufacturers only offer microSDXC Express Cards up to 512GB, which might be pretty limiting if you play several titles. So, Silicon Power’s 1TB capacity is an excellent choice if you plan on collecting games and keeping them ready on your device.

Although the Hypera is made for the Nintendo Switch 2, it’s also compatible with the UHS-I standard. This lets you use it on other devices that don’t support the microSD Express standard just yet, like older consoles, cameras, and smartphones. This makes it quite a flexible storage device, allowing you to use it for content creation, transferring large files, and even recording 4K video on your current equipment, but it is also ready for use with future gear.

We expect more manufacturers to start including this standard in their products, especially as the popularity of the Switch 2 drove demand for this memory card to the limit. Thankfully, companies that made these memory cards quickly scaled up their production to meet demand, allowing you to easily buy Nintendo Switch 2 microSD Express cards if you know where to look — we even spotted one on sale in Walmart, but you'd better act quickly before stocks run out.

Tech enthusiast Matt Cole is the determined creator and maintainer of The Great MicroSD Card Survey, a significant investigative testing and benchmarking treasure trove that began in July 2023. Cole has “set up 8 machines with close to 70 card readers running around the clock… writing 101 terabytes of data per day,” in order to expose the MicroSD card diamonds in the rough and to find fake cards with inflated capacity ratings and cards that use sub-par 'fake flash.' Key features of the regularly updated 15,000-word report are its highlighting and charting of MicroSD cards alongside authenticity, performance, and endurance measurements.

The survey currently encompasses over 200 different MicroSD cards. In a blog post last year, Cole informed readers that running the tests to harvest data from these fingernail-sized slivers of flash storage resulted in over 18 petabytes of data being written to nearly 200 cards, and 51 were literally tested to destruction.

Too much information can make data almost as opaque as too little. So, thankfully, Cole has a number of quick and easy-to-glance charts to show the winners, runners-up, and losers according to the various metrics. If even that is too much for you, there is also a shortcut to the best overall picks the MicroSD card inquisitor has found.

Details of the testing methodologies, host machines, card readers, and software used are shared by Cole. Temperature measurements were also taken during the storage stress testing, but it isn’t known whether these are significant to measured performance metrics or endurance at this time.

Authenticity, 'fake flash' and 'skimpy flash'

When shopping for a MicroSD card, it is important to consider authenticity. Cole isn’t looking into counterfeit activity here; rather, he seeks to chart cards with what he calls ‘fake flash,’ where unscrupulous manufacturers and resellers will happily sell you a card with an advertised capacity that bears little relation to its storage capabilities. Cole also highlights ‘skimpy flash,’ where a ‘64GB’ card might just offer “about 61.89GB,’ for example. Skimpy flash is prevalent, even among the most trusted brands.

Performance, SDA checks

With a view to performance, Cole tested two key quality metrics. Firstly, he was interested in how well cards performed on an absolute level – raw performance. Secondly, his data checks flag whether a card’s SD Association speed rating logo is the correct one. This section also exposes the underlying data from sequential I/O test and a random I/O test results.

Endurance, Lenovo no go

Endurance is also crucial for flash storage buyers in maintaining the long-term integrity of their valuable data. How long can a user expect their MicroSD card to last under heavy read/write cycles? These tests should help deliver insight for reasoned expectations.

Cole explains that the endurance test suite will put MicroSD cards under a sustained heavy load. The most important insights we noted were that “Name-brand cards obtained from Amazon performed markedly better than name-brand cards obtained from AliExpress,” and that “fake flash performed significantly worse than authentic flash.”

So, be warned, from the best cards to the worst, the average durability almost halves, from 3,166 to 1,594 cycles. Meanwhile, if you are in a pinch and don’t have this data to refer to, it seems like a safe bet to buy a Sandisk or Kingston-branded card for an average of 4,634 and 3,555 read/write cycles before encountering their first error, respectively. Lenovo was the worst-performing well-known brand, with an average of 291 cycles before the first error occurred. Some off-brand memories lasted on average as few as 27 cycles.

Cole’s data goes far beyond this first error data, with additional charts for things like 10% failure and complete failure. However, endurance data doesn’t cover as many models as the performance charts due to its time-consuming nature.

Overall picks, weighing the data

Hot on the heels of Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders and the potentially wallet-straining news that the new handheld is switching to microSD Express storage technology, PNY has unveiled its new microSD Express Flash Memory Cards.

PNY says that its new cards are capable of up to 890MB/s read speeds and up to 750MB/s write speeds, 4.4 times faster than standard UHS-I microSD cards.

It features PCIe Gen3x1 microSD technology, which should, in theory, reduce load times of your favorite Nintendo Switch 2 games and even improve performance.

The Nintendo Switch 2 comes with 256GB of onboard storage as standard, so if you want any more, you'll need to invest in a microSD Express card like this one.

PNY says its microSD Express Cards maintain backwards compatibility with USH-I and USH-II host devices at their respective speeds.

They also come with unique heat dissipation technology and built-in microSD thermal monitoring PNY claims adjusts to optimize temperature and keep things running smoothly.

PNY's microSD Express cards are also rated as magnet proof, shock proof, temperature proof, waterproof, drop proof, X-Ray proof, humidity proof, and wear-out proof. They also come with a lifetime warranty.

Nintendo's latest games console is edging ever closer to its release date on June 5th, and if you're a Nintendo fan planning on grabbing a bunch of games and Switch 2 peripherals, it's best to get in early and make your orders to try and avoid any disappointment.

I've been keeping an eye on the microSD Express memory cards that are required for storing and launching installed games on the Nintendo Switch 2 outside of the console's built-in system storage, and noting the fluctuating prices and availability in our Where to buy Nintendo Switch 2 microSD Express cards guide.

Over at Amazon.co.uk, you can pre-order the Officially Licensed Nintendo microSD Express SanDisk 256GB memory card for £49. Amazon is offering a pre-order price guarantee on this item (see terms) that ensures if you order the product now, and it were to go down in price before release, you would get the product at that lower price point.

The Nintendo Switch 2 will support microSD Express cards with a capacity of up to 2TB, which should be more than enough to store a large number of games, should you want them all downloaded and preinstalled for on-the-go gaming. Larger microSD cards will, however, command a very high price, and the sweet spot seems to be the 256GB sizes in terms of price per GB.

When Nintendo announced the Switch 2, it said users would require cards based on the microSD Express standard to expand device memory. Soon after this announcement, both online and physical retail sellers were cleared out, with some store staff telling Hermitage Akihabara in Japan [machine translated] that they sold more than 337 cards per hour. This surprised everyone, especially as microSD Express cards are far more expensive than regular microSD cards.

You'll pay more than double for microSD Express

The vanilla Lexar 1TB Play microSD card has a regular price of $129.99 on Amazon, but is discounted to $69.99 at the time of writing. This card has a read speed of up to 160 MB/s and a write speed of up to 100 MB/s, which is quite respectable but still not as fast as internal device storage. On the other hand, the microSD Express version of this card has a far faster 900 MB/s read speed and 600 MB/s write speed, making it more than five times quicker than the old standard. It comes at a price, though — the Lexar 1TB Play Pro microSD Express card has an original price of $199.99 on Amazon, and even though it’s on sale at $172.63 at the time of writing, it’s still more than double the price of the non-Express version.

No scalping detected

Following the grand reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2, we learned a handful of technical details about the console. Most notably, the Switch 2 is set to require a different MicroSD standard than its predecessor, named MicroSD Express. And, if current pricing for announced products is anything to go by, it will be painful on your wallet. In fact, on a capacity basis, they're pricier than many modern SSDs — MicroSD Express cards range from 20 to 25 cents per GB of storage, whereas bargain basement SSDs can retail for as little as 5 to 6 cents per GB. That's partly due to the NVMe and PCIe 3.0 support, commonly found on M.2 SSDs, that's baked right into the new MicroSD Express cards.

Sandisk's MicroSD Express cards have an MSRP of $49.99 for just 128GB of storage, with the 256GB variant at $64.99. These cards operate at speeds up to 880 MB/s read, 480 MB/s write, and 100 MB/s sustained write.

However, Lexar has announced larger capacities of up to 1TB. But, you might want to brace your wallet, as the prices are predictably not pretty for this new standard.

Lexar's Play Pro 1TB MicroSD Express card costs a staggering $199.99, with the 512 GB model at $99.99, and 256 GB at $49.99. Lexar boasts that these cards can achieve speeds of up to 900 MB/s read and 600 MB/s write.

Sandisk's MicroSD Express cards cost up to $0.39 per-gigabyte for the 128GB model, while the 256GB model costs $0.25 per-gigabyte. Lexar's options seem to be the best deal, with all three storage variants at a standardized cost of $0.20 per gigabyte, while also seemingly boasting higher-end specs.

Why storage is more important than ever for Switch 2

We know that the Switch 2 will ship with 256GB of storage as standard, but there's a catch. Even if you purchase a physical game, you might not be able to play it immediately just by inserting the cartridge. Some titles will require the full title to be downloaded and installed onto the system, with the cartridge serving as a glorified physical license key, which Nintendo calls a "Game-Key Card". This might be down to companies and publishers wanting to cut down on cartridge costs, especially as the price of NAND storage is expected to rise.

For example, if you wanted to purchase the Street Fighter 6 cartridge, you'll end up having to install an additional 50GB of data onto your system right off of the bat. This means that the meager 256GB of storage that the console ships with will inevitably fill up. This reveals a hidden cost for the privilege of using Nintendo's new system, expensive new MicroSD cards to expand storage, unless you're willing to play the frustrating game of redownloading titles and managing storage any time you insert a Game-Key Card into your system.

The Switch 2's MicroSD Express standard explained

While it might be tough to tell the difference between a standard MicroSD card and a MicroSD Express card at a glance, potentially causing some confusion for potential buyers, the technical details explain that MicroSD Express is a big jump from the UHS-I standard used by the Nintendo Switch.

The SD Association's current SD Express speed classifications divide MicroSD Express into four categories: Class 150, Class 300, Class 450, and Class 600. The numbers at the end of each classification denote the minimum read / write performance of the cards in MB/s. MicroSD Express cards also have significantly more pins than their older UHS-I brethren, at either 16 or 17, compared to just eight.

Underpinning the technology are NVMe and PCIe 3.0 interfaces, which allow for speeds of up to 2GB/s (using a PCIe 4.0 interface). You can read the deep-dive details of the tech on our sister site, AnandTech.

However, with technical details of the Switch 2's capabilities on the lighter side, we still don't know if the console will be able to match those theoretical speeds, and no currently-announced MicroSD Express card is able to achieve those peak speeds, either.

“The new microSD Express standard offers us a way to deliver a memory card with incomparable performance in that form factor,” said Joey Lopez, Director of Brand Marketing at Lexar in a press release. “We’re excited to create a card for our customers that leverages the benefits of this new standard and prepares gamers for the next generation of handheld gaming.”

So, there's a gulf between the fastest UHS-I MicroSD Card and the fastest theoretical MicroSD Express card. The fastest announced card is currently the Lexar Play Pro MicroSDXC Express card, but those speeds will inevitably have to be tested once the Switch 2, and the MicroSD Express cards, are in our hands. For now, you can check out our hands-on with the Nintendo Switch 2.

A recent Linux kernel commit (6.11) addresses key aspects of SD card compatibility and support, most namely adding support for Ultra High-Speed II SD cards (UHS-II) and Ultra Capacity SD cards (dubbed SDUC) [h/t Phoronix]. UHS-II SD cards support speeds up to 312 MB/s, while SDUC cards have a theoretical maximum capacity of 128 TB and can support yet faster UHS-III and SD Express speeds.

Regarding SDUC cards and capacity, we saw 4 TB SDUC cards back in April, and since then, an 8 TB SDUC card has also been announced. That is expected to increase over time, hence the 128 TB ceiling.

While the continued growth of SD cards has been quite impressive since they're still by far the most compact form of modern flash storage, the goal of eventually reaching 128 TB on one of these seems like a far-off dream, particularly when hard drives are still top out around 32 TB, and 128TB SSDs need much larger form factors than an SD card.

Unfortunately, the current highest-capacity cards using SDUC see an 8 TB SD card limited to UHS-I speeds of roughly 104 MB/s. That's slightly slower than a standard desktop hard drive—UHS-II, meanwhile, is 320 MB/s and more like a common SATA SSD (which tops out at ~550 MB/s) in overall bandwidth.

In its debut form, SD Express used PCIe 3.0 to reach speeds of up to 985 MB/s, but subsequent iterations have allowed SD Express to be used with PCIe 4.0 to reach speeds as high as 3940 MB/s, which is on par with proper NVMe Gen 3/entry-level Gen 4 SSDs in that same familiar SD card form factor.

Fortunately, SDUC cards will likely get better support for faster grades of UHS and SD Express in the long term—the SDUC standard already supports these features fine, but pushing the limits of SD card capacity does seem to come with some speed compromises.

Fortunately, Linux kernel 6.11 is well-prepared to deal with the still-evolving SD card market.

Aside from adding support for SDUC and UHS-II, this Linux 6.11 kernel MMC update mostly consists of added device support and miscellaneous error fixes. For those who still actively use SD cards, particularly in professional video fields where SD cards are still common, this update is sure to provide a welcome improvement to compatibility and stability.

The Lexar High-Performance SD 8.0 card promises read and write speeds up to 1,700 MB/s and 1,000 MB/s, respectively. According to PetaPixel, the new SD 8.0 card is ahead of its time since it is not fully compatible with any devices that use this standard, especially cameras, downgrading its performance to the UHS-I standard.

Lexar recently rolled out a series of flash storage-based cards, including the Stainless steel variant in Gold and Silver Pro, which comply with UHS-II standards. But the one that gained the attention was the SD 8.0 standard, which utilized PCIe 4.0 lanes to achieve this speed—similar to its Lexar Professional CFexpress 4.0 card. This was possible because the new standard allowed theoretical transfer speeds up to 2 GB/s.

There is a significant caveat. Only card readers or cameras that comply with the SD 8.0 standard can take advantage of the card's speed. However, none exists, as the standard was finalized a month ago. The SD 8.0 standard was designed to use multiple PCIe interfaces: PCIe Gen 4 x1, PCIe G3 x2, and PCIe Gen4 x2. While the SD card will function with currently available cameras and card readers, the performance is downgraded to a UHS-I standard at 30 MB/s transfer speeds. Hence, the whole purpose of buying a high-speed SD card is that it cannot be used effectively.

The card was designed to operate similarly to its CFexpress 4.0 counterpart, such as the Lexar Professional series, to have similar read/ write speeds that use PCIe 4.0. However, the similarity ends there, as no devices can exploit it. The SD Association introduced the new standard using the same form factor while using one PCIe lane. Lexar could have showcased the SD 8.0 card to show its performance as a concept, but having it announced as a final product is puzzling. No other storage maker showcased any SD 8.0 cards yet.

High-speed storage is essential for cameras because of the growing need for high speed and high storage for 8K RAW footage or high-resolution images with faster burst rate RAW images. This is where CF cards are preferred over SD cards. While SD cards are convenient, the pros outweigh any benefit they could offer professionals. There is also the question of whether camera manufacturers will see the importance of implementing the new SD standard sooner rather than later.

Despite the announcement, the card is not featured on Lexar's website, though its new stainless steel-based UHS-II SDXC cards are featured. We may not see SD 8.0 cards available because no cameras or card readers take advantage of this, or if they ever will. However, only time will tell if the hopes of having high-speed SD cards comparable to current CF cards will bear fruit. There's always the SDUC standard for those needing a higher-capacity SD card.

Western Digital showcased three major new SD cards: a 4TB SDUC SD card, a 2TB SDXC SD card, and even a 256 GB SD Express-supported card. Below, we'll examine some finer details, including why SDUC cards are still rare and how SD Express compares.

First, review the 2TB SDXC cards, the SanDisk Extreme Pro V30. The SanDisk Extreme Pro V30 comes in standard and microSD card formats, and this is stated to be the Extreme Pro's debut with 2TB of storage. The world's first 2TB microSD cards were released in January, so this is a brand-first and not a world-first anymore. However, 2TB is not a sufficient storage area to sneeze at— in fact, this officially tops out the range of the SDXC spec by hitting that 2TB target.

According to Western Digital, this SD card's use of UHS-I should make it one of the world's fastest microSD cards designed around these mainstream SDXC specifications for SSDs.

Next, let's look at the SanDisk SD Express (or microSD Express) cards, which join a market where similar SD Express cards already exist. WD's SanDisk SD Express and microSD Express cards look pretty similar to other SD cards, but using a faster PCIe interface can achieve storage read speeds of up to 880 MB/s and storage write speeds of up to ~650 MB/s. Unfortunately, the SD Express cards seem limited to only 256GB— but these speed feats place them somewhere between the best SATA SSDs and many early NVMe Gen 3 SSDs.

These speeds are pretty impressive for SD cards, and if costs get low enough while support continues to improve, the future of upcoming devices like Switch 2, Steam Deck 2, etc., looks just a bit brighter. Since many games are beginning to require SSDs and several pro workloads are better with them, continued improvements to SD card speeds like this bode well for the future.

Finally, look at the crowning jewel: the SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC V30, which weighs a whopping 4TB capacity. Even by the standards of full-sized drives, that's a lot of storage, and achieving it is finally starting to make good use of the SDUC specs. While SDXC caps out at 2TB anyway, SDUC-supported SD cards could one day get as big as 128TB. 

So, while a 2TB SDXC card shows that the limit has been reached, a 4TB SDUC card like this indicates that the absolute limit is one we have yet to go. While these are optimistic looks at the near future of SD cards from Western Digital-owned SanDisk, we do not have any actual pricing or lease date information to share.

Western Digital's new SDUC cards will be available in 2025. Pricing remains a mystery as the company didn't share many details about the upcoming products.

Valve was quick to push out a remedial fix centering on the Steam Deck’s expandable storage capability. As Gaming on Linux noticed, the recent stable Steam Client Update for desktop and Steam Deck broke the handheld device’s microSD card handling. Valve issued a new client update on Sept. 12 to directly address the issue.

The microSD card jinxing updates were delivered alongside the recent SteamOS 3.4.10 release. Shortly after they brought their systems up to date, Steam Deck owners started to report that their microSD cards weren't being mounted by the system.

According to reports, the microSD card issue was annoyingly inconsistent. For example, users could sometimes get their microSD card readers to work again if they pulled out and reinserted their microSD cards. Some users had to resort to a system reboot to get it to recognize an inserted microSD card.

Valve’s update page offers no background detail regarding the underlying problems fixed, nor any details about how the bug occurred. A single bullet point on the Steam Deck Client Update: Sept. 12 page says “General: Fixed a failure to recognize the microSD card after a system reboot.”

We don’t recall any prior issues with the Steam Deck’s handling of microSD cards. The same cannot be said for the Asus ROG Ally, though. The Asus handheld’s design seems to have located the microSD card reader hardware in a particularly hot area of the PCB — with unfortunate but somewhat predictable results.

To get the best performance from their games, users of these handhelds are steered to get the biggest built-in SSDs they can afford when buying their device. However, sometimes it might make sense to just upgrade the storage yourself — check out our roundup of the best M.2 2230 SSDs for handhelds (such as the Steam Deck).

If the best SSDs can't satiate your hunger for ultra-fast storage, you should try HighPoint's latest RocketAIC card, an enterprise-class PCIe 4.0 Add-In Card (AIC) designed for reliability and endurance. The RocketAIC is available with storage densities of up to 122 TB at whopping read and write performance up to 54 GB/s and 36 GB/s, respectively.

The RocketAIC communicates with your system through a regular PCIe 4.0 x16 expansion slot. Unlike other PCIe 4.0 AIC solutions, such as the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer or the ASRock Blazing Quad M.2 Card, the RocketAIC doesn't leverage M.2 SSDs. On the contrary, HighPoint's AIC taps the Solidigm D7-P5520 E1.S, a 114-layer TLC drive.

The RocketAIC features eight E1.S NVMe ports to house up to eight E.1S drives. You can't feed eight SSDs with only the expansion slot, so the RocketAIC has a standard 6-pin PCIe power connector for external power. An undisclosed Broadcom PCIe 4.0 switch ensures that each E.1S SSD has its own PCIe 4.0 x4 interface.

The AIC features a tools-free design where you can access the E.1S ports by pressing a switch. HighPoint developed a robust cooling solution to keep the E.1S SSDs cool. Heat is always the biggest enemy in AIC setups. The aluminum casing has integrated heatsinks with corresponding vents for heat dissipation. A pair of small, low-decibel cooling fans at the rear of the RocketAIC push air into the card to cool the SSDs.

The RocketAIC comes in two capacities: 30.72 TB and 61.44 TB. However, you can pair two in a dual-drive (cross-sync) setup to hit 122.88 TB of storage. The performance is similar between both capacities. However, the 61.44 TB model delivers read and write speeds up to 27 GB/s and 18 GB/s, respectively. In a dual-drive configuration, however, the performance jumps up to 54 GB/s reads and 36 GB/s writes.

HighPoint RocketAIC Specifications

The 30.72 TB drive consumes around 137.28W of power, while the 61.44 TB model's power draw is rated for 161.298W. For the dual-drive configuration, just multiply the power consumption by two. The RocketAIC supports three RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 10 arrays so you can pick between the best performance, added security, or a combination of the two. The only caveat is that it only supports data RAID and not boot RAID, an aspect that may be a deal breaker for some.

The RocketAIC comes in a standard full-height, full-length, dual-width form factor, measuring 7.68 x 4.37 x 0.85 inches (195.07 x 111 x 21.59mm).

The RocketAIC is compatible with macOS, Linux, and Windows operating systems. However, you must pay attention to the part number. The RA7749EM with the "EM" suffix is for macOS, while the RA7749EW with the "EW" suffix denotes the variant for Windows and Linux systems. Regardless of the operating system support, the drives have identical pricing, so you don't have to worry about one being more expensive than the other because you're on a Mac.

The RocketAIC has a three-year warranty regardless of the capacity or configuration. It's mind-boggling why HighPiont's warranty is so short, considering that the RocketAIC is a workstation product that costs an arm and a leg. Even Solidigm stands behind its D7-P5520 SSD with a five-year warranty. While the three-year warranty is equal across the board, the endurance limits vary between each RocketAIC SKU. In a single drive configuration, HighPoint backs the 30.72 TB and 61.44 TB drives with 7 PBW and 14 PBW, respectively. In contrast, the dual-drive 61.44 TB and 122.88 TB setups correspond to 56 PBW and 112 PBW, respectively.

The RocketAIC targets the professional and workstation markets and has a price tag that reflects that. The 30.72 TB drive retails for $4,999.99, and the 61.44 TB drive will set you back $9,999.99. HighPoint hasn't listed the dual-drive configurations on the company's eStore yet. However, the pricing should be twice the single models since the dual-drive package combines two single AICs.

Today, Asus has released a BIOS update for the ROG Alloy gaming handheld. However, among the blurb there is no specific mention of last week's hot topic - MicroSD cards getting so cooked they become unusable.

In Asus ROG Ally BIOS update v323, only a quartet of UX improvements are highlighted by Asus:

• UX improvement: Added 30W support when plugging in 65W or higher wattage PD adapters or Type-C hub. 
• UX improvement: Modified minimum panel backlight value from 25nits to 10nits to improve usability in dark environments.
• UX improvement: On future BIOS updates, the "Memory Assigned to GPU" setting won’t be reset to default; it will now keep its previous value.
• UX improvement: Optimized performance in Performance mode when plugged in.

The Asus community post also provides some explanatory information which talks about issues with third party USB Type-C docks, power draw, and Turbo mode. The discussion of power might give some hope that BIOS update v323 will address MicroSD card malfunctioning issues. At the time of writing Asus hasn't responded to users on forums or social media who have raised this burning question. Was it too optimistic to hope for a fix a week after the admission of this issue?

Asus admitted its MicroSD card overheating issue last week after simmering voices of complaint about ruined memory cards reached boiling point. To recap that news, an Asus rep wrote on the ROG Ally's Discord channel that "under certain thermal stress conditions the SD card reader may malfunction." The conditions didn't seem extraordinary, with complaints about toasted memory cards quite common.

Also last week, Asus pledged to push out an update to its ROG Ally customers which would tweak the device's fan curves. Enthusiasts had actually shown tuning the fans was a potential fix for MicroSD card frying issues several weeks earlier.

Until Asus comes out and officially says it has delivered an update to address potential MicroSD card overheating we therefore advise caution. Users might want to either tweak with their own fan curve settings to make sure the APU and VRM areas located near the card slot don't get too toasty. Or alternatively, try and simply avoid using the supplementary storage for a little while longer.

If your built-in storage is cramped, you might also consider an internal SSD upgrade. We recently looked at the best Steam Deck and ROG Ally SSD upgrade options, with prices starting at 11 cents per GB.

An Asus representative has admitted that the ROG Ally handheld can have a problem operating with MicroSD cards. Whitson Gordon shared an Asus HQ statement on Discord, where the firm says that its testing has revealed a thermal issue in play. For those currently suffering from memory card issues, Asus is opening up RMA programs. Furthermore, it hopes to mitigate further MicroSD card issues with an update that will modify the device’s fan curves.

Users of the Asus ROG Ally handheld have been complaining about memory card issues for quite some time. Some might get be able to use these memory cards again later, or after checking them on another computer, but for others the cards might become e-waste.

So, what is happening here? Asus has this to say about the ROG Ally’s heat problem: “under certain thermal stress conditions the SD card reader may malfunction.” The statement certainly suggests there is far too much heat at this location.

Around the Tom’s Hardware office we pondered over how much heat is being directed at the microSD card reader area of the ROG Ally’s PCB, and how it could damage a MicroSD card. According to WD / SanDisk, for example, its memory cards “are capable of withstanding operating temperatures from -13ºF to 185ºF (-25ºC to 85ºC).” Such temperatures aren’t beyond reason when we are talking about AMD APUs and components in near proximity.

In late June, well ahead of Asus’s admission, YouTuber CPPC TEK analyzed this ROG Ally MicroSD card overheating issue. In the video embedded above you can see how close the MicroSD card reader is to the power delivery VRMs, which feed the AMD APU.

CPPC TEK asserts that creating a manual fan curve, to keep things cooler than default has meant that he and various acquaintances have never had MicroSD card problems. The YouTuber went on to predict that Asus was going to have to deliver an update with more aggressive fan curves, to avoid this issue cropping up in the larger and perhaps less technically-minded user base.

Indeed, if we continue to read through today’s Asus HQ statement, it says that “To alleviate the issue, we will be releasing an update that further fine-tunes the default and minimum fan speeds on the device to improve reliability while keeping fan noise in check, as we know this is a concern for many of you.”

It sounds like Asus ROG Ally users are going to have to put up with a bit more fan noise so that their MicroSD cards aren’t fried. In our detailed review of the Asus handheld, we noted it was significantly quieter than the Steam Deck, and hopefully, that will continue to be the case.

Those who are having major problems with MicroSD cards in the ROG Ally can contact their local customer service center, or cl-adrian@asus.com (in the US).

Don’t forget that if you have a bigger handheld gaming system SSD, then you probably won’t need to use MicroSDs so much. Please check out our recent Best Steam Deck and ROG Ally SSD roundup if you decide to go this route.

Chinese customs have another unsuccessful smuggler in custody. In the latest unfortunate episode, a man was caught trying to smuggle 6,000 microSD cards from Hong Kong island to mainland China. Hong Kong residents benefit from zero sales tax on goods, but the rate on the mainland can be up to 13%.

MicroSD cards are very compact and smaller than an adult fingernail, so it isn’t surprising that 6,000 of these flash storage devices could be hidden within the structure of a bicycle. In the bike diagram, the customs authority outlined the sections filled with memory cards, including the large structural crossbar and the seat.

The smuggler rolled his bike through the 'nothing to declare' channel in transit from Hong Kong to Guangdong Province but gave away his illegal intent with his behavior. According to machine translations of the foreign language reports, the man "often looked away and acted suspiciously." We guess from this translation that he attempted to avoid eye contact with officials on his way through the green channel due to the secret stash of microSD cards. 

The source report also highlights additional recent attempts to smuggle undeclared / misdeclared goods from low / zero tax regions to the mainland. For example, at the end of March, a foreigner tried to smuggle 56 boxes (1.3 tons) of used smartphones and replacement screens to China. Somewhat amusingly, earlier this month, someone was caught attempting to import over 200 iPhones and iPads for "personal use."

We have reported on other failed Hong Kong-to-mainland China smuggling attempts in recent weeks and months. For example, at the end of March, we saw reports of around half a million items seized attempting this route, with a large portion of the haul comprising PC components like CPUs and SSDs. These misdeclared goods were worth HK$30 million (nearly $4 million).

As well as the smuggling attempts that are interesting for their audacious scale, there is another newsworthy category – the bizarre or comical attempts to smuggle high-tech goods. Addressing this category, we recently reported on a man trying to smuggle nearly 240 Intel Raptor Lake processors into China by taping them to his body and legs. In addition, late last year, a woman tried to pass off a prosthetic belly full of 200 CPUs and nine iPhones as a pregnancy. Also, a plan to smuggle 84 M.2 SSDs into China within a scooter frame just last month was foiled.

Remember, crime doesn't pay, especially if you are a suspicious-looking smuggler.

Western Digital this week announced that it has expanded its family of WD Purple SC QD101 microSD cards designed for compact and mobile surveillance applications with a 1TB model. In addition to offering a record capacity, the new card can survive harsh environments and, if used properly, promises to have an extremely long lifespan of up to 16 years. 

The WD Purple SC QD101 1TB microSD card is based on Western Digital’s BiCS4 96-layer 3D NAND memory and use a proprietary controller that supports card health status monitoring capability enabling operators to replace a card that is about to fail for some reason. The card uses a UHS-I bus, so its peak sequential read/write speeds will be comparable those of other modern WD Purple microSD cards (i.e., 60 MB/s reads and 100 MB/s writes), it also carries the Speed Class 10 as well as UHS Speed Class 1 badges, so it guarantees a minimal write speed of 10 MB/s. 

The WD Purple SC QD101 card can withstand temperatures from -25°C to 85°C and can survive bad weather as well as high humidity. Quite naturally, the microSD product is also designed for a 24/7 operation. 

Western Digital says that its WD Purple SC QD101 1TB microSD card is rated for up to 512 program/erase cycles (i.e., 512TB to write), which does not seem good enough by SSD standards. Meanwhile, there are three things to point out. Firstly, SD controllers do not support an advanced LDPC-based ECC technology, so memory cards cannot provide the same level of endurance as SSDs. Secondly, surveillance flash cards write data sequentially in most cases and that pretty much guarantees a low write amplification and a higher endurance when compared to applications that write randomly in most cases (e.g., SSDs). Thirdly, at ~60 MB/s, it will take 5926 days, or over 16 years, to write 512TB of data on this card. The product is covered with a three-year warranty, so its actual capabilities well exceed the warranty. 

There is a catch about endurance though. When using the card for non-surveillance applications that do many random writes, some cells might fail after some time since the card is optimized primarily for sequential workloads. 

Western Digital’s WD Purple SC QD101 1TB microSD card will be available this November. The price is to be announced later, but given that the product is intended for surveillance solutions, it is likely that makers of the latter will pay a price that will depend on volumes and other arrangements.

Writing an SD card, the first thing you need to do to set up a Raspberry Pi, typically involves a computer, card reader and software such Raspberry Pi Imager. But what happens when you are away from a computer and need to write a new OS for your Raspberry Pi? Well luckily there is a very useful app for Android phones and tablets. 

Raspi SD Card Imager from Mike Redrobe is a tool to write operating system images for use on the Raspberry Pi. It can download and flash from a selection of images, from Raspberry Pi OS, to Ubuntu and RetroPie, all from one handy app.

If you have your own custom images, these can be written to an SD card while you are on the road. Let's take a look at this application and learn how to write the latest Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit to a microSD card for a spare Raspberry Pi 4.

What You Need

• Android device
• Adapters to connect a micro SD card reader
• Micro SD card
• Raspberry Pi and accessories

How to Install Raspberry Pi OS with Raspi SD Card Imager

1. On your Android device open the Google Play Store and install Pi SD Card Imager. 

2. Insert your micro SD card (and reader) into your Android device. If your device has a built-in micro SD card reader, use that.

3. Open Raspi SD Card Imager app and press the three dots in the top right of the screen. Select Choose OS and use the filters at the top of the screen to select Pi 4. 

4. Choose Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) (3.2GB). This will download and cache the installation files to your Android device. 

5. Select Choose SD or USB via the three dot menu. Select the drive which contains your micro SD card. 

6.  Click on “Enable SSH for remote login” for out of the box SSH support. 

7.  Click on “Write to SD” to start the process. Depending on the Android device, this should take no longer than 10 minutes. 

8. Eject the micro SD card and then insert the micro SD card into your Raspberry Pi.

9. Power up the Raspberry Pi and it will go through the final stages of the install process. Once complete, the Pi will reboot and you will see the Raspberry Pi OS Desktop.

Hat tip to leepspvideo who provided the inspiration for this article. 

If you feel as though you're endlessly running out of digital storage space, you probably are. With file sizes going up, SD cards and other removable storage solutions are expanding.

• Get the SanDisk 200GB SD Card for $24.00.

If you find yourself in need of some additional storage space, Amazon has the SanDisk 200GB Ultra microSDXC on the cheap as part of a Deal of the Day sale going on now.

The deal nets you the 200GB Ultra microSDXC card for just $24, which is 26% off the typical asking price of $32.49. Amazon is also offering free one-day shopping for Prime members, so it'll be at your home in no time. Considering the next biggest card is 256GB for $42.99, this is a great deal for stocking up on extra cards – you never know when you're going to need one, after all.

This mini but mighty Deal of the Day nets you plenty of space to expand your smartphone’s memory, download your favorite Netflix shows to binge to your tablet, or save all those hilarious Super Smash Bros. Ultimate stage creations from your Nintendo Switch. These cards feature up to 100MB/s transfer read speed.

SanDisk's Ultra microSDXC cards are backed by a limited lifetime warranty, save for certain countries like Canada and any others that aren't eligible. In those cases, you're still covered by a lengthy warranty of 30 years. That's probably still plenty long enough, seeing as how storage needs will have almost certainly changed drastically by then.

Do you love taking photographs and recording videos on your smartphone, but always run out of storage? Are you sick of not having enough space for your Nintendo Switch games? Here's your opportunity to expand your storage space with PNY's U3 Pro Elite microSD card. The 256GB model, which retails for $139.99, is down to $59.99. The larger 512GB model that has a normal $189.99 is selling for $99.99.

• Get the PNY U3 Pro Elite 256GB microSD card for $59.99.
• Get the PNY U3 Pro Elite 512GB microSd card for $99.99.

Starting with the obvious, the PNY U3 Pro Elite is a microSDXC card that has earned the Class 10, U3 (UHS Speed Class 3), V30 (Video Speed Class 30) and A2 (Application Performance Class 2) certifications. In layman terms, PNY's offerings are fully capable of keeping up the latest 4K devices whether they be smartphones, action cameras, DSLRs and other devices.

Independent of the capacity, PNY's U3 Pro Elite microSD cards deliver up read and write speeds up to 100 MB/s and 80 MB/s, respectively. Whether you achieve the rated speeds depends on your device though. PNY also affirms that its U3 Pro Elite microSD cards are magnet-proof, shockproof, temperature-proof, waterproof and X-ray-proof. An SD adapter is included in case you want to use the U3 Pro Elite in a device with a standard SD slot.

They PNY U3 Pro Elite microSD cards are backed by PNY's limited lifetime warranty.

At the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona today, the SD Association announced the new microSD Express standard based on the PCIe and NVMe interfaces.

New SD 7.1 Specification

The SD Association announced the microSD Express interface as part of the new SD 7.1 specification and some manufacturers have already announced microSD cards that support it.

The need for higher-speed microSD has increased primarily due to more smartphones gaining support for 4K resolution video recording at 60 frames per second (fps), as well as for 960 fps slow-motion videos, which can turn into very large files very quickly. Higher-speed microSDs are also increasingly needed for the ever-evolving gaming systems, multi-channel IoT devices, numerous automotive uses, action cameras, 360-degree videos and VR use cases.

Hiroyuki Sakamoto, SDA president, in a statement said: “microSD Express gives the mobile industry a compelling new choice to equip mobile devices with removable SSDs. SD 7.1 prepares consumers and mobile device manufacturers to meet ever increasing storage demands for years to come.”

SSD Speeds for microSD Cards

The microSD Express interface uses the PCIe 3.1 and NVMe v1.3 specifications defined by PCI-SIG and NVM Express, respectively. PCIe 3.1 comes with support for low-power states, which enable the low-power implementation of SD Express for mobile devices. The power utilized by microSD Express cards for data transfers is expected to be less than what traditional microSD cards consumed.

The SD Association and NVM Express Inc believe that microSD Express cards could be rapidly embraced in future products as consumers start to treat microSDs more like removable SSDs for their mobile devices.

Amber Huffman, NVM Express Inc. president, said: “NVMe is the industry-recognized performance SSD interface from the client to the data center to mobile, shipping in millions of units. By SDA adopting NVMe technology into the new microSD Express cards, users can experience lower latency and increasingly fast transfer speeds across various applications.” 

The era of 1TB microSD cards is here. Micron and Western Digital both announced 1TB microSDXC UHS-I cards at MWC Barcelona 2019. Micron's is called the Micron c200 1TB microSDXC UHS-I, which is as descriptive as it is easy to remember, while Western Digital's offering will be sold as the SanDisk Extreme microSDXC UHS-I.

Our need for more storage rises in step with the capabilities of the computers in our pockets, so it's no longer enough to store a few gigabytes worth of data. Now we're playing graphically intense games, shooting 4K video, and storing other content on our phones. As such, both cards are primarily meant for use in smartphones.

As Micron said in its press release about the new 1TB card:

“Micron’s technology leadership in 3D NAND with CMOS under the array and 96-layer QLC has been instrumental in developing and launching the world’s first 1TB microSD card,” said Aravind Ramamoorthy, senior director of NAND solutions for Micron's Embedded Business Unit. “The new c200 1TB microSD card gives consumers the freedom to capture, share, store and enjoy more content while supporting their mobile-centric lifestyles.”

It also isn't enough to offer high capacity storage--otherwise, people would be content to connect external hard drives to their phones. Storage has to be small enough to fit into the phone itself, have a high enough capacity to handle everything we want to store and be fast enough that we don't grow impatient.

These cards are supposed to meet all those criteria. They fit everywhere a microSDXC card does boast up to 1TB of storage, and offer up to 100MB/s read and 95MB/s write (Micron), or 160MB/s read and 90MB/s write (Western Digital) speeds. That's said to be fast enough to handle 4K UHD video recording and playback easily.

Both cards also meet the A2 Application Performance Class specification, which means they're fine to use for mobile apps. As we said, they should be good-to-go for data-hungry smartphones.

Micron said it plans to release the Micron c200 1TB microSDXC UHS-I card in 2Q19; it didn't reveal pricing information. Western Digital plans to release the SanDisk Extreme microSDXC UHS-I in April 2019 in two capacities, 512GB and 1TB, for a respective $200 and $450. The card's available to reserve on SanDisk's website.

That price discrepancy highlights the fact that the era of 1TB microSD cards is really only beginning. Most people aren't going to spend $450 on 1TB of storage--especially as prices for desktop storage continue to fall--instead of buying the $200 offering. Enthusiasts will, of course, but the average consumer won't.

Still, it won't be too long until the price of the 1TB card falls in line with the 512GB offering. People are getting too data-hungry (and too used to paying a pittance for storage) for prices to remain that high for too long. This is a glimpse at the future, not a sign that everyone will have 1TB microSD cards in a month.

HyperX, Kingston's renowned gaming division, has just launched a new line of gaming microSD cards that promises high levels of performance and reliability for demanding gamers.

Nowadays, it's pretty common to find the gaming monicker on every type of computer product, whether it be components, like motherboards or memory, or peripherals, such as mice, keyboards and headsets. There are even routers and network switches out there labeled and marketed as gaming-grade devices. HyperX's latest gaming-oriented microSD cards aren't a novelty by any means since SanDisk released its own microSD cards for gamers not so long ago. However, what really surprised us was that HyperX was so late to the game considering it's one of the major players in the gaming market and owned by parent company Kingston.

The Class 10 UHS-I HyperX Gaming microSD cards feature A1 and U3 speed class performance with read speeds of 100MB/s and write speeds of 80MB/s. HyperX will offer the microSD cards in capacities of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. HyperX emphasized that its gaming microSD cards are compatible with a wide selection of devices, which include the Nintendo Switch console, mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, and basically any other portable gaming devices with a microSD slot.

Consumers in the United States and Canada can purchase the new HyperX Gaming microSD cards through Amazon, HyperX said in its announcement. The 64GB (HXSDC/64GB) model goes for $49.99, while the 256GB (HXSDC/256GB) will set you back $199.99. At the time of writing, HyperX hasn't revealed the price tag for the 128GB (HXSDC/128GB). As is custom, all HyperX Gaming microSD cards are backed by a lifetime warranty and technical support.

HyperX Gaming microSD Card Specifications

• Capacity: 64GB, 128GB, 256GB
• Performance: 100MB/s read and 80MB/s write, UHS-I, CL10, Speed Class (U3), A1 App
• Dimensions: 11 x 15 x 1mm
• Format: exFAT (SDXC 64GB-256GB)
• Operating Temperatures: -25°C to 85°C
• Storage Temperatures: -40°C to 85°C
• Voltage: 3.3V

Since the start of Computex 2018, a number of companies have announced 512GB microSD cards, but the first product came from Integral Memory based in London back in January. Since then Adata, PNY, and now Lexar have unleashed products with the same capacity. But the new Lexar is different from the rest: it's the only product to gain A2 certification, making it the fastest available for running applications on your smartphone or tablet.

"Turning it up to two" just doesn't have a strong enough ring to it, but it's the equivalent to 11 when it comes to SD application performance, because the rating indicates that a product is capable of at least 4,000 read and 2,000 write IOPS. Here's what having an A2 certification entails:

"The Application Performance Class 2 (A2) is defined by SD Physical 6.0 specification. It makes SD memory card much higher performance than A1 performance by using functions of Command Queuing and Cache. Efficient flash memory management can be supported by Maintenance functions. Application Performance Class can be applied to UHS SDHC/SDXC Memory Card product family."

We broke the story of Lexar's acquisition last August, and since then the company has focused on building its brand and establishing a network of retail sellers. Its parent company, Longsys, is the largest buyer of Samsung flash memory and the largest SSD manufacturer in China. You probably don't recognize the Longsys name but you do know its products; it manufactures SSDs and SD-type products for the world's largest brands.

It's easy to see how the acquisition of Lexar, one of the most trusted brand names in the U.S., will play out over time with the backing of such a strong and diverse company behind the wheel. The company has a number of interesting products in the works that are just begging to be revealed.

Aside from the A2 certified microSD card, Lexar also announced a new high-speed USB portable SSD called the SL100 Pro. This drive reaches up to 850 MB/s sequential performance and will ship in capacities of 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB. The USB 3.1 Gen 2 drive features a small, yet sturdy enclosure that fits well in your shirt or jeans pocket with room to spare.

PNY just announced the new 512GB Elite microSDXC memory card, which is large enough to take the capacity crown away from the 400GB device SanDisk released in February. For $350, mobile data hoarders can store over 80 hours of Full HD video or 100,000 18MP pictures.

The 512GB Elite satisfies the performance requirements to meet Class 10 and U1 ratings but not the hefty A1 requirement for application performance in a mobile device. PNY claims up to 90 MB/s performance over the UHS-1 interface but doesn't specify random performance, which is used to achieve the A1 rating.

Compatibility is always a concern for large capacity microSDXC products. PNY includes an SD adapter with the 512GB Elite for use in a PC or Mac but didn't publish a list of supported mobile devices.

PNY is the first to announce a 512GB microSD card, but we know more will come in a few weeks at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan. The increase in density is a direct result of advances in flash technology. PNY didn't disclose the technology used to make the 512GB Elite microSDXC possible but it's likely the result of new 4-bit per cell memory (QLC) from Toshiba.

What worries us about the 512GB Elite microSDXC is the lack of any published endurance specifications. QLC is new, unproven memory technology for consumer devices and will require powerful software error correction technology that increases power consumption over the life of the device.

SanDisk announced the new Extreme UHS-I microSD Card at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The drive fits 400GB on a card the size of your fingernail and takes the "world's fastest" honor with up to 160 MB/s sequential read performance.

SanDisk says the new model is 50% faster than the previous generation. Sequential write performance tops 90MB/s, according to the company's internal testing. The SanDisk Extreme UHS-I microSD Card meets or exceeds the A2 specification for random performance used to launch apps at high speeds on mobile devices. The cost is less micro--expect to shell out $300 for the largest capacity and fastest SD card available.

Here's what SanDisk said about its new card in a press release:

“Consumers expect an increasingly better mobile experience, and with our 3D NAND technology, we are pushing the boundaries of innovation to enable them to create and enjoy more rich content on their devices. Our expertise in flash memory and microSD card electronics enables us to achieve unmatched performance. The breakthrough SanDisk microSD card is evidence of Western Digital’s commitment to delivering more advanced solutions that enable data to thrive,” said Jim Welsh, senior vice president and general manager, Client Solutions, Western Digital.

Parent company Western Digital is also showing a new mobile storage technology based on PCI Express "in anticipation of the next generation of high-performance mobile computing requirements."

The technology uses the latest PCIe 3.0 standard with a single lane capable of up to 985 MB/s. This technology has been discussed several times in the past but lacks the device support needed to spur production of the storage component. We may see moves in PCIe-based mobile storage this year, however, as companies look to new technology to increase performance and reduce power consumption.

Nintendo announced that SanDisk will release Switch-branded microSDXC cards in October. The cards themselves won't be unique, aside from their inclusion of the Switch logo, but the partnership could allow SanDisk to become the brand of choice for Switch owners looking for extra storage.

Two cards will be available. The first bears Link from The Legend of Zelda on its packaging and, more important, boasts a 64GB capacity with up to 100MBps sequential read and 60MBps sequential write speeds. The second features Mario from, well, you know. That card has a 128GB capacity and up to 100MBps sequential read and 90MBps sequential write speeds. Nintendo didn't reveal pricing information or a firm release date for either card.

The announcement of these cards featured all of the usual PR speak—praise for each company's market share, talking up the Switch's reception, etc.—but it also contained an interesting tidbit about upcoming games. Here's what Nintendo said about why people will want these cards:

Additional storage enables players to download more digital games and content, and take it all on the go. Also, a microSD card will be needed for certain Nintendo Switch games that contain an especially large amount of content and require additional storage for players to enjoy the full experience.

It's not clear if the second sentence refers to digital games that exceed the Switch's 32GB of built-in storage or to physical games that won't fit on a single cartridge. The former wouldn't be surprising; games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild require at least 13.8GB of storage if they're downloaded from the eShop. (And that doesn't even include save game data, expansions, and updates that could take up even more space.)

That means you could buy two particularly large games and run out of storage on the Switch. In that case, you either have to remove something from the console or purchase an SD card. Unless you plan to research the best cards—and we're sure you would, dear reader—chances are good that you'll just buy the Switch-branded SD cards with the familiar characters on their packaging right next to everything else Nintendo related.

The more intriguing possibility is that a single game will require more storage than the Switch's carts provide. We imagine that would be a tougher sell—part of the reason why people buy physical versions of games is to sidestep the storage problem. Still, we'd be interested to see how something could escape the bounds of those carts, even if the rise of digital gaming is the more likely explanation for Nintendo's statement.

Nintendo said these cards will be available at "select retail outlets" in October.

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.

“Mobile devices have become the epicenter of our lives, and consumers are now accustomed to using their smartphones for anything from entertainment to business. We are collecting and sharing massive amounts of data on smartphones, drones, tablets, PCs, laptops and more. We anticipate that storage needs will only continue to grow as people continue to expect more sophisticated features on their devices and desire higher quality content,” Jeff Janukowicz, research vice president, IDC. “We estimate mobile device users worldwide will install over 150 billion applications alone this year, which require a ton of memory on all of our favorite devices.”

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.

SanDisk pairs the new high-capacity, high-performance microSD drive with an updated app called SanDisk Memory Zone, which offers you greater control of your device's storage. The app is currently available on Google Play as a free download.

The new 400GB microSD card costs a bit more. Priced at $250 through major retailers, you'll pay a premium for the best-in-class user capacity.

Western Digital achieved this capacity breakthrough by leveraging its proprietary memory technology and design and production processes that allow for more bits per die.

The obvious question is if Western Digital just released a product with quad-level cell (QLC) memory technology. The press release leads us to believe so. because other companies have hinted that QLC will make an appearance in limited form before the end of the year, and Toshiba demonstrated working QLC at Flash Memory Summit with a massive 768Gbit die capacity.

SanDisk, which is now a Western Digital Company, introduced two new beefy 256 GB microSDXC cards at the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, China. SanDisk went through a quiet period as it worked out the kinks of its acquisition by WD, but now the company appears to be back to normal operation as it released several new products this week.

SanDisk has not indicated what type of NAND its new capacious cards employ, and the company has not released its new BiCS 3D NAND in any products yet. It is unlikely that BiCS would make its debut in the microSDXC format, so the new cards likely utilize 15nm planar NAND. This is an important distinction, because Samsung manufactures the only competing 256GB microSDXC cards on the market, which employ 3D TLC V-NAND.

The new cards are an evolutionary capacity increase in comparison to the previous-generation 200 GB SanDisk Ultra offerings.

SanDisk Extreme MicroSDXC UHS-I 256 GB

SanDisk claimed the Extreme variant is the fastest card in its class, and the company designed it for intense 4K use cases such as action cameras, drones and 4K-capable smartphones. SanDisk claimed the Extreme features a "data transfer speed" (which we interpret as a read speed metric) up to 100 MB/s, and its sequential write speed is listed at 90 MB/s. SanDisk declined to reveal the write speed of the previous-generation 200 GB Ultra card, likely because it is less than impressive, so the inclusion of the write speed with this model is noteworthy. SanDisk noted that the card can store up to 14 hours of 4K UHD video.

SanDisk indicated that the 256 GB Extreme will retail for $199.99 in Q4 2016, which is significantly less than the $249.99 price tag on the competing Samsung Evo Plus. However, Samsung originally scheduled the Samsung Evo Plus for general availability this month, but it is not for sale at any major retailers (that we can find). Both cards offer a ten-year warranty, but the SanDisk card provides 5 MB/s more of sequential read performance.

SanDisk Ultra Premium Edition MicroSDXC UHS-I 256 GB

SanDisk designed the Ultra Premium Edition for more mundane non-4K workloads, and the company positioned it specifically for Android-based smartphones and tablets by touting that it can hold up to 24 hours of Full HD video. SanDisk listed its transfer speed (sequential read) at 95 MB/s but did not disclose its sequential write speed, which likely indicates anemic performance.

The Ultra microSDXC will come to market in August 2016 with an MSRP of $149.99, and it features a ten-year warranty.

Features

SanDisk indicated that both models feature the usual repertoire of features, such as being waterproof; temperature resistant (-25C to 85C); and X-Ray, magnet and impact proof -- which are fairly standard qualities of all microSDXC cards. Both cards also support the SanDisk Memory Zone app for Android devices.

Paul Alcorn is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.

Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

This week in storage was a somewhat quiet affair, as all of the major storage vendors are holding new product announcements prior to Computex, which takes place at the end of the month. We are going to have a full complement of reporters on hand for the show in hot and humid Taipei, so expect the news deluge to begin soon.

WD and SanDisk are hearing wedding bells as the MOFCOM Chinese regulatory agency approved the Western Digital acquisition of SanDisk. Both companies have multiple products from their previous marriages, and there are a few SSD overlaps, so the situation will get dicey as WD slices out redundant products. The companies manufacture inherently dissimilar products, for the most part, so the axes will likely swing hardest in many of the support roles, such as marketing and HR.

In either case, WD's investor friends are not particularly impressed with the acquisition, as evidenced by the plummeting stock price during the process (it's now trading at a four-year low). WD has lost more than 60 percent of its value in the last year, and Bank Of America downgraded the company due to reduced NAND pricing. (Poor WD...first it loses value on reduced HDD sales, so it buys its way into flash, then loses value due to reduced NAND prices.)

Samsung announced that it is bringing an incredible amount of storage to hand-held devices with its new 256 GB EVO Plus MicroSD card. Suddenly, my meager 128 GB MicroSD card feels inferior to the well-endowed EVO Plus, as does SanDisk's competing 200 GB Ultra MicroSD card. The EVO Plus serves yet another example of the performance and density advantages provided by 3D TLC NAND in comparison to planar (2D) NAND.

The SanDisk 200 GB Ultra does not have a sequential write speed listed in its specifications. Usually, when a key specification is missing, it means the company would rather not talk about it because it is horridly slow. SanDisk does note, however, that the Ultra's "write speed is lower" in comparison to its read speed, but the lack of a listed specification tells me all I need to know.

Meanwhile, the prodigious Samsung is thrusting its extra 56 GB of capacity into SD slots with 95/90 MBps of sequential read/write speed. Now if Samsung would just reduce its $249.99 price to a sane level...

Phison Predicts NAND Drought In Midst Of NAND Flood

The burning question around any computer component is whether we should buy one today or wait until prices go down. In the case of SSDs, according to Phison, prices are headed the other direction.

Khein-Seng Pua, the Company Chairman of Phison, predicted a looming third-quarter NAND shortage in the Chinese Economic Daily News. Pua indicated that the transition to 3D NAND is not progressing smoothly for several of the large NAND fabs, which will ultimately lead to an industry-wide shortage.

Phison is a well-known SSD controller manufacturer, but few know that it actually builds the entire SSD for several of the third-party SSD vendors. Companies such as Corsair, Patriot, PNY, and others buy the complete SSD from Phison and then sell it under their own brand.

To fuel its manufacturing efforts, Phison maintains a large supply of NAND, which is currently valued at NT$9.27 billion (~$284 million USD), so it is keenly aware of NAND market trends. It appears the company is building up its NAND stockpile, which was valued only at $160 million USD at the end of 2015.

SSD prices, which are largely driven by the price of NAND, are currently at historic lows. The price of a 256 GB SSD has fallen from roughly $125 last year to sub-$60 this year, so it is clear that there is an abundance of NAND on the market.

The low SSD prices are the result of the declining smartphone and desktop PC markets, which weaken demand. The depth and extent of the decline varies depending upon the analyst firm that is reporting them, but all foresee a continued desktop PC slump for the remainder of the year, along with uncharacteristic single-digit growth numbers for the mobile phone market.

Many analysts contradict the Phison predictions, and instead foresee an increasing oversupply as 3D NAND from other fabs, such as Intel/Micron 3D NAND and SK Hynix 3D NAND V2, come to market. When 3D NAND does take hold, it will magnify the amount of capacity shipped due to its increased density, and pouring more capacity onto a market that is already swimming in NAND should only intensify the oversupply condition.

Samsung certainly believes there is a pending possibility for an oversupply situation, as evidenced by its February 2016 announcement that it postponed the expansion of its 3D NAND fab in Xi'an, China. SanDisk is also rumored to have its 3D BiCS NAND very close to shipping, but the company has been quiet during its pending (now final) acquisition by WD. Speaking of NAND oversupplies, Bank Of America just downgraded WD due to weak NAND ASPs.

However, the 3D NAND transition has been painfully slow, and most fabs are still not shipping 3D NAND in volume. We also have yet to see any 3D NAND-powered products from third-party SSD vendors, which we expect to see teased at Computex, but it is unlikely that many will be available in the near term.

Many of the fabs are transitioning their NAND bit output to 3D and have not increased 2D NAND output, which Khein-Seng Pua contends will open a window of opportunity for the NAND drought. If his predictions come to fruition, there will be a sudden increase in SSD prices across the board, and some cite an increasing price gap between 2D TLC and MLC as a sign that there is already an MLC NAND drought brewing.

If there is not an impending drought, as the industry at large tends to believe, then Phison has a stockpile valued over a quarter of a billion dollars that will lose value rapidly as 3D NAND continues to dilute the average selling price. If a drought materializes, then Phison made a particularly wise investment that will pay big dividends.

Such is life in the NAND game. If one were to believe the Phison predictions, and just happen to have a lot of skin in the game, the time to buy an SSD is now.

Paul Alcorn is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.

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Samsung unveiled its beefy EVO Plus 256 GB MicroSD card, which unseats SanDisk as the current MicroSD density leader. SanDisk introduced its 200 GB Ultra MicroSD card in March 2015, but it is widely believed to employ 15nm planar TLC NAND, whereas the new Samsung EVO Plus features its 48-layer 3D TLC V-NAND. 

The UHS-1 Class 10 EVO Plus offers up to 95/90 MBps of sequential read/write throughput, which should satisfy the needs of most common applications, such as 4K video recording, high-resolution photography and other mobile applications. In contrast, the SanDisk Ultra 200 GB offers up to 90 MBps of sequential read speed, but no write speed is listed in its specifications.

Samsung is exploiting the advantages of 3D TLC NAND to beat the SanDisk offering on both density and performance, but both offer the same 10-year warranty period.

For now, the Samsung EVO Plus retails for $249.99, which will buy you enough storage to hold up to 55,000 photos, 12 hours of 4K UHD video, 33 hours of full HD video, or up to 23,500 MP3 files.

The SanDisk Ultra 200 GB can be found for around $80, which works out to $0.40-per-GB, whereas the 256 GB EVO Plus weighs in at $0.97-per-GB. The smart money says to wait a week or two until the early-adopter tax subsides; Samsung will have to be more competitive on the price front, and likely will be. The faster speed of 3D NAND is a nice bullet point on the specifications list, but the MicroSD card space tends to be driven by value. 

It goes without saying that the EVO Plus is waterproof, magnetic proof and X-ray proof, as nearly all MicroSD cards are, but Samsung threw in claims of it being temperature-proof, as well. This might lead some users to mistakenly deploy the EVO Plus into industrial applications, where high heat tolerance typically demands extra dollars. We are sure the fine print will hash that out, but make sure to investigate the claim before using it in high-heat applications, which are notoriously harsh on NAND-based storage, such as vehicle video recorders.

The new card will be available in 50 countries, including the U.S., Europe and China in June 2016.

Paul Alcorn is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.

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Note: The Flash Memory Summit 2015 and Tom's Hardware / Tom's IT Pro are pleased to announce complementary 3-day access passes (a $1,695 value) to all qualified IT Professionals. See below for registration information.

Flash storage permeates every single aspect of our daily lives. If you've used a PC, laptop, cellphone, television, or even drove a vehicle today, the odds are pretty good that you have come into contact with the advantages of flash storage. There is no better place to get a finger on the pulse of the flash world than the upcoming Flash Memory Summit 2015 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. The trade show runs from August 11-13 and is jam-packed with seminars, forums, keynotes and sessions that cover every aspect of the flash ecosystem.

At last year's summit we began hearing the drumbeats of the approaching TLC SSD parade. The move to TLC NAND is now well underway, and there are projections that by the end of this year more than half of the NAND produced will be TLC. Toshiba has its new 15nm TLC coming to market, and across the aisle Micron will also be touting the advantages of its competing 16nm TLC NAND.

Samsung has yet to make one of its notoriously ground-shaking 3D NAND announcements this year, so we also expect more news on the V-NAND front during the show. The powerful Intel/Micron partnership isn't standing on the 3D NAND sidelines, and with their products headed to market by the end of this year, we wouldn't be surprised to see a wafer of their long-anticipated 3D NAND on display.

NVMe brings the next level of performance for bleeding-edge SSDs, and a common perception in the industry is that if a vendor doesn't have a TLC SSD with NVMe by next year, they aren't going to be around for long. We expect to hear more about the pairing of lower-cost TLC NAND with the NVMe interface from several vendors during this year's show. Plextor, for instance, will be rolling out its first NVMe SSD, the M7e.

SSDs with larger capacities are also coming to the forefront as the price of NAND continues to drop, and we are sure to hear of new 2.5" SSD releases that break the 1 TB barrier during the event. 

Last year's event also had a glimpse of the future beyond NAND, with ST-MRAM, PCM and RRAM on display, including a working demo pushing out more than 3 million IOPS. It will be interesting to see what new cutting-edge technology will come to the forefront during this year's event.

Flash Memory Summit has it all, from the most in-depth over-your-head technical discussions to the glitzy displays of the latest flash products. The leaders of the flash industry, including Micron, Samsung, SanDisk, HGST, Seagate and Toshiba, among many others, will be at the conference in full force. Exhibitors from every link in the flash food chain will also be present, such as networking, test equipment, standards committees and software vendors. 

Tom's Hardware and Tom's IT Pro will also be at the show in full force to bring the latest news directly to our readers. We will be scouring the floor for award-worthy products in the client and enterprise space, which we will be announcing online during the show. We will also have a booth at the show, so feel free to stop by and chat about storage with our media representatives. 

Flash Memory Summit has an expanded IT focus this year, and we are also pleased to announce that there will be free all-access 3-day passes for qualified readers who are IT professionals. Readers meeting that requirement are encouraged to email the Flash Memory Summit at pr@flashmemorysummit.com with the requisite credentials (such as a link to a LinkedIn profile).

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Samsung unveiled its next-generation EVO, EVO Plus, PRO and PRO Plus SD and microSD cards, which significantly improve the performance of their predecessors. The PRO series is now capable of supporting the speeds necessary for transferring and recording 4K UHD content, which should be a great benefit to consumers looking to record 4K video on their high-end smartphones or on their DSLRs.

Samsung announced that it will launch the PRO and PRO Plus SD and microSD cards with 32 GB and 64 GB options. Samsung claimed that its PRO Plus series can read data at up to 95 MB/s and write at up to 90 MB/s.

Users can store up to 110 minutes of 4K UHD video or 490 minutes of 1080p video on the 64 GB version. The PRO and PRO Plus cards satisfy the UHS-I Speed Class 3 (U3) as well as the Speed Class 10 levels of performance.

The EVO and EVO Plus cards have only slightly lower read speeds of 80 MB/s and significantly smaller write speeds of only 20 MB/s. However, they'll likely sell at an appropriate (lower) price point as well. These cards provide the UHS-I Speed Class 1 (U1) and Speed Class 10 performance.

Because of the much lower write speeds, the EVO-series can currently only support transferring and recording of 1080p video. The upside is that Samsung will offer 32 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB EVO Plus variants, which can store a maximum of 10,940 photos, 30,670 songs, or 980 minutes of Full HD video recording.

The difference between the basic versions and the Plus versions of the SD and microSD series is that the Plus versions come with five protection features, which include protection against water damage, temperature, shock, X-ray and magnetism, therefore making the cards more resilient. They could, for instance, be more suitable for "rugged" or waterproof phones such as the ones Samsung and Sony are selling. Both Plus series can withstand up to 72 hours of submersion under seawater. Samsung claimed that represents a 48-hour improvement over existing products.

All card series are guaranteed to survive operating temperatures from -25°C to 85°C (-13°F to 185°F) and non-operating temperatures from -40°C to 85°C (-40°F to 185°F).

Samsung will offer the new microSD cards starting this month, while their SD equivalents will ship at a later date.

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Archos launched a new proprietary technology that will combine the physical storage space of its tablets and smartphones with storage provided by an inserted microSD card. Called Fusion Storage, this software-based feature is now rolling out to specific tablets and phones by way of an over-the-air update.

"Archos' R&D team focused on the lower layers of the Google operating system and its Kernel core, modifying its characteristics to allow automatic memory reconciliation and allocation," the company explained in a press release. "The result is increased capacity for Android tablets and smartphones through a seamless and safe transfer of information."

Once customers install the new feature, Fusion Storage will analyze the files on the device and move them to a specific area. For example, photos, video and data will be stored on the installed microSD card. However, the application files will be housed in the internal storage. All of this can be reversed if the customer removes the microSD card.

Archos indicated that all new tablets and smartphones, starting with the Archos 62 Xenon and the Archos 59 Xenon, will already have Fusion Storage installed. Older devices that will receive the over-the-air update include the Archos 101 Oxygen, the Archos 50 Oxygen Plus, the Archos 52 Platinum and the Archos 50 Diamond.

The company first introduced Fusion Storage back in March during Mobile World Congress 2015 (pdf). Archos called it "revolutionary" in that the tech pulls data from the microSD card and "optimizes memory balance." Thus, by combining the microSD card and internal storage, devices receive an increased storage capacity.

Fusion Storage was introduced alongside the company's Magnus range of tablets that feature up to 256 GB of internal storage. This line includes the Archos 94 Magnus, the Archos 101 Magnus and the Archos 101 Magnus Plus. These tablets shipped in April, costing $349 for the Archos 101 Magnus Plus (128 GB), $349 for the Archos 94 Magnus (256 GB) and $179 for the Archos 101 Magnus (64 GB). All three have Fusion Storage.

What will be interesting to see is how the Fusion Storage-compatible devices will perform with the feature enabled. Presumably, this method is different than moving apps to an SD card, as Fusion Storage is attempting to "fuse" together both the ROM and microSD capacity. As Archos revealed, there won't be chunks of installed apps sitting on the microSD card to slow the system down.

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SanDisk announced its new 200 GB Ultra microSDXC UHS-I and High Endurance Video Monitoring memory cards today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The 200 GB Ultra Premium Edition takes the throne as the highest-capacity MicroSD card geared for use in mobile devices, and it delivers a 56 percent increase in storage capacity within a fingernail-sized device.

Mobile phones and their increasingly sophisticated cameras continue to pillage the digital camera market, which contracted 40 percent in 2013 alone. Mobile devices have become the camera of choice for the majority of users, and increased resolutions and video quality are fueling the need for more storage capacity.

“Mobile devices are completely changing the game. Seven out of 10 images captured by consumers are now from smartphones and tablets. Consumers view mobile-first devices as their primary means for image capture and sharing, and by 2019 smartphones and tablets will account for nine out of 10 images captured," said Christopher Chute, Vice President, Worldwide Digital Imaging Practice, IDC. "As the needs of mobile users continue to change, SanDisk is on the forefront of delivering solutions for these demands as is clearly illustrated through their growing portfolio of innovative products, including the new 200GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card."

Performance is also important in mobile applications, and the Ultra provides 90 MB/s, which is fast enough to move roughly 1,200 photos per minute. SanDisk refined its production process to store more bits per die, which obviously has not affected the overall reliability of the device. SanDisk backs the Ultra with a ten-year limited warranty, and the diminutive storage solution will feature a $399.99 MSRP. The 200 GB Ultra will hit store shelves in Q2 of this year.

SanDisk also announced the first microSDXC memory card designed for high-endurance applications. The SanDisk High Endurance Video Monitoring (HEVM) 64 GB memory card is designed for dash cameras and home video monitoring systems and has the ability to withstand 10,000 hours of full HD video recording. The 32 GB version of the memory card features a 5,000-hour recording threshold.

Memory cards are well suited for vehicle applications. They are resistant to shock, can weather temperature extremes and are waterproof. The HEVM memory cards operate at Class 10 speeds, which is sufficient for the majority of video applications. The HEVM cards have a two-year warranty and are available for $84.99 and $149.99 for the 32 GB and 64 GB capacity points, respectively. HEVM cards will initially only be available through the SanDisk website for U.S. customers.

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The display resolution rush presents a number of technical challenges. Just yesterday, DisplayPort 1.3 addressed the bandwidth issue, but there is more to be concerned about. One of those issues is video recording, for which you need fast storage. Several mobile phones already support recording 4K video, but the time intervals for recording with these are rather limited due to the lack of speedy storage options. For SanDisk, the fastest MicroSD card you could buy would transfer up to 95 MB/s, although it only came in up to 16 GB capacities – until now. SanDisk has announced the Extreme Pro 32 GB and 64 GB MicroSD cards, which are UHS-I compliant and capable of reading up to 95 MB/s and writing up to 90 MB/s.

It's true that 128 GB MicroSD cards are already on the market, but they aren't nearly as fast. The higher transfer rates might not seem relevant for transferring music to your phone, for example, and you might have patience for installing applications, but when it comes to 4K video recording there are certain minimum transfer speeds that you'll need in order to be able to keep up. That's also SanDisk's target group here – users who record 4K video with their mobile phones.

Performance aside, there is another aspect about these cards that's important to note: their resistance to harsh environments. SanDisk claims that they're able to operate in temperature ranges of -25 C through 85 C and that they can be submerged in 1 m of salt water for up to three days straight and remain operational after drying.

We've reached out to SanDisk for information on pricing and will let you know when we hear back.

Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

This week during the International Broadcasting Convention, SanDisk revealed its largest SD card to date, the 512 GB SanDisk Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I memory card. Built for professionals, this card promises not only a huge capacity for raw movies and photos, but write speeds up to 90 MB/s and transfer speeds up to 95 MB/s.

"Since SanDisk unveiled its first 512 MB SD card in 2003, capacity demands have increased exponentially and the new 512 GB SanDisk Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I card represents a 1,000-fold capacity increase in just over a decade, yet maintains the same size footprint," the press release said.

According to a list of features, the card is resistant to shock, temperature, water and X-rays. Because the card is "temperature-proof," users can take photos in extreme climates ranging from -13 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit.

The feature list also shows that the new 512 GB card has a built-in Advanced Wear Leveling and Error Correction Code engine. The card even has UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) recording speed for stutter-free 4K Ultra HD video. A built-in write protect switch prevents users from accidentally deleting the card's contents.

The new 512 GB card provides a discount on RescuePRO Deluxe, which helps users bring back their accidentally deleted files on the 512 GB card. A lifetime limited warranty is also provided.

The SanDisk Extreme PRO UHS-I SDHC/SDXC family includes 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB capacities. The new 512 GB card costs $799.99 and is available now.

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Toshiba America Components revealed the "world's fastest" microSD memory cards. These cards are the first to comply with the UHS-II interface standard, the ultra-high speed serial bus interface defined in the SD Memory Card Standard Ver. 4.20.

"Toshiba's new microSD memory cards offer the fastest transfer rates available, are UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) enabled, and allow high-quality 4K video capture at constant minimum write speeds of 30MB/s," states the PR. "This means that 4K2K video, live broadcast and content can be recorded on high-performance cameras."

According to Toshiba, the new microSD card comes in 32 GB and 64 GB capacities. The 64 GB model (THNSX064GBK5M4) boasts a maximum read speed of 145 MB/s and a maximum write speed of 130 MB/s. This transfer speed reduces the time required to download large data movie and music files to smart phones and tablets.

The 32 GB model (THNSX032GAJCM4) is a bit zippier in read/write speeds, providing a maximum read speed of 260 MB/s and maximum write speed of 240 MB/s. That's an 8x write speed improvement and 2.7x read speed improvement compared to the current 32 GB microSD UHS-I cards.

"The entire memory card line features cryptographic security and high-level copyright protection functions. Looking to the future, Toshiba will continue to meet market demands by enhancing its line-up of UHS-II compliant microSD memory cards," states the PR.

Sample shipments for chipset vendors and set manufacturers of smart phones and other mobile devices are available now. Currently, there is no information about when these cards will be implemented into hardware nor when they're available to the public.

This week during Mobile World Congress 2014, SanDisk introduced the world's highest capacity microSDXC memory card, weighing a hefty 128 GB. That's a huge leap in storage compared to the 128 MB microSD card launched 10 years ago.

"The new SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card again demonstrates how SanDisk continues to expand the possibilities of storage so that consumers can benefit from our latest technology advancements," said Susan Park, director, retail product marketing, SanDisk.

The company reports that the high capacity is possible on such a small form factor thanks to an "innovative" proprietary technique that allows for 16 memory die to be vertically stacked. Each one is also shaved to be thinner than a strand of hair.

"With 128 GB of removable storage, consumers will enjoy the freedom to capture and save whatever they want on a smartphone or tablet, without worrying about running out of storage space," added Park.

Of course, you'll need a device that supports capacities of this size. Smartphones and tablets, the major audience for this card, typically support cards of 64 GB or less. SanDisk provides these as well, offering 64 GB, 32 GB, 16 GB and 8 GB, with a starting price of $29.99. Read speeds are up to 30 MB/s.

The product notes show that the card provides Class 10 performance for recording Full HD video. The card is also waterproof, temperature-proof, X-ray-proof, magnet-proof, shockproof, and comes with an SD adapter for digital camera compatibility.

In addition to launching the new 128 GB card, SanDisk also unleashed a new version of its Memory Zone app for Android. This app allows users to easily view, access, and backup their files from the device's internal storage. Memory Zone also has a new feature called OptiMem, which automatically sends old photos and videos to the memory card.

The new SanDisk Ultra microSDXC card is available now exclusively at Best Buy and Amazon, costing $199.99 USD. For more information about the new 128 GB card, head here.

SanDisk introduced this week the Extreme PRO SDHC/SDXC UHS-II card. This card is deemed as the "world's fastest" by SanDisk, as write speeds are up to 250 MB/s and read speeds are up to 280 MB/s. The card is also UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) enabled, a new specification allowing for high-quality 4K video recording.

"The new SanDisk Extreme PRO SD UHS-II card shatters the existing barrier of UHS-I limitations, delivering speeds up to three times faster than current cards," said Susan Park, director, product marketing, SanDisk. "This is another example of our legacy of innovation and technology leadership in the digital imaging and video industries."

The new SD card is optimized for the next generation of pro video cameras and high-end DSLRs that support the UHS-II standard. The new card also offers the highest video performance available for sustained video capture of 30 MB/s, according to SanDisk, allowing users to capture 4K, 3D and Full HD videos.

With the purchase of the new card, customers can download RescuePro Deluxe media recovery software. For one year, this software will help customers recover their files stored on the card in case of accidental deletion, file corruption, and so on.

The SanDisk Extreme PRO SDHC/SDXC UHS-II card will be available this April in three capacities: 16 GB ($119.99), 32 GB ($199.99) and 64 GB ($299.99). Customers can pre-purchase the cards now right here.

In addition to the new card, SanDisk also introduced the Extreme PRO SD UHS-II Card Reader/Writer, the world's first SDHC/SDXC UHS-II memory card reader/writer. This device features a USB 3.0 interface, allowing users to insert a card and transfer data to and from a desktop or laptop. This device should be extremely handy for customers without a built-in SD card reader.

The new card reader will also be available this April. Customers can pre-purchase the device now from SanDisk at $49.99.

Kingston has announced a new lineup of SD cards, which are rather speedy. They are to be known by the part numbers SDA3/16GB, SDA3/32GB, and SDA3/64GB.

The cards match the SD Association's newest specification, UHS-I  U3, though go well beyond the required performance numbers. Kingston claims that the SD cards can read and write at 90 MB/s and 80 MB/s, respectively. The U3 specification guarantees you at least 30 MB/s for both reading and writing. Of course, to meet these speeds when accessing the cards from your PC, you'll need a USB 3.0 capable card reader.

The 16 GB and 32 GB models are based on the SDHC technology and feature a FAT32 file format. The 64 GB card is an SDXC card, initialized with the exFAT file format.

No word on availability or pricing yet.

Most of us probably don't, but there may be a few among us who happen to have a bunch of MicroSD cards just lying around, being unused. Well, especially for you folks, GeekStuff4U.com is selling a MicroSD SSD creator kit.

This kit allows you to take up to four SD cards, and put them in a 2.5" form factor converter. Each card can be up to 32 GB in size, allowing for crafted SSDs of up to 128 GB. Undoubtedly, it uses a raid controller inside. Also, according to the site, the gadget can bring Windows Experience Index Score up to 3.6 for storage. Faster cards would obviously lead to higher scores.

The MicroSD SSD Creator Kit retails for a price of $79.56, so it might not be the cheapest way to land yourself a 128 GB SSD, but it is certainly an amusing little trick.

SanDisk on Friday announced the world's fastest memory card boasting read speeds of up to 450 MB/s and write speeds of up to 350 MB. SanDisk claims that the 120 GB SanDisk Extreme Pro CFast 2.0 is capable of transferring a 100 GB file in only four minutes because it's the first card to utilize the CFast 2.0 specification.

"With the SanDisk Extreme Pro CFast 2.0 card, we are enabling a next generation card format to meet the needs of high-end professional cinematographers," said Dinesh Bahal, vice president, product marketing, SanDisk. "These cards will enable new digital solutions for professional filmmakers looking to embrace technologies such as high-quality 4K video, and are another example of SanDisk's innovation and leadership in flash memory storage."

The CFast 2.0 specification is designed for professional video and photography applications. The list of early adopters includes Canon, ARRI, and Codes, as well as SanDisk. Motion picture equipment manufacturer ARRI's documentary-style ARRI AMIRA will record to CFast 2.0 cards at launch.

The SanDisk Extreme Pro CFast 2.0 memory cards are apparently already available in the US and Europe but no word on price just yet.

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