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Western Digital has announced that it’s working on the “world’s first” 8TB SD card during the 2024 Future of Memory and Storage Conference, according to a press release. It will be released under the SanDisk brand name.
The company has said remarkably little about the card: there’s no mention of a price, release date, or an idea of where it’ll fall in its lineup. However, it seems unlikely that you’ll actually be able to buy it any time soon: earlier this year, Western Digital said 4TB cards wouldn’t be coming until 2025. We’ve reached out for more info and will update this article if we hear back, but if cards with half the capacity are still a year out, you probably shouldn’t hold your breath for this one.
Western Digital’s press release also doesn’t include any speed ratings for the card beyond a vague “UHS-I,” though that’s enough to show that it won’t be the best pick if you’re looking for massive storage capacity for 8K video shot with your Canon EOS R5 II or a7RV.
SD card speed ratings are a bit of a mess, but without the second row of pins that UHS-II provides, the card almost certainly won’t have a video rating above the 30 MBps V30. Even the EOS R5 II’s most basic 8K settings require over twice that bandwidth.
That does raise the question of how many people really need that much storage in a single card, especially given how long it’d take to fill it up. But even if it’s only useful for people with niche use cases (or data hoarder tendencies), it’s still exciting to see SD card manufacturers pushing the format’s capabilities. That’s especially true as competing standards like CFexpress are gaining ground in some high-end cameras, though it seems like those will retain the speed crown for the foreseeable future.
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This article comes from DP Review and can be read on the original site.
