Western Digital has announced the world’s first-ever 4-terabyte SD card, a new capacity point that the company will begin shipping in 2025.
WD is showing off the 4TB SanDisk Extreme PRO SDUC UHS-I memory card this week (with a bit more capacity than the image at the top of this story) at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show, which caters to broadcasters and content creators.
WD isn’t saying that the new 4TB card will cost. Anandtech, which noticed the announcement, said that the card uses the UHS-I bus at Speed Class 10. WD’s SD card is also rated to meet Video Speed Class V30, supporting a minimal sequential write speed of 30 MB/s, which is believed to be good enough for 8K video recording.
Though the capacity point of the new cards is approaching that of more conventional SSDs, you probably shouldn’t consider the cards for long-term storage. The lifespan of an SD card depends on the type of memory used, environmental conditions, and other factors, and is generally considered to be about ten years. Consider one of our best SSDs or external drives instead.
WD is also announcing the 24TB G-Drive, an external desktop hard drive, for $699. You can also purchase a similar 24TB G-Drive Project for $929, which includes a 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port (probably overkill for a drive with only 260MB/s read/write throughput) and a 48TB version (the Mirror drive) for $1,599. The latter uses an additional 24TB as a RAID-1 mirrored backup.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers' News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.