4TB SD cards are coming in 2025

The first SD cards with storage capacities of 1.5 TB started shipping last year, but Western Digital has announced plans to launch cards with more than twice as much storage.

During the NAB show this week, the company has announced several new SanDisk-branded storage products set to hit the streets in the next year or two, including the world’s first 4TB SD cards, which are expected to launch in 2025.

The upcoming SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC UHS-I card packs 4TB of storage into a card about the size of a postage stamp.

As a UHS-I Class 10 card, it should offer data transfer speeds up to 104MB/S, although AnandTech notes that it’s possible that it’s likely the cards could actually support higher speeds (up to 170MB/s), even though that’s not mentioned in the press release

While the SDUC (Secure Digital Ultra Capacity) standard theoretically supports cards with p to 128GB of storage, this 4TB card is the highest capacity SD card announced to date, and the first I’m aware of to have more than 2TB of storage.

Other new SanDisk products announced during NAB 2024 include:

• 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I card
• 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro microSDXC UHS-I card
• 128GB and 256GB Sandisk SD Express cards
• 128GB and 256GB SanDisk microSD Express cards

The SD Express and microSD Express cards may have just a small fraction of the storage capacity of the Extreme Pro-branded cards. But they’ll offer much higher speeds by utilizing the SD Express standard: Western Digital says to expect speeds as much as 4.4 times higher than its other SD cards.

Western Digital isn’t the only company with SD Express cards on the way. Earlier this year Samsung unveiled its first microSD Express cards with support for 800MB/s sequential read speeds.

SD Express technology brings PCI Express and NVMe interfaces to SD cards, enabling support for SSD-like speeds on removable media including SD and microSD cards.