Get a load of this! Sandisk recently announced the world’s first SD card with a capacity of 512 gigabytes—half a terabyte of storage. That’s right, you’ll soon be able to buy an SD card with more capacity than many PC hard drives, as long as you don’t mind paying an insane premium for the privilege.
And you thought it was cool carting around a 16GB SD card with a basic Ubuntu install on it.

Although it is shipping now to retailers, SanDisk’s Extreme PRO SDXC (UHS-1) is aimed at photographers and other imaging pros. The new SD card offers a 90 megabyte-per-second write speed and up to 95MBps read speeds. With a U3 speed rating, SanDisk says the new card will allow for “stutter-free” 4K video recording.
The new card is also resistant to extreme cold, water, shock, and X-ray allowing photographers to use these cards almost anywhere. Alongside its 512GB cards, SanDisk is also selling 256GB and 128GB cards in the Extreme PRO SDXC line.
The bad news is the new 512GB card is wickedly expensive with an MSRP of $800. That’s to be expected, however, as storage companies typically market new products to pro types first where premium prices are the norm. Only recently, Seagate announced an 8TB hard drive that is also being sold at an unannounced premium to data centers that need to pack as much storage into as little space as possible.
Just like Seagate’s 8TB monsters, Seagate’s 512GB SD cards will inevitably come down to a more manageable price range.
While the rest of us are waiting for lower prices, we’ll have plenty of time to think-up fun new projects for a 512GB card. But you don’t have to wait until SanDisk’s new SD card is ready for the masses to start playing around with portable storage. Check out our recent look at 5 insanely powerful tools you won’t believe can fit on a flash drive.