We all know camera technology is evolving at a rapid pace. On the high end, we’re seeing cameras like the Blackmagic URSA Cine push 12K and 17K, which very obviously require a ton of storage. But even on the low and mid-end of video these days most cameras can record 4K or 6K, and RAW files are becoming more the norm than ever before.

With all that data comes responsibility though. And the various storage companies have been hard at work trying to push their cards and hard drives (and cloud storage options) to keep up.

This is why we’re not too surprised to learn, but still impressed to see that Western Digital has announced that they have two new SanDisk cards which will reportedly be the world’s first for some insane storage capabilities. Let’s take a look.


The World’s First 4TB microSD and 8TB SD Cards

The first announcement from Western Digital / SanDisk is that they’ve unlocked the ability to fit 4TBs into a microSD card. And they’ve also announced that they’ve similarly unlocked the ability to fit 8TBs into an SD card. These are both world’s first and represent years (if not decades) of R&D in this area.

Both cards are only going to be UHS-I as they’ve obviously done all they can to cram as much data into them as possible, even if that means sacrificing speed for now. This means we can expect these first iterations of these numbers not to be too fast (we don’t have exact transfer speeds yet).

However, SanDisk does share that these new cards are designed to be used with smartphones, drones, cameras, gaming devices, and laptops, so not your high-end cinema cameras or anything just yet.

What Does the Future Hold?

We’ll keep you updated as these new cards are released to the public (along with more accurate speeds and pricing options), but for now, this does look to be a promising step forward for both SD and microSD cards. As with any major milestone like this, we can expect technology to quickly rush past it now as the floodgates will be open.

So we’re excited to see what comes next.