Highest Capacity SecureDigital Cards Strangely Rare and Unexplainably Expensive

[CenSin]

It is well known among digital photographers that the highest capacity SD cards are 256GB and produced by Lexar. Lexar has been making them since the winter of 2012 with 0 competition. Yet, in the intervening 15 months, no other company had anything to compete with Lexar, with the Lexar cards maintaining their high price of around $400. Google searches would only turn up Lexar's product, reviews about its product, or rumors of higher capacity cards in the making from the likes of SanDisk or Kingston.

 

It was only a month ago that PNY began selling a competitively-performing 256GB card for only a quarter of the price. In fact, it's so new that PNY's own website does not yet acknowledge its existence! A search for other companies who sell (or are planning to sell) 256GB cards now turns up some relatively unknown players in the SD card market:

• Duracell: 256GB cards are coming soon, but their 64GB cards are priced at an incredible high of $349.99 for performance that is worse than mid-range offerings from its competitors. It says right on their site that their cards' read/write speed is 60MBps/35MBps. I guess it's no surprise why Duracell is still only known for selling batteries.
• Kingmax: 256GB cards are also coming soon, but they are a relatively unknown company. While they have products listed on Newegg and Amazon.com, most of their items have 0 reviews/ratings with a few having 1 or 2 ratings.
• Green House: a Japanese company with little global presence. It currently sells 256GB SDXC cards for about $500. And apparently, this has been announced since November 2013 but hidden away from the prying eyes of Googlebot.
• Panasonic: ???

Notice that no popular SD card manufacturer has even hinted at developing 256GB SD cards. Toshiba, which manufactures its own NAND, and Sandisk, its close partner, still sells only 64GB and 128GB cards respectively. Samsung recently refreshed its product offerings with the largest capacity SD card still being 64GB. To estimate what should be possible now, consider the fact that SanDisk recently released a 128GB MicroSDXC card. A regular-sized SD card is about 9 times the volume of a MicroSD card (over twice the thickness, twice as wide, and twice as long), and if it were hollow it could comfortably fit 8 MicroSD cards inside of its shell. That means that SDXC cards should be capable of holding over 1TB! Furthermore, the SD family of cards all contain a microprocessor and NAND chip. If in a volume containing 8 of them, 7 microprocessors were replaced with NAND chips, then we'd be knocking on the door of 2TB territory. 2TB SDXC cards should already be possible.

 

What's holding these manufacturers back? 4K video, and soon 8K video, recording will become the norm soon with ever-increasing resolution of DSLRs.

 

Also posted at The Code Project.