Would you rather save something locally rather than online? Despite all the cloud initiatives, home storage is still developing: If you buy an SD card in 2025, it can store at least 4 terabytes of information.
4TB is a big number, but there's more context to be given. For example, 4 TB is equivalent to about 500 movies, 1 million MP3 songs, and 800,000 high-resolution photos. So, it's a big number that many people probably won't be able to reach with all their data. But if you're a video editor or professional photographer, for example, such a large amount of storage space can be a huge advantage.
4TB SD card
Not everyone wants to use the cloud (online storage): firstly because files are unavailable when you don't have internet, but secondly because hackers may be able to intercept your files when they are sent. Or they break into your cloud and still have access to it. The cloud is also less sustainable than putting something on an offline storage card: after all, the cloud isn't a cloud, it's servers placed in data centers.
A 4TB SD card is in the works at Western Digital/SanDisk and demos of its innovation are said to be planned for next week. Thanks to Ultra High Speed-1, the card has a theoretical transfer rate of up to 104MB/s. As for write speed, you should consider at least 10MB/s Anand Tech. You can't store an 8K RAW video image on it, because that's still a bit ambitious, but regular 8K photos are an option.
100 euros for 1 TB
It is still unknown how much this SD card will cost. Currently, the largest SD card capacity is 1TB, with 2TB microSD cards likely coming later this year. A 1TB SD card currently costs €100. Although this 4TB innovation is a big step forward, Western Digital has to be pretty sure it actually works. We are currently receiving a lot of complaints about SanDisk Extreme SSD drives that suddenly seem to stop working.
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