A landmark moment in solid-state storage history occurred this week at Mobile World Congress when SanDisk unveiled the world's largest capacity microSD card, boasting room for 200GB of data.
It was almost exactly a year ago that SanDisk introduced the 128GB card and since then the company has figured out how to increase storage by 56 percent. This will allow mobile users to store an enormous number of images and files on a card smaller than a five pence piece.
For many years the industry was stuck at producing 64GB cards and could not progress, SanDisk's Dinesh Bahal tells WIRED.co.uk.
But last year the company was able to break this barrier. "With the 128GB we pushed a lot of boundaries in what is called a 16-layer stack and we pushed a similar boundary when we did a 512GB SD card a few months ago."
The cards are packed with wafers that are layered like plies of tissue paper. "As you get more and more density in, you're creating a lot more complexity and we've really been working at solving that complexity," explains Bahal.
SanDisk faced similar challenges over the last 12 months as it developed the 200GB card. "It was more of the same in the sense that what we did with the 128, we built on top of that, but as you get to that level of data density the challenges become significantly higher."
SanDisk also claims that the card can transfer up to 1,200 images per minute thanks to its supremely speedy 90MB per second download rate. This is an awesome achievement considering that the added storage density also makes it harder to ensure the card's performance and the integrity of the data.
There's not long to wait if you want to get your fingertips on this tiny piece of tech. It should be available sometime in Q2 -- meaning the next few months -- at which point it will be available for an eye-watering $400 (£260), which is more than the cost of many Android phones these days. That seems like an awful lot, but at least you get a ten-year warranty with the card, so look at it as a long-term mobile storage investment.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
