WD is prepping 8TB SD cards and 16TB external drives

Consider it a sign of how far storage demands have come — Western Digital’s SanDisk brand will soon launch an 8TB, SDUC UHS-I card, said to be the first of its kind. The product was one of several WD announcements at the 2024 Future Memory and Storage Conference, which took place this week in Santa Clara, California. 8TB is larger than the internal drives on most PCs, which could potentially make it a one-and-done option for audiences like photographers, videographers, and the burgeoning handheld gaming PC sector.

SanDisk is also prepping a 4TB microSDUC card, suitable for devices like smartphones. Both of the cards will be capable of speeds up to 100MBps — which may be enough to run some apps off of, though that’s still far slower than the latest SSDs.

WD hasn’t set any release dates or prices yet. Expect to pay a hefty sum, however. At the moment, even a slower 1TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SD card is about $180, so it may actually be cheaper to buy an SSD if you have the space and connections for one.

SanDisk/Pocket-lint

The mother of all external SSDs

If an external SSD is an option and you need the most storage possible, WD is also working on a 16TB version of the SanDisk Desk Drive. That’s double the Desk Drive’s current maximum, and will likely appeal mostly to video editors working on 4K or 8K projects. That’s because of cost — the 8TB Desk Drive is $700, and already overkill for people just wanting to backup personal media and documents. As with the company’s SD cards, there’s no word on an exact cost or release date. A portable 16TB option is in the proof-of-concept stage.

As extreme as WD’s new products are, they do reflect the growing demands of apps, music, and video. Many laptops now ship with 1TB by default, and even smartphones like the iPhone 15 Pro now have a 1TB option so they can save reasonable quantities of pro-grade video. 128GB is usually the minimum viable capacity for any phone.