SanDisk, Micron want to put a 1TB microSD card in your phone

Get ready to cram your entire digital life onto your phone. SanDisk and Micron today both announced microSD cards with 1TB capacities. These tiny storage cards can hold up to 500 hours of HD movies, tens of thousands of high-quality photos, and up to 200,000 songs. Who needs the cloud when everything can fit into your pocket?

Phones are quickly replacing stand-alone cameras and video cameras, and today’s flagships can capture bursts of 25MP images and 4K video. All this content takes up precious storage space. Many expensive flagships, such as the Samsung Galaxy S10 and LG G8 ThinQ, include just 128GB of storage. MicroSD cards to the rescue!

Micro to the max

SanDisk claims its 1TB microSD card is the world’s fastest. The 1TB SanDisk Extreme UHS-I microSDXC card can reach speeds up to 160Mbps. SanDisk says this is nearly twice as fast as standard UHS-I microSD cards in the market. Moreover, the card supports the A2 specification for storing and running Android apps with no speed issues. It’s not clear if the card meets the brand new microSD Express standard.

Micron’s card offers the same capacity but at slower speeds. The Micron c200 1TB microSDXC UHS-I card uses Micron’s 96-layer 3D quad-level NAND technology to achieve its high capacity. Micron says its card can reach read speeds of 100Mbps and write speeds of 95Mbps. This still meets UHS-I Speed Class 3 and Video Speed Class 30 specifications. Like the SanDisk card, Micron’s is A2 compliant for apps.

Properly equipped phones are required to reach the speeds indicated by SanDisk and Micron. Many phones top out at 512GB when it comes to microSD support. In order to use the new cards, phones will need to support the 2TB microSD spec, something the LG V50 ThinQ 5G will do when it reaches stores later this year.

Not quite here yet

Both SanDisk and Micron plan to ship their new 1TB microSD cards starting in the second quarter. SanDisk has committed to launching its card in April, and it’s already available for pre-order from SanDisk’s web site. Micron’s card has a more nebulous launch set for some time before July 1, though it is already offering samples to its partners.

These memory cards won’t be cheap. Micron has not set pricing yet, but SanDisk says its 1TB card will retail for $450. That’s as much as a mid-range phone, such as the Sony Xperia 10 Plus. A 512GB variant of SanDisk’s card will cost $200.