Western Digitalshowcased three major new SD cards: a 4TB SDUC SD card, a 2TB SDXC SD card, and even a 256 GB SD Express-supported card. Below, we’ll examine some finer details, including why SDUC cards are still rare and how SD Express compares.
First, review the 2TB SDXC cards, the SanDisk Extreme Pro V30. The SanDisk Extreme Pro V30 comes in standard and microSD card formats, and this is stated to be the Extreme Pro’s debut with 2TB of storage. The world’s first 2TB microSD cards were released in January, so this is a brand-first and not a world-first anymore. However, 2TB is not a sufficient storage area to sneeze at— in fact, this officially tops out the range of the SDXC spec by hitting that 2TB target.
According toWestern Digital, this SD card’s use of UHS-I should make it one of the world’s fastest microSD cards designed around these mainstream SDXC specifications for SSDs.
Next, let’s look at the SanDisk SD Express (or microSD Express) cards, which join a market where similar SD Express cards already exist. WD’s SanDisk SD Express and microSD Express cards look pretty similar to other SD cards, but using a faster PCIe interface can achieve storage read speeds of up to 880 MB/s and storage write speeds of up to ~650 MB/s. Unfortunately, the SD Express cards seem limited to only 256GB— but these speed feats place them somewhere between the best SATA SSDs and many early NVMe Gen 3 SSDs.
These speeds are pretty impressive for SD cards, and if costs get low enough while support continues to improve, the future of upcoming devices likeSwitch 2,Steam Deck 2, etc., looks just a bit brighter. Since many games are beginning to require SSDs and several pro workloads are better with them, continued improvements to SD card speeds like this bode well for the future.
Finally, look at the crowning jewel: the SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC V30, which weighs a whopping 4TB capacity. Even by the standards of full-sized drives, that’s a lot of storage, and achieving it is finally starting to make good use of the SDUC specs. While SDXC caps out at 2TB anyway, SDUC-supported SD cards could one day get as big as 128TB.
So, while a 2TB SDXC card shows that the limit has been reached, a 4TB SDUC card like this indicates that the absolute limit is one we have yet to go. While these are optimistic looks at the near future of SD cards from Western Digital-owned SanDisk, we do not have any actual pricing or lease date information to share.
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Western Digital’s new SDUC cards will be available in 2025. Pricing remains a mystery as the company didn’t share many details about the upcoming products.
Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
