SanDisk introduces the first 1TB microSD card, for $450
Have you been salivating at the thought of stuffing a 1TB microSD card into your phone? You can finally act on that impulse. SanDisk has made the record-setting Extreme card available both through its own store and (when it's in stock) …
Context & Ripple Effects
SanDisk's 1TB Extreme card caps a four-year capacity race it helped start: the company shipped a 200GB microSD back in 2015, and Microdia's 512GB card was announced that June at roughly $1,000. At $450 for double Microdia's capacity, SanDisk has cut the per-gigabyte price of the format's frontier by more than half.
The other benchmark is solid-state: Samsung's portable T1 SSD line sold 1TB for $600 in early 2015, so a removable card now undercuts a comparable external drive. The SD Association's SD 8.0 spec shows the format also preparing a speed answer, not just a capacity one.
First-order effects
- Phone, camera, and drone owners can finally buy terabyte-scale removable storage off the shelf, though at $450 it targets prosumers shooting high-bitrate video rather than mainstream buyers.
- SanDisk's Extreme line becomes the first microSD product to compete head-to-head on price with 1TB portable SSDs, pressuring the external-drive category Samsung defined with the T1.
Second-order effects
- Rivals like Samsung and Micron face pressure to match the 1TB milestone quickly, repeating the pattern where each capacity record triggers a fast-follow from the other flash giants.
- As flagship-capacity cards cascade down the price curve, they cannibalize low-end SSDs and hard drives at the margins, forcing drive makers to differentiate on speed rather than capacity alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, microSD follows the established flash playbook — record capacities debuting at a premium, then halving within a few years — making terabyte-class removable storage routine in phones and cameras within a product cycle or two.
- With SD Express pushing card speeds toward PCIe levels, the boundary between removable media and internal storage blurs, shifting competition from how much a card holds to whether it can replace built-in NAND entirely.
The trend: Flash memory keeps doubling capacity while per-gigabyte prices collapse, pulling removable cards into direct competition with SSDs for every storage dollar.