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Something to look forward to: Good news for Steam Deck owners, drone users, camera fans, and anyone else who values the convenience of having mass storage available in a portable form factor. Western Digital has announced the world's first 8TB SD card and 16TB external SSD for consumers.
Western Digital, which owns the SanDisk brand, is showing off several products at the Future Memory and Storage Conference (FMS2024), a flash memory conference and exhibition event.
The company revealed it is introducing the world's first SanDisk 4TB microSDUC UHS-I card along with a larger SDUC UHS-I SD card with an 8TB capacity. The cards will reach a maximum speed of 100MB/s, and Western Digital says they should be ideal for smartphones, gaming devices, drones, cameras, and laptops.
Another of the company's consumer products is its first-ever 16TB version of the SanDisk Desk Drive, double the capacity of its current largest external SSD. Western Digital said a portable version of the drive, likely in its Extreme Portable SSD range, is in the proof-of-concept stage, but WD will no doubt be pushing hard to get it on the market quickly.
Away from portable storage, WD is demoing BiCS8 performance and mainstream PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs using AI PCs, gaming rigs, workstations, laptops, and more.
The data center market is a major area for companies these days. Western Digital's related products include a 128TB high-capacity QLC eSSD that uses its 8th-gen NAND designed for fast AI data lakes and capacity-intensive performance applications. WD is also showing off the world's first 32TB ePMR SMR HDD for massive data storage at scale and a new 64TB eSSD for storage-intensive applications.
Elsewhere, WD is demonstrating a new RapidFlex interposer that converts PCIe SSD signals to Ethernet. This allows PCIe eSSDs can be deployed in either an Ethernet-switched or a PCIe-switched system architecture, such as the OpenFlex Data24 4200 NVMe-oF storage platform.
There's no word on the potential price or release date of the high-capacity consumer SSDs and SD cards, but we know they'll carry a hefty price tag. The 8TB SanDisk Desk Drive is $700, and the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SD UHS-I memory card with speeds of up to 90MB/s is $180.