Western Digital has released the world's first consumer-oriented 8TB SD card and 16TB external solid-state drive. Large-capacity memory cards are great news for SteamDeck users, drone users, camera enthusiasts, and anyone else who values the convenience of a portable mass storage device.
Western Digital, which owns the SanDisk brand, will showcase a variety of products at the flash memory conference and exhibition event "Future Memory and Storage Conference" (FMS2024).
The company revealed that it will launch the world's first SanDisk 4TB microSDUCUHS-I card, as well as a larger SDUCUHS-ISD card with a capacity of 8TB. Western Digital says the cards will have top speeds of 100MB/s, making them ideal for smartphones, gaming devices, drones, cameras and laptops.
The company's other consumer product is the first-ever 16TB version of the SanDisk DeskDrive, twice the capacity of its largest current external SSD. Western Digital said that the portable version of the hard drive may belong to its ExtremePortable SSD series, which is currently in the proof-of-concept stage, but Western Digital will vigorously promote the product to be launched as soon as possible.
In addition to portable storage, Western Digital also demonstrated BiCS8 performance and mainstream PCIe5.0 NVMe solid-state drives, using devices including artificial intelligence PCs, game consoles, workstations, laptops, etc.
The data center market is currently the main area in which companies compete. Related products from Western Digital include the 128TB high-capacity QLCeSSD, which uses eighth-generation NAND and is designed for fast artificial intelligence data lakes and capacity-intensive performance applications. In addition, Western Digital also demonstrated the world's first 32TBePMRSMRHDD for large-scale data storage, and a new 64TBeSSD for storage-intensive applications.
In other news, Western Digital is showing off a new RapidFlex converter that converts PCIe SSD signals to Ethernet signals. This allows PCIee SSD to be deployed in Ethernet switching or PCIe switching system architectures, such as the OpenFlexData244200NVMe-oF storage platform.
There's no word yet on potential pricing or release dates for high-capacity consumer SSDs and SD cards, but we do know they'll come with a hefty price tag. The 8TB SanDisk DeskDrive is priced at US$700, and the 1TB SanDisk Extreme Speed SDUHS-I memory card (speed up to 90MB/s) is priced at US$180.