The 8TB SDUC memory card announced by SanDisk, a brand of American storage manufacturer Western Digital many years ago, is finally close to being officially launched. At the same time, a faster 4TB SD card has also appeared in the exhibition materials.At this year's Taipei International Computer Show (Computex 2026), the SD Association's booth publicly displayed the specifications of the new 4TB and 8TB SDUC cards. Several exhibitors revealed to foreign media Notebookcheck that these large-capacity memory cards will be on the market in the near future, providing more lightweight mass storage solutions for digital cameras, handheld consoles and other portable devices.
Western Digital first announced its 8TB SD card plan at the Future Memory and Storage Conference in 2024, when it confirmed that it was developing a 4TB microSDUC and a standard-size 8TB SDUC card, both of which use the UHS-I bus and have a nominal minimum sustained write speed of 10MB/s. The specifications exhibited at Computex this time are basically consistent with the information of the year: these two large-capacity SDUC cards both belong to the V10 video speed level and reach the A1 application performance level, claiming to provide at least 1,500 IOPS random read and 500 IOPS random write capabilities.
From a positioning point of view, this type of card is not only used for "cold storage" archiving. Users can directly edit documents to a certain extent on the card, run some applications, and even do lightweight processing of video files stored in the card. However, to take full advantage of the new 4TB and 8TB SDUC cards, users must be equipped with card readers and terminal devices that support the new standard.
Also exposed at the same time as the large-capacity SDUC card is a higher-performance 4TB standard-size SanDisk Extreme Pro SD card. This product is still labeled as UHS-I, but in terms of specifications it supports UHS speed level 3 (U3) and video speed level V30, corresponding to a minimum sustained writing speed of 30MB/s, and upgrades the application performance level to A2, with a nominal 4000 IOPS random reading and 2000 IOPS random writing, which is significantly better than the A1 level large-capacity SDUC card.
Card readers currently on the market do not yet support SDUC, so the related supporting hardware is expected to be updated in the near future. Known information shows that the new generation of card readers will be compatible with UHS-II, SDUC and SD Express protocols to meet the future needs of higher capacity and higher bandwidth memory cards. While the SD Express standard has been around for years, the real driver of demand was the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 - the handheld game console is currently the only mainstream consumer device that mandates the use of microSD Express cards to reduce game load times.
As for the price that consumers are most concerned about, the current price information of 4TB and 8TB SDUC memory cards has not been announced, but the industry generally expects that the price will not be cheap. Driven by the boom in the construction of AI data centers, the prices of DRAM and solid-state drives continue to rise, which has also pushed up the cost of flash memory products such as SD cards. New ultra-large capacity products will most likely be in the high-price range in the early launch stage.