More than seven months after the presentation of the world’s first 1.5 TB MicroSD card, Micron’s MTSD1T5ANC8MS-1WTShe landed, well almost. A handful of tech wholesalers have the card, also known as the i400, listed on their website, and depending on how many you need and what area you’re buying from, customers may have to wait at least four months. mouse catcher, Arrow and Avnet (plus its subsidiaries Farnel (opens in new tab), Newark (opens in new tab), Item14) have already listed it, with Newark being the cheapest in Newark, just $420.53, a price that includes free shipping.
Buy at least 12,000 of these to see the price drop to $381 (with a total cost of more than $4.5M), not a bad price for 18PB (yes, that’s petabytes) of solid state storage, which should not weigh more than 4 kg (without packaging, of course). In case you were wondering, this microSD card costs about as much as its weight in 0.125 carats of diamond ($1.1M per kg).
Equally important is the data on these cards. So remember that a microSD is smaller than a fingernail. We recommend backing up your data with a Cloud storage Solution (although you won’t find one free cloud storage that can do 1.5TB).
What’s next?
Micron was the first with a 1TB card. the C200 is nearly four years old, and it’s only in the last few months that the average price – and relative availability – of 1TB MicroSD cards has improved. But how long the 1.5TB capacity will remain king of the hills remains to be seen; Kioxia introduced a 2 TB Exceria Plus Prototype as early as September 2022, but while a tentative launch in 2023 has been murmured, this will likely depend on market conditions (i.e. if there is enough demand for it).
However, for those interested in buying it, keep in mind that it has a formatted capacity of 1,430,511 megabytes. Samsung and Kingston, two of the largest solid-state storage providers, have yet to release microSD cards with capacities of 1TB or larger.
At the time of writing, the The cheapest 1TB microSD card is a Silicon Power model for $87.99 (opens in new tab), about a third of the price per TB of Micron’s i40. Amazon has many others fake 1TB microSD cards in its marketplace and this endemic problem has not yet been solved. When buying a microSD card, make sure it is one of these 14 brands: Samsung, Kingston, SP/Silicon Power, Teamgroup, Sandisk, WD, PNY, Lexar, Inland, Gigastone, Patriot, Transcend, Amazon Basics, and MicroCenter. We would not trust others.
