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At CES 2000 San Disk, Matsushita and Toshiba announced the creation of the SD Association to promote SD cards and later that year they hit the market with their first cards with a capacity of 32 and 64MB. Now, 19 years later SD cards, in the new SDXC format have reached 1 TB, that is almost 16,000 times the original capacity (the original format, SD, could only support up to 2GB, SDXC can support up to 2TB and the new SDUC format can support up to 128TB). If you do the math a doubling every 18 months, as the Moore’s law required would have resulted in a 4,000 increase. Hence, the evolution of SD card was faster than foreseen by Moore.
Lexar is the first to make a 1TB SD card you can actually buy, SanDisk announced one in September 2016(!) but it is not yet available, The Lexar one is priced at 499.99 (you may say 500$) which means 0.05$c per MB. Compare this with the 99.99$ you had to pay for that first 32MB SD card (an equivalent price of 3$ per MB, that is 6,000 times more).
The question is: what can you do with such a capacity? Clearly it is not intended to store photos, you could store some 20,000 photos taken with a professional camera at 50 Mpixels, over 100,000 photos taken with a consumer camera. The card is intended for video makers: in 1TB you can only fit 1 hour and 15′ of raw footage taken in 4K and just 8′ of 8k footage (see graphic).
As you can see there seems to be no limit to the amount of storage you may eventually need… and technology is eager to provide the extra capacity needed.
