Western Digital will preview the industry’s first 4TB SD card this week. The device is being demonstrated to broadcasters and content creators at the NAB trade show and will be commercially released in 2025.
Western Digital’s SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC 4 TB SD card complies with the Secure Digital Ultra Capacity standard (SDUC, supporting up to 128TB). The card uses the Ultra High Speed-I (UHS-I) interface and is speed class 10, thus supporting a minimum speed of 10 MB/s and a maximum data transfer rate of 104 MB/s when operating under UHS104 (SDR104). ) mode (there is a performance issue, more on that later). WD’s SD card also complies with the Video Speed Class V30 standard, supporting a minimum sequential write speed of 30 MB/s, which is believed to be sufficient for 8K video recording, beyond the 4K video market that Western Digital is primarily targeting with its upcoming card.
Currently, Western Digital has not revealed what NAND is in the SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC 4 TB SD card. Given the large capacity and the relatively distant 2025 release date, WD will likely make this one of the first products to use the upcoming BiCS 9 NAND.
While it’s not listed in WD’s official press release, we’d be surprised if the upcoming card doesn’t support the out-of-spec DDR200/DDR208 mode, which allows for higher transfer rates than the UHS-I standard typically allows via double the data rate. Higher signaling. Western Digital’s current-generation SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC 1 TB SD cards already support this mode, giving them read speeds of up to 170 MB/s, so it would be surprising to see the company drop it in newer products. That said, the downside of DDR208 is the same as always: it’s a proprietary mode that requires a compatible host to use.
Western Digital has not yet revealed how much its SanDisk Extreme Pro SDUC 4 TB SD card will cost. A 1 TB SanDisk Extreme Pro card costs $140, so one can guess how much a 4 TB SD card using cutting-edge NAND would cost.