Image: Western Digital
The other day, I sent my dad—who’s old enough to remember programming computers with punch cards—a photo of a two-terabyte M.2 drive. He replied: “The first Burroughs 5700 mainframe I worked on had a two-megabyte drive about the size of two washing machines.”
Well, according to Western Digital, next Christmas I might be able to send him a tiny SSD with literally eight million times as much storage.
The storage company (which also owns the SanDisk brand as of 2016) announced a slew of new products ahead of the FMS 2024 industry trade show in Santa Clara. In addition to data center flash storage drives of up to a mind-boggling 128TB, the company is also prepping some exciting news on the consumer front.
According to its press release, SanDisk MicroSD cards will stretch up to 4TB with the UHS-1 standard and larger SD cards will balloon all the way up to an impressive 8TB. The maximum speed for these cards is 10MB/s, according to the SD Association. This is great news for your Steam Deck and your camera, respectively.
What about your PC? While Western Digital is hyping up speedy PCIe 5.0 drives for enterprise, none were shown off for desktops or laptops before the show. But there is a 16TB version of the SanDisk Desk Drive in the works—that’s double the capacity of the biggest external SSD currently sold by the company. A portable version, presumably in the Extreme Portable SSD form factor or similar, is also in the proof-of-concept stage.
When will these products arrive and for how much will they sell? We don’t know yet. Technically, Western Digital hasn’t committed to that 16TB portable drive, but I’d be very surprised if it isn’t available at some point in 2025. (The header image for this story is a mockup, btw.) If you’re interested, you might want to start saving now—an 8TB SanDisk Desk Drive currently goes for $700.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he’s the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop “battlestation” in his off hours. Michael’s previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he’s covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he’s always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.
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