SanDisk announces world's biggest SD card – 512GB for $800

Those clever engineers are always finding ways to cram more storage into the same amount of space. Remember when a 1GB flash drive was an unbelievable luxury? We're certainly a lot better off, but the files we need to store are getting bigger too. That's why SanDisk has created 512GB SanDisk Extreme PRO. It's the highest capacity SD card in the world, and it'll only set you back $799.99. Yeah, you could get a pretty nice camera for that much.

SanDisk happily admits that this is a professional-level accessory. You won't need the new SanDisk Extreme PRO for your next family vacation. Well, unless you plan to film the entire thing in 4K. This is one of the use cases cited by SanDisk-recording a lot of HD and Ultra HD video. Even a short 4K clip will take up a few hundred megabytes of space. Stretch that to any usable bit of footage, and you're into the gigabyte range. In just over a decade, the amount of storage in an SD card has grown by 1,000 times.

Despite the world record memory density, the 512GB card has write speeds of 90 MB/s. Transfer speeds of up to 95 MB/s are also possible with the right post-production setup. Depending on the settings used, this card should be able to hold about 4 hours of 4K video or a full 24 hours of 1080p video.

The $800 price point is just the MSRP, so this card might show up at retailers for slightly less. Preorder prices are mostly in the mid-700s. If this card is too pricey, SanDisk also announced some smaller variants in the same product line including the 128GB card for $190 and the 256 version for $360. The cards will ship later this month.

Now read: Toshiba announces world's fastest SD card, capable of 240 Mbps writes