SanDisk launch largest ever capacity SD card with 512GB of storage

The thumbnail-sized card represents a thousand-fold increase in SD storage capacity in just a little over a decade

SanDisk has just announced the world’s largest capacity SD card, managing to squeeze 512GB of storage into a chip not much bigger than your thumbnail.

That’s pretty staggering, especially considering that SanDisk’s first SD card came out in 2003 with just 512MB of memory. That’s a thousand-fold increase in capacity in a little over a decade.

The un-exotically named SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I may have more memory than your laptop, but it’s certainly not for average users. SandDisk built it for cameras recording video in 4K resolution – aka ultra HD.

In addition to the phenomenal storage, the new card also comes with a lifetime warranty is temperature proof, water proof, shock proof and X-Ray proof. It goes on sale for $800 (£490).

And to get some historical perspective, the first ever hard drive to have a storage capacity greater than 1GB was the IBM 3380 released in 1980 (that's a single 1GB module below left), while experts believe that SD cards could one day hold 2TB of data (or roughly 2,000GB)

Storage capacity then and now.