More than seven months after its release, the world’s first 1.5TB drive micro SD card, Micron MTSD1T5ANC8MS-1WTalmost landed. Several tech wholesalers have listed the card otherwise known as the i400 on their website, and depending on how much you need and what territory you buy from, customers can wait at least four months. Mouse, Arrow and Avnet (and its subsidiaries Farnell (opens in a new tab), Newark (opens in a new tab), root 14) have already listed it and Newark is the cheapest in Newark, only $420.53, price includes free shipping.
Buy at least 12,000 of these to see the price drop to $381 (for a total cost of over $4.5M), not a bad deal for 18PB (yes, that’s petabytes) of solid state storage that should weigh no more than 4kg (without packaging of course). In case you were wondering, this microSD card costs about the same as its weight in 0.125-carat diamonds ($1.1 million per kilogram).
Equally important is the data on these cards, so keep in mind that microSD is smaller than your fingernail. We recommend that you back up your data with cloud storage solution (although you won’t find any free cloud storage which can do 1.5TB).
What’s next?
Micron was the first of the 1TB cards. The C200 is almost four years old, and only in the last few months has the average price – and relative availability – of 1TB MicroSD cards improved. But how long 1.5TB capacity will remain king of the hill is anyone’s guess; Kioxia presented Exceria Plus with a capacity of 2 TB prototype in September 2022, but while there has been talk of an initial launch in 2023, it will likely depend on market conditions (i.e. whether there will be enough demand for it).
For those interested in purchasing, however, note that it has a formatted capacity of 1,430,511 megabytes. Samsung and Kingston, the two largest suppliers of solid-state storage, have yet to release any microSD cards with a capacity of 1TB or more.
At the time of writing, the cheapest 1TB microSD card is the Silicon Power model for $87.99 (opens in a new tab), about a third of the price of Micron’s TB i40. Amazon has many others counterfeit 1TB microSD cards in its market, and this endemic problem has not yet been resolved. If you buy a microSD card, make sure it’s one of the 14 brands: Samsung, Kingston, SP/Silicon Power, Teamgroup, Sandisk, WD, PNY, Lexar, Inland, Gigastone, Patriot, Transcend, Amazon Basics, and MicroCenter. We wouldn’t trust anyone else.