When I heard about this news first I thought it was from SanDisk, but alas, it is a different brand this time and beware, it is extremely costly. We came across various brands displaying their products at Computex for the past few days, some surprised us and some disappointed us, but this one from Microdia gave us something else. They unveiled the world’s first 512GB microSD card. They somehow managed to cram 512GB into this tiny device. Must appreciate them for that.
Microdia said it estimates that Xtra Elite will cost around $1,000. You can actually buy a good smartphone for that price, but apart from that, it’ll take some time for smartphones to have this compatibility. The good news is Android M is kinda love with microSD cards and they’ll provide proper support to them.
The Xtra Elite will use version 4.0 of the Secure Digital (SD) standard and it will also feature an Ultra High Speed (UHS) bus with data transfer rates of up to 300MBps.
They didn’t have a working model for this at Computex, but looks like they’ll launch this next month. Microdia is targeting professional photographers mostly, I don’t really see the use of this microSD card for any other user. I would really invest this money to buy an external portable SSD instead. I can’t imagine what happens if I somehow lose this microSD card with 500GB of valuable photographs and documents. I’m using a 128GB microSD card for my Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and every time I transfer some files I make sure I handle it extremely well, it is so tiny and even if I drop it in the floor, it’ll take me ages to find it. 😛
SanDisk’s current highest capacity microSD card is 200GB (Microdia provides double the storage space) but I’m pretty sure they’ll launch an upgraded version soon, but the point is, do we really need it? Do let us know your views in the comments below.