With the arrival of cameras like the 100MP Fujifilm GFX 100 and 61MP Sony A7R IV, it's clear that memory card manufacturers need to keep pushing to provide plenty of storage space to stash all your super-sized images and videos. And Western Digital is clearly up for the challenge, having used IFA 2019 to launch its first Sandisk-branded 1TB SDXC card.
The SanDisk Extreme Pro 1TB UHS-I SDXC follows the 1TB Extreme microSDXC UHS-I card that came along in February, although it's not quite the first standard-size 1TB card to appear – that honor goes to Longsys, which revealed its own model under the Lexar brand at CES earlier this year.
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Western Digital did, however, unveil a prototype of the card three years ago, and it's great to see the company come out with its own offering; and it's just as pleasing to see that it's not all about space but performance too.
Residing in the Sandisk Extreme Pro range, the new card offers read speeds of up to 170MB/s, and write speeds of up to 90MB/s. That's significantly ahead of the Lexar-branded counterpart – that card's read speeds top out at 95MB/s, and its write speeds reach just 70MB/s.
That said, the SanDisk Extreme Pro 1TB UHS-I SDXC is a UHS-I rather than a UHS-II card, and a Video Speed Class 30 (V30) model, at a time when many smaller-capacity cards are V90-ready. Quite whether you want to store 1TB of images and videos on a single memory card is another matter.
Still, if you're desperate to get your hands on one, you'll be pleased to know it's available now; that's the good news – the bad news is that it will set you back $499.99 / £478.99 (about AU$860), which is about the same as an Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark III body or a Panasonic FZ1000.
