Although as inevitable as death and taxes, yesterday Micron revealed that its new industrial-grade i400 microSD will come in capacities ranging from 256GB to 1TB, and for the first time ever, a never-before-seen 1.5TB option that will undoubtedly be devastatingly expensive.
Officially announced at the Embedded World 2022 conference currently taking place in Nuremberg, Germany, Micron’s new i400 microSD line is being manufactured using the company’s 176-layer 3D NAND process with a focus on performance and endurance, and is being positioned primarily as a storage device for video security devices such as dash cameras in large vehicle fleets, police body cameras, and even home security solutions.
Micron says the 1.5TB microSD card can store up to 120 full days of footage: a completely arbitrary number without specs on resolution, frame rate, and compression level, and is more than fast enough to handle 4K video capture as well as “up to eight AI events per second, such as object detection and classification like license plate or facial recognition.” The microSD card also boasts a mean time to failure of two million hours—or around 228 years—so odds are the device it’s used in will fail long before the card does.
There are no specifics on when the 1.5TB i400 microSD card will go on sale, nor is there any pricing information available yet either. When SanDisk launched the first 1TB microSD card back in 2019, it sold for $450. But given the ongoing supply chain headaches around the world and the scarcity of electronic components, plus the fact that Micron is positioning this card for industrial uses, there’s a good chance the 1.5TB microSD will be even more expensive than that. So while it might seem like a great storage solution for the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck, do you really want to pay more for the tiny card you stick in your portable gaming machine than the console itself?
Update, June 28, 12:53 p.m. EST/EDT: A representative for Micron has reached out to clarify that its calculations of the new 1.5TB i400 microSD card storing 120 full days of footage was “based on a 1 megabit per second bit rate” and not a specific resolution, compression level, or frame rate. “...using a 1 Mbps assumption is helpful as different users can calculate the period their camera can store footage locally based on their different configurations.”