- A modest beginning with mass growth for 25 years
- More than 12 billion SD and MicroSD cards have been sold on consumption and industrial devices
- Express SD cards now reach 4GB/s speeds, compared to only 12.5 mb/s in 2000
When the first SD memory card reached the market in 2000, it offered a modest 8 MB of storage. At that time, this was a practical solution for the relatively small demands of digital cameras and the first portable media devices.
Twenty -five years later, SD and MicroSD cards have become high performance storage media, with capabilities that reach up to 8TB after the launch of Sandisk Extreme Pro in 2024.
According to the SD Association (SDA), a consortium of almost 800 technology companies, this represents an increase in capacity of more than one million times.
MicroSD paper
MicroSD, which marks its twentieth anniversary in 2025, has been particularly accredited with the configuration of mobile devices capabilities.
“Possible selfies were made, photography of mobile phones, music and videos on a mobile phone due to the innovation driven by the SDA,” said the association.
Today, the best microSD cards and SD cards are still widely used in smartphones, cameras, drones, games of games and IoT devices.
Even with the increase in USB-C flash units and cloud synchronization services, SD technology continues to occupy its place.
“SD memory cards continue to offer portability and convenience, allowing people to update storage on their devices at any time thanks to the dedication and vision of our almost 800 members of SDA,” said Yosi Pinto, president of the SDA.
The SDA reports that more than 12 billion SD and MicroSD cards have been sold worldwide. While volumes increase, performance is also improving.
In 2000, the card speeds were around 12.5 MB per second. Modern cards that use the SD Express standard can reach almost 4 GB per second, an improvement in the speed of more than 300 times.
With these profits, SD technology approaches the performance at the SSD level, a particularly important development since games workloads, VR and IA promotes the demand for faster and faster storage of high capacity.
That said, internal storage is becoming more affordable, and the cloud dependence continues to grow. This raises the question of whether external cards will remain essential or change to niche roles. However, SDA is still sure.
“We hope that SD memory cards remain a critical and profitable storage option in a variety of applications and devices in the future, since 394 data is expected to be created by 2028,” said Hiroyuki Sakamoto, president of the SDA.
