1TB microSD cards are here and I irrationally want one

Let’s face it: Unless you shoot tons of video on your phone, you probably don’t need a 1TB microSD card. And yet, you can now buy it from not one but two companies: Western Digital’s Sandisk and Micron. 

Both companies launched their variants of the 1TB microSD card at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and if you have a smartphone that supports them, you can get one and tremendously increase the phone’s storage capacity. 

There are some differences between the two cards: Sandisk’s is a little faster with up to 160MB/s read speeds and up to 90MB/s write speeds, while Micron’s card can do up to 100MB/s and 95MB/s write speeds (note, however, that you have to take the companies’ words for these speeds, they haven’t been tested in the wild yet). 

Also, unlike Micron’s card, Sandisk’s 1TB card already has a price: $449.99. Yes, you can get a decent phone for that, but does that phone have 1TB of storage? No, no it doesn’t. Alternatively, you could also get a 512GB variant of the same card for $199.99. 

Personally, I’ve stopped pining for more storage around the time when most phones started coming with 64GB of built-in storage or more, but I still wouldn’t mind having the possibility to shoot a 2-hour-long 4K video and not worry about storage. Note, however, that most phones don’t support cards this big. For example, Samsung’s latest and greatest Galaxy S10+, which is available with 1TB of internal storage, only supports cards with up to 512GB of storage. 

Sandisk’s 1TB and 512GB microSD cards are available for pre-order on the company’s website, and they’ll hit “select retailers” in April 2019. Micron’s 1TB card will be available in Q2 2019, the company said.