I was so excited to get my first digital camera.
My family was never big on taking pictures. Whenever someone did manage to bring a camera to an event, the film often went undeveloped.
We didn’t have thick albums full of photos lying around the house, and as a result, I didn’t have the strongest memories of things we had done when I was a child.
The digital camera was my chance to change that. One of my friends at college got one and showed us how great it was. With one of my own, I could take tons of photos and store as many as my computer would let me…
Or until I filled up the 16 Megabyte CompactFlash memory.
It’s such a laughably small amount of memory by today’s standards, but the photographs were so small and low resolution that I could store plenty without too much worry. It was plenty of digital assistance in remembering my life.
This week, Milpitas, California-based digital data storage company SanDisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) debuted an SD card with 512 gigabytes of storage.
That’s 32,000 times more storage than I had on my first digital camera in the early 2000s and very near the theoretical limit of what can be done with the SD format.
Our memories will be even clearer — at a staggering 4K resolution.
The Limit
SanDisk regularly releases the “world’s highest capacity SD card.”
Every couple of years, it will release the next generation of card, putting the previous generation on a lower pricing tier.
Since this latest one is the cutting-edge release, it costs a whopping $800. It’s able to hold approximately 200,000 8-megapixel JPEG photos or 20,000 8-megapixel RAW photos — the ones most commonly shot by professional photographers.
As is the case with all computer memory, it will be prohibitively expensive at first but then become a commodity when production increases and prices lower. They practically give away 1GB SD cards today.
A decade ago, those would have fetched as much as $1,000.
This card is based on the SDXC standard, which has a theoretical maximum capacity of 2 Terabytes.
That limit is now less than two generations away.
When that limit is hit, the SD association will need to standardize a new type of storage with a new file system and reinvent memory once again.
This won’t require a major structural change, but it will require a whole new set of rules governing compatibility, speed, and usage.
There is another form of memory that is changing, though.
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Three-Dimensional Storage
With a market cap of $22.4 billion and 20% of the NAND flash memory market as its own, SanDisk is one of the biggest names in memory today.
Last May, SanDisk signed a deal with Toshiba Corporation worth approximately $4.84 billion to build 3D flash memory chips that could break through that theoretical maximum. The partnership included constructing new facilities at Toshiba’s Yokkaichi fabrication plant in Japan.
The facility is expected to be completed in 2016, and SanDisk expects this new type of memory to go into mass production as soon as the facilities are on line.
This 3D memory technology is being adopted by a lot of semiconductor companies. At about the same time as SanDisk and Toshiba announced their partnership, South Korea’s Samsung announced it had already begun production of its 3D NAND flash, which it calls V-NAND (the V stands for “vertical”).
While Samsung is one of the largest tech companies in the world, its announcement was still somewhat ahead of the whole 3D NAND business.
SanDisk’s timeline is a little bit more realistic. Production can begin in earnest in 2016, and the “bit supply” will grow by 30 to 40% between 2016 and 2018.
This 3D fabrication technology is being applied first to larger solid-state hard drives for PCs and then could see broader application on the smaller scale.
Either way, SanDisk is standing with its toes in the next generation.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
