SanDisk 1.5TB Ultra microSDXC Performance
While the drive has a high capacity, it is not necessarily fast.
When we tried it in an Insta360 X4 a 360 degree 8K camera.
It actually recorded 8K 360 degree video, albeit we got a stern warning from the camera.
Just for a comparison point against the 512GB SanDisk Extreme microSDXC card here was copying the 8K video to and from the cards. This is the SanDisk 1.5TB Ultra:
This is the SanDisk 512GB Extreme:
Copying the other direction on the Sandisk 1.5TB Ultra this is what we saw:
We got fairly high numbers for our SanDisk 512GB Extreme as we would expect these to be around 190MB/s max, but doing smaller 5-10GB transfers on a largely empty drive (10GB is <2% filled) we kept getting these numbers.
For this, we used the ASUS ROG NUC and the Apple Macbook M4 Max that we featured in the Apple Mac Mini M4 piece to simply copy video files to and from the cards. Apple treats drives a bit differently, but the steady-state transfers were about the same.
Overall, there was a fairly decent difference between the two.
Final Words
There are perhaps two good ways to look at this. First off, if you tend to stick a card in your action camera and forget it, then 1.5TB is certainly a huge capacity. Likewise, if you have a phone with a SD card slot, then this is a cheap and easy way to add capacity. Compared to a M.2 drive, it is absolutely tiny.
The other way is that 1.5TB is a lot of data on a lower-performance drive. Endurance ratings are not even given for microSD cards. If you plan to take these out and shuffle them, then there is a real risk of losing something this small.
SanDisk already has said that 4TB and 8TB drives are coming. For now though, this is about the highest storage density you are going to get.
Where to Buy
We purchased our 1.5TB card during a sale on Amazon (affiliate link.) Here is the 512GB Extreme Pro Amazon affiliate link.
$109.99 divided by 1,500 GB equals approximately $13.64 per gigabyte. Not too shabby for something so tiny as a Micro SD card and roughly what I would expect for 1 to 2 TBs of capacity. Very nice. Just beware the scams claiming to be selling terabyte-capacity cards and drives for as little as $1.00 or less as THOSE are fakes.
And of course I got the maths backwards. It should be 1,500 GB divided by $109.99, not the other way around. Sorry folks, my bad.
To bad there’s so few phones to put it in these days!
Works great in my nintendo switch. Upgraded from a 512 and there is definitely a marked slowing compared to the 512. Write speeds slow read speeds aren’t bad. I can fit almost 200 games on the 1.5tb
Good
“……..blow your mind at just how big 1.5TB is these days”
Most ridiculous childlike statement even for an online “writer”
1.5TB is exactly the same size it’s always been. That would be 1.5TB.
I didn’t read on.
The writer was referring to the physical dimensions of the SD card, not the amount of storage. Reading comprehension :)
Progression of technology is pretty amazing at times. I remember using cassette tapes for computer storage, then floppies being a huge upgrade, progressing through all sorts of things to zip drives, those micro HDs, compactFlash… but microSD in the legitimate TB range is pretty amazing.
I would think we are not going to see huge changes in the end physical size now just because loss will become the biggest factor if it gets much smaller… but the capacity will continue up as will speeds.
My buddy just got this exact drive and it’s ever-so-slightly thicker than other micro SD cards. It sticks in the SD adapter. He measured the contact portion at 0.75mm instead of 0.70mm (or less on some micro SD)
regardless, this capacity is crazy. I can fit unlimited music on this. My next phone MUST have a micro SD card slot.
Can people not do basic math these days?
It COSTS $109.99
It STORES 1500 GB’s
The COST PER GB is calculated by DIVIDING the COST by 1500!
Therefore : $109.99 / 1500 = $.073323 PER GB!
Mr. Beets actually stated the correct formula but went backwards in his calculation!
I just bought the 2TB SD Extreme Pro
So it would take potentially a full day to copy all the files off such a card? Seems like an undesirable ratio of space to speed.
Best Buy has already announced that the two terabyte version of the same SD micro card will be on the shelves this month.
However you’ve been able to buy the 2 TB version directly from SanDisk for almost a month. So your article was kind of out of date in November.
Great illustration of the difference between an A2 and A1 card.
@BLSinSC
Thanks for your clarification. I ain’t no mathematician and I’ve never done well in that subject. Also, I don’t know which way to calculate the price per GB of storage devices or media. So, if I got that wrong twice, I do apologize.
Get an M.2 adapter that supports four of these and shove it in a NUC and I’ll be quite happy.
some of ya’ll need coffee this morning
If you want to have a SanDisk card, the Ultras are not what you should be buying.
I’ve had nothing but issues with these, to the point that after 6 months the card got so frequently stuck doing GC that the phone wouldn’t even take pictures.
So while you start with 20MB/s writes (wow, no progress over 10y on SanDisk Ultra cards!), this can and will drop to low single digits after a very short time.
Sometimes one can do a full erase and it will come back to where it was but it won’t last. SanDisk needs to fix both this cheap line of microSD and USB drives, which have the same problem.
What’s the point of this crap ?
Can you even get all the data off this thing before it degrades ?
SDUC holds 64x as much data in 6x the space compared to μSDXC.
Should have shown a photo comparing these to a coin to fully appreciate how tiny they are, and fiddly to get into your phone.
SD cards are too small? Should we make them bigger? The article quickly veered away from its title.