Exclusive: Micron’s 1.5TB MicroSD card costs more than diamond

More than seven months after it was unveiled, the world’s first 1.5TB microSD card, Micron’s MTSD1T5ANC8MS-1WT, has landed, well almost. A handful of tech wholesalers have listed the card otherwise known as the i400 on their website and depending on how many you need and which territory you are buying from, customers may have to wait for at least four months. Mouser, Arrow and Avnet (plus its subsidiaries Farnell (opens in new tab), Newark (opens in new tab), Element14) have already listed it with Newark being the cheapest at Newark, only $420.53, a price that includes free delivery.

Buy at least 12,000 of them to see the price drop to $381 (with a total cost of more than $4.5m), not a bad price for 18PB (yes, that’s Petabytes) of solid state storage that should weigh, no more than 4Kg (without the packaging of course). In case you were wondering, this microSD card costs about the same as its weight in 0.125 carat diamond ($1.1m per Kg).

Equally important is the data on these cards so bear in mind that a microSD is smaller than a fingernail. We recommend that you backup your data using a cloud storage solution (although you won’t find any free cloud storage that can do 1.5TB).

What comes next?

Micron was the first out of the with a 1TB card. The C200 is almost four years old and it’s only in the past few months that the average price – and relative availability of – 1TB MicroSD cards has improved. But how long will 1.5TB capacity remain the king of the hill remains anyone’s guess; Kioxia unveiled a 2TB Exceria Plus prototype back in September 2022 but while a tentative 2023 launch has been muttered, it is likely to depend on market conditions (i.e. if there’s enough demand for it).

For those interested in purchasing it though, just bear in mind that it has a formatted capacity of 1,430,511 Megabytes. Samsung and Kingston, two of the largest solid state storage vendors, have yet to release any microSD cards with a 1TB or higher capacity. 

At the time of writing, the cheapest 1TB microSD card is a Silicon Power model at $87.99 (opens in new tab), about a third of the price per TB of Micron’s i40. Amazon has a lot of other fake 1TB microSD cards on its marketplace and this endemic problem hasn’t been resolved yet. Should you buy a microSD card, make sure it’s one of these 14 brands: Samsung, Kingston, SP/Silicon Power, Teamgroup, Sandisk, WD, PNY, Lexar, Inland, Gigastone, Patriot, Transcend, Amazon Basics and MicroCenter. We wouldn’t trust any others.

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.