SanDisk 64Gb SDXC Card now on sale for $350, plus 144Tb CompactFlash on the way…

Memory cards may lag behind hard disks when it comes to storage capacity, but they’re catching up. Last year we wrote about Toshiba’s plans to produce the world’s first 64Gb memory card based on the SDXC format, but it looks like it’s been pipped at the post by SanDisk.

SanDisk announced yesterday that its 64Gb Ultra SDXC has just started shipping, with a price of $350 — around £225. This gives a cost-per-gigabyte of around £3.50, which is still some way off the 0.05p per gigabyte of a hard disk like this one, but remember that a hard drive is about 250 times bigger than an SDXC card.

The 64Gb SanDisk Ultra has a 15Mb/sec read speed (a Class 4 speed rating), but the SDXC standard supports cards with capacities up to 1Tb and read speeds of 37.5Mb/sec, so SanDisk still has some way to go before it exhausts the format. The bad news is that not all devices are compatible with the SDXC format — the specification is a relatively recent one and not all hardware manufacturers have adopted it yet.

Not to be outdone by its smaller successor, the CompactFlash Association has also just announced a new specification. CF4.0 currently limits storage capacity to a mere 137Gb, but CF5.0 ups this to an unimaginable 144Pb (petabytes) — or 150, 994, 944Gb. So, in your face, SDXC.

[ SanDisk | CompactFlash Association]