The Japanese company Kioxia, known worldwide for having been Toshiba’s NAND Flash memory division, has developed a 2TB microSDXC card prototypea huge capacity for a storage solution that marks, without any doubt, an important turning point in the sector.
This Kioxia product is nothing more than the natural response to a very simple reality, our digital life weighs more and more, and therefore we need higher capacity storage solutions. microSDXC cards are the perfect complement to increase the storage capacity of numerous mobile devices, including everything from smartphones to cameras, tablets, media players and even small laptops.
To better understand what this means we should give it some context. Just ten years ago, the top-of-the-range smartphones that hit the market were configured with 8 GB of storage capacity, and external storage solutions had a limited capacity that was measured in hundreds of MB or a few GB, depending on the model and the specific time.
Today, just ten years later, Kioxia has been able to create a microSDXC unit with a whopping 2 TB, that is, the Japanese company has integrated 2,048 GB of storage capacity on a card small enough to fit on a fingertip. Impressive, no doubt. This achievement has been possible thanks to the use of BiCS 3D NAND Flash memory (stacked in 3D) and a controller of the Japanese company. In total, 16 terabit chips have been stacked to achieve those 2 terabytes of capacity, and the total thickness of this memory card is just 0.8mm.
We do not yet have details about its possible price for sale, although it is clear that as it is a high-capacity and small-size solution, this is going to be considerably high. In any case, we can be sure that it will become a very popular option, especially for those professionals who need to have a high storage capacity in their digital devices and tools, and also for those consumers who want to carry their digital life with them.
Mass production of Kioxia’s first 2TB microSDXC cards is expected to start sometime in 2023, so their launch could come sometime in that year. There is nothing concrete yet, but considering that it is in the prototype phase and that it has yet to go through that stage of mass production I think we can expect a launch in the second half of 2023.
