Will SD cards be able to rival hard drives for storage capacity anytime soon? Probably not, but it won't be because of a technical limitation - the next generation of SD cards, dubbed SDXC, have been announced this week. Among other things, the new format for the cards will result in a theoretical size limit of a massive 2TB, 64 times greater than the current 32GB limitation. That's a significant jump, considering that 32GB SDHC cards have been available for only about a year.
The SD association has been working to retain the existing form factor and interface for SD cards, but is pushing the technology forward at a very rapid rate. The SDXC standard will supposedly provide cards that will start at read/write speeds greater than 100MB/sec, and in the future could go as high as 300MB/sec. SD is a very popular format, particularly for devices like digital camcorders and cameras. With HD cameras becoming more popular and the amount of space needed to store high quality video increasing rapidly, SDXC is trying to keep up and fill that need.