Almost one year after the first 1.5TB microSD card went on sale, a little known company called AGI has piped Kioxia to the post by putting the first ever 2TB microSD card on sale, a candidate for our best microSD card buying guide. At only $229 plus delivery (that’s about £180, AU$344) from popular US retailer Newegg, the Supreme Pro TF138 carries a premium due to its current status as the only commercially available 2TB microSD card. The card is also listed on Amazon.com but has yet to get a price.
AGI claims that the card can reach read/write speeds of up to 170/160MBps although that requires a proprietary compatible card reader – the CR138 – to achieve these numbers. Other features on its spec sheet includes an automatic error correction function, UHS-1 U3 high speed protocol, V30/A2 compatibility and all sort of proofing (dust, water, shock, magnetic and X-ray). In other words, the card is more than fast enough for 4K video capture.
Kioxia announced the first 2TB microSD card – the Exceria Plus – in September 2022 and said it had started to mass produce them in December 2023. Now you CAN buy a 2TB microSD for less, there’s plenty around on eBay, Amazon and Aliexpress but they are all 100% fakes.
But not this one, why I’m so sure? For a start, we were sent a press release (never happens with fakes) and AGI does a LOT of other products. Finally, it’s worth also watching this video of the launching ceremony of the card, last month in somewhere in Asia, a video that contains a lot more information about the product including the nifty embedded temperature sensor.
125 grams of Petabyte goodness
Micron cracked the 1TB barrier 18 months ago with its 1.5TB MTSD1T5ANC8MS-1WT, a card that still carries a rather steep price tag, almost a year after launch. A mitigating factor is that this is an industrial microSD card which means that it has a set of far more stringent characteristics to follow like the ability to remotely update its firmware, 24/7 video recording and a whopping 2 million hour mean time to failure rating.
Since then SanDisk launched another 1.5TB microSD card, the SDSQUAC-1T50-GN6MA, which costs a mere $149.99. At the time of writing, genuine 1TB microSD cards can be sourced from Amazon for around $55 so there’s some margin for cuts.
Curiously, some of the biggest names in storage cards (Samsung, Lexar, Kingston) have yet to release products with a capacity bigger than 1TB.
A microSD card remains the smallest mainstream removable storage media; with dimensions of 15 x 11 x 1mm for a weight of 0.25g, you can easily fit 500 AGI Supreme Pro TF138 in a small box barely bigger than a standard 3.5-inch hard disk drive and weighing less than the iPhone 15.
Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand; 500 of these cards will deliver a total capacity of one Petabyte at a cost of about $100,000; yes, that was a purely academic exercise but shows the potential of the world’s most dense storage media.
I have approached AGI for a review sample and will report back as soon as I get a test product.
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