Is it me or is $99 for a 1TB micro SD card an insanely good deal?

news7f11/27/2022

0 4 minutes read

Cyber Monday isn’t always about big-ticket items. You know what I mean: that 65-inch 4K TV for $499that King size mattress for $870 (opens in a new tab)or that Air fryer for $54.99. Sometimes it’s about the little things. I mean very small things, like a 1TB SD card that can fit on a fingertip.

Right now, I’m so excited about a Cyber Monday Offer on one of these cards: just $99 for the storage once filled four spinning hard drives that weigh 256GB that, when stacked, are as tall as half a loaf.

The specific Cyber Monday deal (actually a Cyber Weekend deal, you know?) I’m talking about $99 SanDisk Ultra MicroSD Card 1TB (opens in a new tab) (originally $136.99). It’s not SansDisk’s fastest solid-state storage option. In another excellent Cyber Monday deal, I was able to pay $117 for the “Extreme” version. That’s great, but I don’t need that level of read-write times (190mb/ps vs 150mb/ps) and I really like the idea of 1TB for under $100.

To understand why I’m so excited about this deal, you need to know a little about me:

First, I’ve been doing this for a long time and have looked at almost the entire history of modern computer storage.
Second, I save everything, which means I never have enough storage space.
Third, I have a habit of misplacing small microSD cards and always looking for new ones.

However, let’s go back to the first thing. Back in the mid-1980s, our storage options were limited to giant floppy drives (8 inches and then 5 inches), which, if we were lucky, had 360K capacities. In 1986, IBM blessed us with 1.44 MB, 3.5-inch floppy disks (not floppy disks because they all came in a hard, protective case), which was standard in most 1990. Our spinning hard drives are also very small. We didn’t really talk about gigabytes until the mid-1990s.

At the same time as hard drives increase in storage capacity, portable storage devices continue to shrink and increase in capacity. Flash drives didn’t initially offer more space than a regular floppy disk, but soon they offered MB and later GB of storage.

I still vividly remember the first time I held a 16 GB microSD card in my early years. At the time, it was a prototype and I wondered if I would ever use these cards and portable storage as much. I can’t imagine 4K video and 24MP photos.

I now have 32GG, 128GB and 256GB microSD cards scattered throughout my office.

There’s never enough room

As for the second point of why I always need more storage space, I blame my photography and drone preferences. I take a lot of pictures of birds and the moon, and though Sony A6000 using a standard SD card, I have a collection of micro-SD card adapters about the size of an SD card: you can simply slide the small card into the large card and use it like any other standard SD card . So easy. My trading card happens to include a memory adapter – for free.

Most of my drones use a microSD card which usually flies when I press to release the little buggers from the drone.

Which brings me back to the reason I often lose these cards. As much as I love them, microSD cards are virtually weightless, and when they slip out of your hand, it’s easy to drop them underfoot, along with all your precious photos and videos.

Why this card? Why now?

I’d say the $99 1TB microSD card is a threshold product. That means we can now expect a price of $99 (or cheaper) for 1TB (or more) in the future. For example, you have to pay a lot for 1TB iPhone 14 Pro or 1TB MacBook Pro. Obviously, you also get the display, chassis, CPU, and camera, but the memory is part of the cost.

My one caveat about microSD cards, though, is that while I’m sure you can find even cheaper CyberMonday microSD card deals, beware. I’m buying SanDisk for a reason. It’s a trusted name, and if you’re getting some off-brand memory, you might not be happy with the card’s performance. What I have found is that cheaper cards cannot be written, erased and rewritten. Errors appear and soon the card is damaged and unusable.

However, if you buy a card like this, you’ll probably be happy. And, think about it, you can get 5TB of portable storage for $495. That’s pretty awesome, isn’t it?

Check out Cyber Monday microSD card deals below.