10 Years Have Passed and SanDisk Shipped 2 Billion microSD Cards

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 14 Jul 2015

It’s been 10 years since SanDisk started to commercially ship microSD cards. How many microSD cards do you think the company sold during all this time? You’re right, 2 billion!

On the eve of the Mobile World Congress Shanghai, SanDisk announced that it has shipped more than 2 billion microSD cards since it started commercial shipment of the technology ten years ago.


A look back in history


Back in March 2003, SanDisk announced and demonstrated the miniSD. The SD Association (SDA) adopted the miniSD that same year.

SanDisk’s CEO (and Motorola’s CEO) came to the conclusion that current memory cards are too large for mobile phones. So SanDisk came up with the microSD, a smaller version of the miniSD. You see, the microSD and the miniSD are smaller variants of the SD (Secure Digital) memory card. The miniSD may be small, but the microSD is even smaller.

At first, the microSD was called T-Flash. But, after T-Mobile issued a cease-and-desist, the name was changed to TransFlash. The SDA later renamed the technology to microSD and released the final specifications for the microSD format in July 2005.

10 years later


It’s been 10 years since SanDisk started commercially shipping the microSD technology. And during all this time, the company managed to ship more than 2 billion units. It averages out at 6.34 microSD cards every second since the formal unveiling of the microSD specifications.

You could store 11,103 billion MB (megabytes) of data on the two billion microSD cards that SanDisk shipped for the past decade.

"Demand for storage never stops growing. We will soon see smartphones with multiple-aperture lenses, phones capable of shooting UltraHD video and applications for taking and viewing virtual reality environments,” said Shuki Nir, senior vice president, corporate marketing and general manager, Retail, SanDisk. “microSD memory cards will also be instrumental in the growth of the Internet of Things by lowering the barrier to experimentation. Two billion is just the beginning, and we look forward to contributing to future technologies enabled by the microSD format.”

How things have changed

Back in the day, microSD cards could store 32MB of data. The latest SanDisk microSDXC offers a staggering 200GB of storage space. That’s a 6,250x increase in storage capacity over a period of 10 years.



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