I distinctly recall paying more than $100 for a 1GB SD card many years ago. Now, the cards are smaller, faster, and have much higher capacities. SanDisk announced an Ultra-series 256GB card at CES this year, but the new Extreme card is even faster with support for the A1 U3 standard.

The new SanDisk Extreme 256GB card will support random read input-output access per second (IOPS) of 1,500 and write IOPS of 500. The transfer speed maxes out at 100MB per second, slightly faster than the A1 UHS-I cards it announced at CES this year (i.e. not U3). SanDisk is pushing this card as a better way to use adoptable storage on Android devices, but it's also plenty fast for recording 4K video and working with other large files.

The new cards will be available starting in March with an MSRP of $199.99. They'll probably sell close to that for at least a few weeks, then I'm sure we'll start to see sales.

PRESS RELEASE