Saturday, November 26, 2022

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

Cyber Monday is not always about the big-ticket items. You know what I mean: that 65-inch 4K TV for $499, that King-sized mattress for $870, or that Air Fryer for $54.99. Sometimes, it's about the little stuff.  I mean really little stuff, like a 1TB SD card that can fit on the tip of one finger.

Currently, I'm way too excited about a Cyber Monday deal on one of these cards: just $99 for storage that once filled four heavy 256GB spinning hard drives, which, when stacked, were as tall as half a loaf of bread.

The specific Cyber Monday deal (really a Cyber Weekend deal, amirite?) I'm talking about a $99 SanDisk Ultra microSD 1TB card (originally $136.99). This is not SansDisk's fastest solid-stage storage option. In another stellar Cyber Monday deal, I could pay $117 for the "Extreme" version. That's nice, but I don't need that level of read-write times (190mb/ps vs 150mb/ps), and I'm really into the idea of 1TB for under $100.

SanDisk Ultra 1TB microSD card. Was $136.99. Now $99 at Amazon

One can never have enough portable storage, especially when it's less than $100 and is a full terabyte of space. The speed is, at 150mb/ps, good enough for your prosumer camera, drone, or even to back up your PC. The may be cheaper deals on 1TB microSD cards, but they probably won't be from SanDisk, a brand with a long history in storage.

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

  • First, I've been doing this job for a long time and have seen almost the entire history of modern computer storage.
  • Second, I save everything, which means I never have enough storage.
  • Third, I have a habit of misplacing tiny microSD cards and am always in search of fresh ones.

Let's dig back into the first thing, though. Back in the mid-1980s, our storage options were limited to giant gloppy drives (8- and then 5-inch) that held, if we were lucky, 360K. In 1986, IBM blessed us with 1.44MB, 3.5-inch floppy disks (not floppy because they were all in hard, protective cases), which were the standard through much of the 1990s. Our spinning hard drives were tiny, too. We really weren't talking gigabytes until the mid-1990s.

At the same time that hard drives ballooned in storage space, portable storage kept shrinking and growing in capacity. Flash drives initially offered no more space than a typical floppy, but soon they were offering MBs and then GBs of storage.

I can still vividly remember the first time I held a 16GB microSD in my hand during the early aughts. At the time, it was a prototype, and I wondered when, if ever, I'd be using these cards and that much mobile storage space. I couldn't imagine 4K video and 24MP photos.

Now I have 32GG, 128GB, and 256GB microSD cards scattered around my office.

Never enough space

On the second point of why I always need more storage, I blame my love of photography and drones. I take a lot of bird and moon photos, and even though my Sony Alpha a6000 takes standard SD cards, I have a collection of SD-card-sized micro-SD card adapters: you just slide the little card into the big card and use it like any other standard SD card. So easy. My deal card happens to include a memory adapter – for free.

Most of my drones use microSD cards that usually go flying when I press to spring-release the little buggers from the drone.

This leads 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 from your grasp, it's easy to lose them underfoot, along with all your precious photos and videos.

Why this card? Why now?

I'd say that a $99 1TB microSD card is a threshold product. It means that we can now expect $99 (or cheaper) prices on 1TB (or more) going forward. You pay a lot of money for, say, a 1TB iPhone 14 Pro or 1TB MacBook Pro. Obviously, you also get screens, chassis, a CPU, and cameras, but the storage 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 deals, be careful. I'm buying the SanDisk for a reason. It's a trusted name, and if you get some off-brand storage, you may not be happy with the card's performance. What I've found is that cheaper cards do not stand up to writing, deleting, and rewriting. Errors get introduced, and soon the card is corrupted and unusable.

If, however, you buy a card like this, you'll probably be happy. And, just think about it, you could have 5TBs of portable storage for $495. That's pretty awesome, right?

Check out the Cyber Monday microSD card deals below.

SanDisk Ultra 1TB microSD card. Was $136.99. Now $99 at Amazon

One can never have enough portable storage, especially when it's less than $100 and is a full terabyte of space. The speed is, at 150mb/ps, good enough for your prosumer camera, drone, or even to back up your PC. The may be cheaper deals on 1TB microSD cards, but they probably won't be from SanDisk, a brand with a long history in storage.

SanDisk Extreme 1TB microSD card. Was $299.99. Now $117.99 at Amazon

While not quite as cheap as the Ultra model, this Extreme microSD is still a great deal with $182 in savings. That's a huge discount. The benefit of this pricier microSD is, for one thing. speed. Pro photograms might want to take a look at this card first

More early Cyber Monday deals



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