The SD card standard was officially introduced in early 2000, and the first cards that reached the market that year held a mere 8MB—enough space for only a few song files at most. What has transpired over the past 25 years is an often underappreciated march of innovation that has scaled the technology to terabytes of capacity, all while retaining the physical size of a postage stamp.
The distinct, slim card with the token chamfered corner at the top right has empowered countless people’s digital lives, giving them the ability to take an immense amount of data storage on the go. From digital cameras and music players to smartphones, navigation and infotainment systems, and eventually drones and other devices, the SD card's ability to provide reliability, speed, and scalability has been a backbone of technology over its quarter-century history.
The SD Association reported the sale of SD and microSD cards reached 12 billion globally this year. At 25 years old, the SD card holds an enduring legacy in technology, and the coming years will see it scale to capacities and speeds previously not thought possible.
A vision for compact storage
By the early 1990s, Sandisk (originally SunDisk but changed its name in 1995) had established itself as a key innovator in flash memory technology. Early on, the company recognized that digital cameras and other mobile devices would need robust digital storage. This foresight positioned Sandisk perfectly for the next phase of the digital memory revolution.
In 1998, Sandisk was approached by Panasonic (then known as Matsushita Electric) and Toshiba to design a new format that would build upon the success of the MMC (MultiMediaCard). Engineers from the three companies worked in secret, meeting regularly over the ensuing months, and collectively agreed to develop a standard format to address the fractured, multi-format market that existed at the time. What resulted was the Secure Digital Card or SD Card.
Yosi Pinto, a Senior Technologist in Consumer Products at Sandisk and the Chairman of the Board and President of the SD Association, was with Sandisk at the time it created the first card. His legacy dates back to the initial brainstorming and development efforts surrounding removable memory, alongside colleagues like company founder Eli Harari, Micky Holtzman—now a Lead Legal Senior Technologist at Sandisk—and Yoram Cedar, a storied VP of Engineering at Sandisk who also served as CTO.
The developmental approach was built on Sandisk’s earlier experience with controller-based MMCs, a key distinction from other formats that did not integrate controller logic directly on the card. Pinto also credits the close technological partnership with Toshiba and Panasonic, two of the world’s largest consumer electronics companies at the time. Their early commitment to adopting the SD format across product lines played a key role in accelerating its market adoption.
“[Memory] was quite costly at the time, but still, it was a big vision around [the ability for the technology to scale] and having these two huge consumer companies that were really committed to adopting these cards. And they were very fast with it,” Pinto said.
Very quickly, major manufacturers of consumer devices like video cameras, digital cameras, PDAs (pre-cell phone devices called personal digital assistants), and portable media devices like MP3 players and voice recorders adopted the SD card as the memory format of choice.
At its inception, the SD Association (SDA) was founded by three leading companies—Panasonic, Toshiba, and Sandisk—and joined by 70 other initiating companies. But as the SD card began to see rapid adoption, so too did companies join the SDA.
“In the first year [2000], we had about 70 or 80 companies that joined immediately, and it grew quite fast. By 2009 or 2010, we had more than 1,000,” Pinto said.
Setting the standard
The association established the memory card standards that could both simplify the product design and provide consumers with the ability to upgrade their devices. Done right, it would prime the market for wide adoption.
As he wrote in a previous article, “The idea for the SD card was about foreseeing the coming of small handy electronic devices and the value that such small memory devices may enable … It wasn’t just about creating a technology, it was about how to turn an idea into a commercial product.”
To support the cause, the SDA heavily promoted its new standard in the early days and continues to do so with any newly published standard. “We participate in trade shows, publish whitepapers and articles, so we’re doing promotion to adopt the standard, which you usually don’t see with other standards organizations,” he said.
Scaling beyond expectations
As SD cards gained traction, Sandisk’s leadership team turned its attention to scaling the technology to meet the demands of rapidly growing markets.
The digital camera and mobile phone markets began to take off in the early 2000s, with significant increases in adoption rates. But even then, aspirations for the compact storage market remained grounded.
From its initial specification, Pinto says the largest expectation was for the card to reach a maximum of 2GB1. But that quickly changed.
“We didn’t imagine there would be such growth, and we had to actually change the spec twice. Then, after we reached 2 gigabytes, we didn’t believe it would ever go above 32 gigabytes.”—Let alone up to 8TB2, for that matter.
A commitment to innovation and the relentless work of engineers like Pinto, along with many others at Sandisk, redefined what these cards are capable of. This, in turn, enabled a golden era of innovation and new product launches from 2000 to 2015.
During that period, two trends fed into each other simultaneously. First, the price of memory per gigabyte plummeted, and demand for data-hungry devices surged. For example, mobile phone makers shipped 1.8 billion units in 2013 alone; and in the decade between 2000 and 2010, digital camera shipments grew from 32 million units to 121 million. All possible thanks to, in part, the availability of affordable data storage.
This explosive growth across device categories demanded a storage solution that could evolve just as quickly, and scale with consumer needs.
An often-overlooked legacy of the SD card is its universality. Consumers could upgrade an SD card at any time for larger capacity or faster read and write speeds. It was a testament to the powerful collaboration of nearly 800 companies working together to provide the world with a standard that fits nearly any device.
The next age of mobile storage
After 25 years of relentless capacity growth, the SD card faces a new kind of challenge: the physics of speed. As devices generate data faster than traditional interfaces can handle, such as 8K video and real-time AI processing, capacity alone is no longer sufficient. The question becomes not only how much data can be stored, but also how quickly it can be accessed.
The same collaborative spirit that drove three companies to reimagine portable storage at the turn of the 21st century has sparked another breakthrough: SD Express. However, the technical hurdles to achieving the inclusion of PCIe® and NVMe™ in a size comparable to a postage stamp required even more sophisticated engineering. SD Express may not aim for one-size-fits-all simplicity, but instead brings enterprise-grade performance to the devices that demand it.
In our next piece to this series, we’ll explore how Sandisk engineers solved the seemingly impossible puzzle of fitting enterprise-grade speed and capacity into one of the world’s most ubiquitous storage formats, and why the market may be poised for wider adoption.