If you own a modern laptop with a solid-state hard drive, you must have noticed that they don’t hold as much data as models with conventional hard drives. 128GB, 256GB and 512GB are typical. Larger is an expensive exception. While portable external drives are an option, they are still an extra thing to carry. Another option to consider — if your laptop has a built-in SD memory card reader — is SDXC Memory cards with 512GB capacity. They’re tiny, solid-state, and can double (or more than double) your portable computer’s capacity.
If you don’t have an internal card reader, an external card reader plugs into your device’s USB port. Get a dual one such as the XX so you also have the option of using a 512GB CF card. Although they’re bigger and more expensive, CF cards offer the advantage of much faster read/write speeds, which will affect performance that you’ll notice when opening big photo or video files.
Here are five 512GB memory cards you can buy now at Adorama.
SanDisk 512GB Extreme Pro UHS-I U3 Class 10 SDXC Memory Card, (Shop Now)
Speed: Up to 95MB/s read; write up to 90MB/s
PNY Technologies Elite Performance 512GB SDXC UHS-1 U3 Class 10 Memory Card, 95MB/s Read, (Shop Now)
Speed: Up to 95MB/s read
Angelbird AVpro CF XT 512GB SATA 3.1 CFast Memory Card, (Shop Now)
Speed: Up to $550MB/s Read; 400MB/s write, CFast 2.0 Compliant
Kingston Technology 512GB SDXC 300X Class 10 UHS-1 Memory Card, (Shop Now)
Speed: 90MB/s read, 45MB/s Write.
Lexar 512GB Professional 3500x CFast 2.0 Memory Card for 4K Video Cameras, , (Shop Now)
Speed: 525MB/s read transfer speed; 445MB/s write speed
Why so expensive? You’re paying for the record-busting read/write speed, which is primarily for big 4K video files.
