First 32GB microSD Card Weighs Less than a Paper Clip

The largest microSD card ever won't even cover your pinky nail, but sports enough storage to handle every episode of The Sopranos ever filmed - or anything else you might care to store on it.

Smartphones like HTC’s MyTouch and Motorola’s Droid have always advertised storage capacities of up to 32GB through microSDHC slots, but cards that big were strictly the stuff of myth and legend – until now. On Monday, SanDisk finally released the first ever 32GB microSDHC card on the market.

The miniscule 32GB microSDHC card will begin selling Tuesday with a suggest retail price of $200. As Wired points out, that makes the 0.5-gram card worth 11 times its weight in gold. That’s quite the premium for storage density, considering SanDisk’s 16GB microSDHC cards can be had for less than $50.

SanDisk produces the card using a new 32-nanometer manufacturing process, which has already been used on other cards, but hasn’t yet been used to bring storage capacity this high.

Previously, the largest-available microSDHC card only hit 16GB. That means SanDisk has effectively doubled capacity for the many phones that rely on microSDHC storage, which could lend an edge to many iPhone competitors which don’t could match the amount of built-in memory Apple offered through microSDHC slots, prior to these cards.