CES 2019 is just about to wrap up in Las Vegas, and up until now there hasn’t been any truly significant announcement apart from LG’s rollable OLED TV. Well now there’s two as Lexar recently revealed their latest offering – a 1TB SD card.

What makes this SD card particularly noteworthy is the fact that it is the first commercially available 1TB SD card on the market, costing a recommended $499 (~R6 905).

This new storage device is even more significant given the fact that SanDisk revealed a prototype 1TB SD card of its own a couple of years ago, but are yet to make one commercially available. When they do, however, they’ll have been beaten to the punch by Lexar, which was recently acquired by Longsys as the brand got a second life of sorts.

Now for the important stuff, how does Lexar’s 1TB SD card perform?

First this new card is part of Lexar’s Professional 633x lineup, which consists of a mix of SDHC and SDXC UHS-I cards. This 1TB version is the latter, and delivers read speeds of 95MB/s and 70MB/s, according to Lexar.

As The Verge points out though, it is classed as V30/U3, which means it only guarantees a 30MB/s sustained write performance, making that something worth considering if you wish to purchase the new 1TB SD card.

If that does not concern you, perhaps the price will, with the new 1TB card costing more than two 512GB ones would. As such you’ll be paying a premium to own the first commercially available card with this size of storage capacity.

We haven’t seen the Lexar Professional 633x 1TB card listed on any local sites at the moment, but it has been found on B&H Photo Video Stateside on pre-order for $399.

Hopefully South African retailers take a similar approach when the new card arrives here.