If you’ve spent a lot of time doing digital photography, or if you’ve owned a lot of Android devices, you’re likely familiar with the humble yet mighty SD card. Across multiple specifications and sizes — SD, SDHC, SDXC, and SDUC, each available in regular and micro sizes — it’s a tried and true storage format. These days, an SD card can hold upwards of one terabyte of data. For mobile photographers and videographers, their slim dimensions make it easy to carry a bunch of them and hot swap as needed. For those who own one of the vanishingly few Android phones with a MicroSD slot, they’re a convenient way to massively increase the storage capacity of those devices. But how did the SD card format come to be, and what does ‘SD’ mean? Hint: it doesn’t stand for SanDisk.
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In fact, SD stands for “Secure Digital,” and these little memory cards were originally designed not for photos and videos, but for music. Back in 1999, Toshiba, SanDisk, and Panasonic joined forces to create a new memory standard that could rival Sony’s Memory Stick (more on that later). There was another motive at play in the background, too. The music industry was fighting a losing battle against digital piracy, and major labels were desperately searching for a way to stem the tide.
The Secure Digital name was deliberately chosen in part because SD cards worked with the Secure Digital Music Initiative, the music industry’s effort to find ways of digitally distributing music that couldn’t be easily shared online. But by the early 2000s, SDMI had gone the way of the dodo. Though DRM compatibility remained a part of the spec, SD cards never became the future of music distribution, instead becoming a staple of simple storage solutions.
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SD stands for Secure Digital, but it may have another meaning
The ‘SD’ stands for Secure Digital, but it originally stood for something entirely different. If you examine the SD logo stamped on an SD card or card reader, you may notice that the ‘D’ is shaped like a circular disc. Some printings of the logo even have visual accents on that letter to make it appear more like a CD or DVD. To state the obvious, nothing about an SD card is at all disc-like, so what gives?
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It has been theorized that the SD card logo was originally intended for another Toshiba technology that never made it to market. In 1995, Toshiba showed off its intended SD-ROM discs, which were meant to compete with the burgeoning DVD format being developed around the same time. The logo we now see on SD cards was plastered all over the press release.
In this case, ‘SD’ stood for Super Density. Since laser discs increase their storage capacity by putting the microscopic grooves on their plate closer together, Super Density was an apt description. However, SD-ROM never came to market, leaving Toshiba with the logo. When the company got involved in the development of the SD card a few years later, we can surmise that it would have seemed like a perfect opportunity to finally put that logo to use. With such a long history, old SD cards are still useful, but they were never a DVD competitor.
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SD won the format war against Sony’s Memory Stick
As mentioned near the top of this article, SD cards were in large part a response to Sony’s Memory Stick format. Sony has had a long history of trying to popularize its proprietary media formats, and a long track record of losses. If you’re old enough to sigh when you sit down in chairs, you’ll probably remember the wars that raged between Toshiba’s HD-DVD and the now ubiquitous Blu-ray format created by Sony. That battle went in Sony’s favor largely thanks to the PlayStation 3 and 4, since if you owned one of those consoles, you also owned a Blu-ray player. But there are far more discontinued Sony formats than there are popular ones. Betamax, MiniDisc, and DAT have all been consigned to history’s waste bin.
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Memory Stick survived longer than most Sony formats, again thanks to a hardware advantage. It’s well known that Sony makes some of the best cameras on the market, and for a very long time, the company insisted on exclusively using Memory Stick. But unlike with gaming consoles, it was easy to simply buy a Canon or Nikon camera if you didn’t like the Memory Stick. And a lot of people did not like Memory Stick. It was expensive, proprietary, and not widely supported. By 2003, SD cards had surpassed it in popularity, and the trend never reversed.
It wasn’t until 2010 that Sony tacitly admitted defeat by releasing new products with support for both SD cards and Memory Stick. That’s probably for the best. As much as consumers can initially benefit from competition, there eventually needs to be a single, unified standard that they can use.
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