Over 98 percent of all microSD cards sold globally in 2017 were used in consumer applications, according to IHS Markit. These consumer-grade memory cards are not designed and validated for commercial use in video surveillance applications.

Micron’s industrial microSD cards are designed specifically for professional video surveillance use cases and include a three-year warranty for 24x7 continuous video recording usage. The Micron microSD card design and firmware is optimized to ensure a reliable, robust and low-maintenance system design that delivers 24x7 continuous recording capability with minimum video frame drops.

“Due to a lack of surveillance-grade solutions, organisations have relied on the use of retail microSD cards that are not optimized for 24x7 recording. As a result, these cards may fail earlier and also experience video frame drops as high as 30 percent,” said Amit Gattani, Sr. director of embedded segment marketing at Micron. “With a strong industry trend toward more analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) in surveillance cameras, there is a growing demand for higher reliability and higher density storage in the cameras. Micron is addressing this need with industry-leading density of 256GB in a surveillance-grade microSD card.”

Micron’s industrial microSD cards are specifically designed for IP video surveillance. There are storage densities of 256GB, 128GB, 64GB, and 32GB, which enable more video to be stored at the edge, giving system designers increased flexibility.  These industrial microSDs offer over three years of high-quality, continuous, 24x7 video recording in a wide range of temperatures and environments.  Micron's technology for the cards to self-monitor and provide information on card usage and expected useful life remaining for each card. In each, the special firmware designed is for continuous video recording, which minimizes frame drops and video loss.  There is a two-million hours mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) or 0.44 percent annualised failure rate (AFR), which is equal or better than most surveillance Hard Disk Drive.

According to IHS Markit, demand for professional video surveillance cameras continues to grow rapidly. It forecasts that over 130 million professional video surveillance cameras will be shipped in 2018, up from about 100 million in 2016. Following Micron’s release of increased capacities for their surveillance grade offerings, many leading professional video surveillance providers have adopted and are deploying the solutions across their products with great success. 

The 128GB and 256GB versions of the Micron Industrial microSD cards are available now for ordering through Micron global distribution channels.