I paid $100 for a massive 1TB hard drive when they first came out years ago. Thought a TB was essentially unlimited and wasn’t sure if it could ever be used.
What a crazy advancement to get to 8TB the size of your pinky nail.
I paid like $150 for a 1GB hard drive on my Toshiba Tecra 510CDT back in the 90s. The guys at the computer store weren’t sure if it would even work.
Tecra was the high end model line and “CDT” in that model name means it had an active matrix LCD. You were already living the life of mobile luxury over most folks. Adding that 1GB HDD was rubbing it in our faces at that point. :)
1TB may have seemed unlimited back then, but now with 8TB, if an uncompressed Blu-Ray is around 50GB, that can fit 160 Blu-Ray movies. Now, 160 movies may seem like a lot, and it is, but think of how many movies there have been overall over time. Then, consider that we’re only talking about movies and then there are other things like TV shows, music, games, etc.
You can never have enough storage.
Our first family PC had a 1,3 gigabyte drive. That had Win ‘95 on it, productivity apps, bunch of games, etc. This was a time when you could actually still run games off CD-ROM’s without needing installs.
These days, my phone has over 200 times the memory. It’s still amazing to me.
Same thing with SD cards. When I started with digital photography, a 32 MB card was big. My current camera takes images that are too large to fit on it! Early cameras even had floppy disk storage, if you can imagine…
I think our first family PC had 40MB of storage, and we loaded optical discs into a caddy before inserting them. That was in the late 80s.
It gets even wilder when you tell younger people that PC’s didn’t even come with storage drives in the early days. One of the earliest I used had to have software loaded through cassette tape. That was certainly a bit annoying, as it took quite a while and was error prone.
These days I somewhat collect old hardware. I love things like my Macintosh Plus where you need to juggle disks in order to load software in the memory so you can use it. Nowadays a single text e-mail outweighs the entire OS for a system like that.
The only things that I can fill it up with are video games and video recordings. Hoarding downloaded files can also build up over time.
You’re only getting 4 TB the size of your pinky nail. 8TB is the size of your thumbnail. Most people can’t be arsed to read the article, but you couldn’t even read the headline?
and both are described as SDUC UHS-I cards that are “built for tomorrow’s smartphones, gaming devices, drones, cameras, and laptops.”
Gaming devices: ✅️
Drones: ✅️
Cameras: ✅️
Smartphones: ❌️Basically every current flagship phone, and you know that’s what they mean, has done away with expandable memory…
Which is utter bullshit. Especially since a lot of lower end phones have the option for dual sim or one sim and sd. There is literally no reason for flagships to not have that and make file transfering easier.
There is. Money. They force you to use their spyware malware cloud storages and steal all your data. gg ez for Google/Samsung
Or use a NAS like a sane data hoarder.
I forgot to say valid reason. Them being greedy is invalid
Or a headphone jack, yes, a large number of people have wireless earbuds…but the audio quality off them isn’t amazing, and goddammit I wanna plug my really nice headphones in, or connect to a stereo without needing to use a Bluetooth dongle or…or…fuck…idk…just stupid. The big players saw apple cutting all that away(barring expandable memory, they never had that as far as I know) and said fuck what people want, apple can dictate what their customers want, and we want to too! And then getting a device with enough on-board storage is hundreds of extra capitalism tokens. It’s a fuckin mess…
It’s sad that because most people dont care about these things we dont get to enjoy them either.
Honestly, you can’t really compare the modern phone memory vs sd card memory anymore.
For pure storage ya, it doesn’t really matter. For using it for anything more than that, it’s honestly too slow.
UFS 4.0 Sequential Read Speed: Up to 4,200 MB/s Sequential Write Speed: Up to 2,800 MB/s Latency: Very low, making it ideal for high-speed data transfer and multitasking in mobile devices. Usage: Commonly used in high-end smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices where speed and efficiency are critical.
SDUC UHS-I Sequential Read Speed: Up to 104 MB/s Sequential Write Speed: Typically around 70-90 MB/s, though the maximum theoretical speed can go up to 104 MB/s. Latency: Higher compared to UFS 4.0, which can impact performance in tasks requiring quick access to data. Usage: Used primarily in SD cards, which are common in cameras, drones, and other devices requiring expandable storage.
Sure, on-board is stupid fast. I don’t need stupid fast to hold my photos and videos for work, or my 100+gb of music for on the go that I change up semi-regularly. What I use my sd for is pure storage, and I now don’t want to further upgrade to a new phone as I either have to pay through the nose for storage, or sacrifice some device power and build quality to be able to have expandable memory. You cannot with a straight face tell me phones don’t need expandable memory, because they really do. I can’t even count how many time my wife has had poor/no reception and was trying to show me a photo from years ago, but her iPhone couldn’t grab a high quality image from the cloud. On a road trip, her Spotify sometimes doesn’t work due to no signal/roaming. I currently don’t have that problem. Most of the music I am listening to frequently is on my sd card, I have backups of ROMs for if I wanna play an SNES or DS game or whatever, I have the important photos from the last decade. It’s all just there because I can slap a 512gb sd into my phone.
I’m def not defending the big phone companies. There could be creative ways to mitigate pure storage vs fast storage, similarly to computer DRAM vs NVME 4.0.
I think another point I want to add is that you’re an outlier. Out of all my friends with iPhones and Android phones, they are not ripping roms and downloading their music from CDs.
Normies are kinda dumb and don’t fully utilize their phones.
These phones are geared towards those normies. Modern phone makers don’t consider you as part of their demographic.
Modern phone makers don’t consider you as part of their demographic.
Ouch…fair, but ouch…
I still have an S9 with notification LED and expandable storage. I recently upgraded the SD card to 512gb.
I live in fear of this phone dying, and me having to get something disappointing to replace it.
The mockup image is kinda misleading (article admits its crappy lol).
afaik there aren’t any current microSD cards 1TB+ that have a u3 or even u1 speed because the increase in storage size comes at the cost of speed.
The development is definitely cool, but the physical size of a microSD is probably very challenging to design around without sacrificing something.
Why would someone wanting to store huge amounts of data to put it on a storage device that is the most fragile/short lived?
short term storage of uncompressed high resolution data
I don’t think microSD has the write speed for that, might be more useful for HD surveillance cameras
Uncompressed 4k stream @ 30fps and 24bpp would be 5.7 GB/s. The top regular SD card speed, UHS-III, maxes at 0.6 GB/s. SD Express, where a PCIe lane is added, goes to 3.9 GB/s.
So, yeah, going to need at least some compression. Good news is that just a little compression can go a long way.
Even full 4K HDR Blu-ray rips come in at about 30GB an hour.
That’s 500MB per minute which just about fits in the 10MB/s of UHS Class 1.
I would consider those fairly standard these days. You’d have to have picked an extra shitty AliExpress special to not have your card meet that.
Why would anyone need a 24TB HDD?
Because in the time we have gone from 4GB SD cards to 4TB cards, movies have gone from being 700MB to 70Gb, and games from coming on a few cds or dvds to requiring a mountain of them - Baldurs Gate 1 came on 5 CDs, BG3 would require around 200 of them.That 4TB card has only space for 26 games, if they are as large as BG3.
The original Baldur’s Gate came on a single CD and had full install size of under 600MB. It was also possible to do a partial install and to load files off the CD at runtime.
An uncompressed CD audio soundtrack, maybe?
(That doesn’t appear to be the case for Baldur’s Gate in particular since the discs pictured in the listing have “compact disc data storage” logos, but I do remember some '90s games being like that.)
You could do that with a lot of PS1 games. The first track was data, the rest were just regular CD audio tracks.
This got rarer later on, once they realised the could fill the discs with FMV sequences instead.
This got rarer later on, once they realised the could fill the discs with FMV sequences instead.
Speaking of PS1 games and disk-filling FMVs: Final Fantasy 7 on the PSX comes on 3 disks but the actual game itself is duplicated on all of them and you can swap them out during gameplay, and the only thing that happens is that it plays the wrong FMVs.
It all breaks down to the actual “game” taking 133MB, plus few hundred for the uncompressed pre-rendered backgrounds, out of the available ~1.8GB (according to this old post about how a Nintendo DS port could easily fit on a 256MB flash cart.)
Games, the easiest way to expand the storage on a Steam Deck is a micro sd card.
SD card is limited to 100MB/s iirc.
It may be simplest, but it’s far from ideal.
Given some reviews I’ve seen, it’s more than good enough for games. Loading times may be a bit longer, but not that bad. HDDs are in that range, and plenty of people use HDDs for gaming.
I can’t even imagine going back to an HDD for gaming.
I was recently given a laptop to check and make sure there was no info on it before disposal, and it took so long to boot into Windows and get into a usable state, I legit thought it was faulty.
And the worst thing was, that was a fresh install. Somebody had already cleared it.
Games are just so stupidly big now. They’re pushing 200GB. To fill 16GB RAM from SD (and not all games load that much) would take 3 minutes. The SSD can do that in about 6 seconds.
Yeah, there’s no way I’d be playing a 200GB game on something like a Steam Deck. Most games I’m interested in playing on a SD is something like 20-50GB, and most of that doesn’t need to be loaded to play.
Sneakernet. There’s places that don’t have access to get l good Internet and relatively inexpensive storage like this allows them to buy and trade media and consume it on inexpensive devices like a cellphone.
Steam deck
Right, the 1Tb of internal storage and the 1Tb SD card is still really cramped if you play a lot of games
Awesome,
but I wonder if we’ll ever get better read and write counts on SD cards. It feels like the size is getting larger than the amount of possible writes to the device, making it kind of moot.
All I want is higher resiliency SD cards. It must be a technology limitation with being unable to fit a good controller in there or something because I would gladly sacrifice speed and capacity for something reliable in a lot of my applications.
ah finally, i can buy a micro sd card for 500 dollars, the same price as a gazillion terabyte harddrive, and get less reliability out of it.
Wasn’t sandisk particularly unreliable or am I mistaken with the brand? I remember some problem with SDs failing prematurely
Def means my next phone I’m buying I make sure has a micro SD slot…
I love emulation on my phone as a hobby and his is hitting the sweet spot where by the time I need to upgrade again in a few years everything up through PS2 generation should be full speed even on mid tier phones that typically still offer micro SD
And 8 tb of micro SD is enough space to carry literally entire romsets for every system I like besides PS2/GameCube which is fine.
The micro SD is 4 TB. Only the full sized SD is 8.
Yeah but in 2-3 years I’m sure they will have an 8 tb micro SD out
This is the kind of discussion i’m here for. Thanks everyone! I didn’t know SD and micro SD cards where this unreliable but i always use them for short term stuff or content that is backed up somewhere else so i think i’m good.
When I started my career I used to have to manage tape backups for the company I worked for using LTO tapes that stored a huge 100 GB lol
Sigh…
A couple of years ago there were discussions on how stupid 20+tb harddrives were, mainly because they are so slow that the time it takes for files to transfer to a spinning disk was too long.
Let’s say you have a good 20tb drive and it can transfer files at 200MB/s. To fill that drive, it’ll take 1 day and 8 hours of continuous transfer. If it’s failing, and you’re trying to get as much off of it you’re screwed.
Now let’s think about that micro SD card. It’s 4tb, and let’s be gracious and give it a v90 speed class. That’s 90MB/s. Looking at a calculation for the time it takes to fill it up, we’re sitting at about 14h and 14 minutes. Worst part is that SD cards don’t have SMART, meaning you don’t know when they’ll die.
From my experience, even good SD cards die in my raspberry pi running pihole, and the cards runs idle almost all the time.
Also there’s this thing that the higher capacity a storage device gets, the more valueable the data stored on it becomes, not directly because it’s high capacity, but because it’s more trusted by the user.
Guys, gals and anyone in between, please get a proper storage solution, something that won’t fail spontaneously. If you need that kind of capacity, go for a Nas with spare drives, or at least get an ssd.
/end rant
Not all use-cases require a high speed:capacity ratio.
I mean, I have an 18TB USB hard drive, which sustains transfer at about 50MB/sec in practice. It is nearly full, and its level of performance has never been a show-stopping problem.
It’s hard to imagine a use case where a NAS would be a viable alternative to an SD card.
The raspberry pi is about the worst case scenario for SD cards. It may be idle, but an operating system is still making constant reads and writes, which absolutely eat through an SD card
I’ve had better luck with pro extreme cards made for dash cams, etc.
Huh. I can see drones, action cameras and spy cameras being able to store lots of super high quality footage with this. Like, so much footage it lasts longer than the battery.
It’s niche, but I can see the use case.
At this size you could carry your backup with you all the time or store it in your car encrypted.
They’re slow as all hell, which is more pronounced the larger these are in capacity.
You’re best of getting a tiny m.2 enclosure for something like that.
I am slightly confused why they use UHS-I instead of UHS-II (or even UHS-III) for such a big capacity. Seems like people needing so much capacity probably write a lot of data in a short time. UHS-II is 3 times quicker.
Then again maybe they are aiming for devices that can’t even run UHS-II
Could be a trade-off issue. They can get capacity or speed but not both yet.
