SD cards could soon hold 128TB of storage | Hacker News Reader

SD cards could soon hold 128TB of storage

theverge.com

14 pointsax00x12 comments

We all have stories of buying our first XX Mb hard drive, thinking, "I'll never fill that up!" But it's going to be a while before I fill 128TB. Anything needing that much storage isn't going to benefit from storage the size of a thumb nail. I've got 128Gb cards in my portable four track recorder and a GoPro camera. I don't know how many hours of music I could record at the highest quality, but I've got hour upon hour of jam sessions and workshops, and it's a long way from full. Multiply that storage x1000, and I'd just never delete anything, ever. :-)

And I'll bet the GoPro would burn through a dozen batteries before it fills the 128Gb card. Your batteries would probably die from charging cycles long before one fills even that first terabyte of this hypothetical card.

We could record and curate all of our personal encounters, conversations, activities, and crafts. Imagine being able to sit in on someone's long-past, deep discussion with Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, Adam Smith, Newton, Galileo, Aristotle, Plato, or Praxiteles. Or your own late-night story-telling with a now-dead older relative; being able to hear and see them again.

Then imagine dropping that card in a field. The problem with high desnity is when it breaks, you lose a lot.

Is that the cowardly principle of how people should decide what to do? "if there is a risk of loss, or the possibility of a great loss, don't even try." Who cares what could be achieved? or what risk mitigations are possible? why attempt anything beyond grabbing berries from the bushes? Good luck with that mode of thinking and life.

I'd like for there to be room for 40 bytes of text on the shell for labeling purposes.

All I think is happening is the communication protocol used to talk to the SD card is being extended to be able to address up to 128 TB of storage. That doesn't mean 128 TB SD cards are going to be available any time soon. SD cards that big are many years away. There are 1TB prototypes but they aren't yet shipping. 128TB cards are probably decades away.

A high speed memory card will write 90MBytes per second. That's 16 days to fill a 128TB disk up, or 1.5 hours to fill up today's drives. Speeds will have to increase dramatically to have any demand.

It's took about 18 years to increase from 64M to 256G, 4000 increase, doubling every 18 months. That would suggest about another decade before we hit 128TB.

If speeds keep track though, UHD2 is about 12GBytes per second. That's 43TB an hour, or 3 hours on a 128T card.

> It's took about 18 years to increase from 64M to 256G, 4000 increase, doubling every 18 months. That would suggest about another decade before we hit 128TB.

True, so maybe my statement "decades away" is overly pessimistic.

On the other hand, we are getting closer to the physical limits of our current semiconductor technologies, so the future growth rate may be less than the past. Which might make my "decades away" statement more true.

I've spent the last decade saying "capacities can't increase", and been proven wrong :D

Can't you speed up write speeds as you add in each memory chip in the sd card? It's like how raid1 with 5 drives is faster than any single drive.

TLDR > 1TB cards aren't even available yet, don't count on 128 TB anytime soon....

yes, exactly. came to say similar thoughts.

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