1TB microSD cards
theverge.com
theverge.com
Imagine an uncompressed image large enough to fill the card, at the size where you can make out every pixel, like 1mm pitch. Then imagine how small each pixel would be if you shrank it down to the size of the chip.
For 1 bit monochrome, 1TB is 2828427 x 2828427. At 1mm pitch, that's is 3 square miles. Imagine shrinking that down to 5mm.
(Edit in response to replies. This example is purposefully simplistic to demonstrate the point about shrinking pixels. A real photo wouldn't be monochrome, or 1-bit depth, or have a dot pitch of 1mm, or be uncompressed, or, for that matter, be 3 square miles big. I mean, who has that much ink?)
Edit 2: For a 2MB Compact Flash card from 1990s the equivalent is 16 square metres. That's still a lot of pixels to squeeze into such a tiny package.
With images as large as the OP is talking about, at typical viewing distances pitch substantially larger than 1mm would be just fine.
When intuitively visualising the number of pixels in a terrabyte I think it's quite good.
I prefer to visualize things at a reasonable density. Using boring software and a boring printer, adding in redundancy and still using very visible dots[1], you can fit over 7000 bits per square cm instead of 100.
That old 2MB card turns out to only be worth 4 sheets of paper. 1TB remains enormous, but going from 3 square miles down to .1 square kilometers helps to bring things closer to understandable. With this new density it's 25 acres or 17 football fields.
Considering the flash layers is also useful to my intuition. That old CF card is four pieces of paper next to each other. This new card is a box 32 meters / 105 feet on each side, filled edge to edge with densely printed dots on paper stacked 96 sheets deep. I can actually visualize that room / yard. I can visualize the dots on a sheet of paper. I cannot visualize a square mile at human scale.
[1] http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/extrem...
Anyway, thanks for your perspective! I think the conclusion is the same -- we've come a long way from the internal combution engine.
Ahh, the days before "retina displays", yes.
;-)
how long to walk that distance, VS how long to read the image from the SD card......
answer:
walking the perimeter (aprox 2 miles): aprox 30min
reading 1tb (assuming sustained speed of 20mb/sec): 14.5hrs
next: consider WRITE speed...
so, 1h 44 minutes, which is not that bad
The sd cards I have always list some performance like "up to 80mb/sec" but never seem to get close in reality.
For 400 thread count sheets (which means 200 widthwise, 200 lengthwise threads per square inch), that 1990s compact flash card would be about 1.6ft squared. You could sort of imagine a tape-out of that complexity being shrunk down through projection.
Now at these densities it is no longer holding up well. 1TB would be a sheet that was about 1100ft x 1100ft. The tape-out itself seems like it would have to be sized to already be the after-shrunk-down version of 1990's tape-outs.
I'm looking forward to SD Express https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/286390-sd-association-ann... which aims to solve this issue.
The typical use for a microSD card is to store media (photos, audio, short video clips), and if you add it gradually and consume it from a managed media library, you'll have smooth sailing until you one day decide to export it or back it up and find that it takes 2.5 hours to transfer everything, assuming you don't get thermally throttled!
I have an old machine I'd like to turn into a WORM server, but I want it to be silent and would rather re-use a bunch of old memory cards than spend money on new storage.
All I could find was a device that put two MicrSD cards into a single SD card. This is even better.
I'd buy it if there was a USB version, since the computer I want to re-use only has USB ports.
WORM is a slightly less scary, but I still wouldn't trust them without being able to handle failure of 50% of the cards.
tldr: it seems to work as advertised but he can't find a valid use case for it.
So yeah, I'm very much interested in this device.
At least with the SSD, you only have one microcontroller doing god-knows-what to hide the horrific reality of flash storage, vs 10 SD card microcontrollers and one on the adapter board, which are all probably even worse.
As I have a lot of odd SD cards unused in drawers I would be more interested in these adapters if they exposed every card as its own drive so I could do ZFS, or if they did "real" raid.
Don't get Kingston, like this one, they seem to break leaving half the thing inside the USB port way too often in my experience :
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1XUlsJVXXXXcGXpXXq6xXFXXXG/Kin...
But for just $218 USD you can have a brand new 1 TB USB 3.1 Portable SSD that does sequential reads/writes at 400 megabytes per second.
Trying to write a terabyte at two or even ten megabytes per second would be excruciating.
As noted above, this would be WORM
But for just $218 USD
I'd rather spend $218 on my family and re-use the flash I have lying around instead of dumping it in a landfill.
Sony has let me down as well, their cards have either poor or no wear leveling and will die in a matter of weeks when used in a GoPro. Every single one I bought has died inside of a year.
The longest lived microSD card I currently have is from Lexar and I recently bought some Samsung cards to see how they'll do.
Lexar is a less-known brand, less likely to be used by counterfeiters.
I don't know why but I found this note in the description really amusing.
In this case 10 mSD slots, single sided.
[updated to correct pricing and calculation based on observation made by the fellow commenter below]
Then again even 1Tb devices make me nervous due to the amount of time it can take to rebuild your redundancy level after replacing iffy units, and might insist on straight mirrors (R10) rather than something more space efficient like R5 to try keep rebuild time down as low as possible.
I just don't think underprivileged people are so desperate for entertainment that they'll browse a 1TB SD card for morsels of wisdom.
Unless you meant you're going to pack it full of movies, music, and games, which actually sounds interesting.
I don't see the parallels.
HN is basically current events social media where people even admit they read the comments instead of TFA. And I think that getting lost on Wikipedia every few weeks is a far cry from browsing old shit on a 1TB SD card for fun in your ramshackle hovel with the family Android tablet.
To me it kinda comes off as the hilarious "wow, those poor people must be so bored watching their paint dry. Maybe I can interest them in something nobody does" wrapped up in some feel good idea about sharing knowledge.
A 1TB dump is not about expecting people to read all of it, it would be about getting a broad enough section of knowledge that the chances of a decent subset of it being of interest to a decent number of people.
And if the purpose is to "spark the next Einstein" as the comment suggested, it doesn't matter if 99% of them ends up being used for games, or sold, or used for all kinds of other things, if a tiny portion triggers an interest in learning and provides a good starting point.
And I call an excessively tangential session a "wikiwalkabout", after the Australian walkabout tradition introduced to Americans by "Crocodile Dundee", or, more recently--the Locke character from "Lost". And boy, did that show have a letdown denoument. But I did like the colossus foot in the later episodes, because it reminded me of "Ozymandias", by P.B. Shelley. And did you know that he wrote that as his shot in a poetry duel with another poet--Horace Smith? (I guess he won, right?) Anyway, they picked that as a topic to honor a new museum exhibit of the Younger Memnon statue of Rameses II. Those British museum-goers were just mad for importing cultural artifacts from distant lands and never sending them back. Like the Elgin Marbles, from Greece. And when I think about Britain and Greece, I can't help thinking about their palace guards--Greece with their poofy-footed Evzones and Britain with their Beefeaters. And one of those Beefeaters is the Ravenmaster of the Tower of London--literally in charge of the welfare of the tower ravens. One of whom is apparently named Merlina, and is allowed additional latitude in how far she may fly, because she always comes back. And speaking of ravens and 19th-century poets, boy was Edgar Allen Poe a gothy li'l guy. He had a lot of inspirational company, though. Including Mary Shelley, wife of the aforementioned P.B., who won a 3-way ghost story duel between herself, her husband, and Lord Byron, who only managed to invent the vampire romance genre. So between the two of them and ol' Rameses II, we're almost all primed to scare the crap out of Laurel and Hardy with Universal Pictures monster movie staples: Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, and the Mummy. But we still need the Wolfman....
And hopefully you see how it works now. Before wikis existed, there was "Connections", by James Burke.
Yep, that show was a poster-child for the phenomenon called "jumping the shark".
Whenever I see or hear something I don't know about I go look it up on Wikipedia.
I find a lot harder to study on the internet with all its distractions, so I'd guess not much.
As a kid I did this for fun all the time. It was either them or read through the 100s of back issues of Nat Geo that my grand parents had.
Today I easily get lost in wikipedia, and need to make sure I do not waste too much time when I go in looking for a single fact.
Sounding off: I was 12 years old, with a dialup connection and a barely functional windows 98 computer, in a shithole town with no future. I got lost reading into the history of video game consoles, and from there, the history of computing and processors in general. I wouldn't have gotten into computers (and therefore, software development and an actual escape from the shithole town) without my limited access to Wikipedia.
What you're missing is that I wasn't looking for entertainment, I was looking for knowledge. Plenty of people seek it out for it's own merits, and I would love if people in other shitholes were able to be introduced to their hobby or passion.
In fact, before wikipedia, we had an actual, 1970s vintage cheapo encyclopedia set, and I read those multiple times. After that, we had Encarta 2000 on CD-ROM. Thank goodness too, because I probably would have moved on to our dictionary from that point
These are the exact words that I was looking for. Thank you.
Encyclopedias (yes, the dusty paper versions) enabled my development; I would be a completely different person if I didn’t have one when I was a child.
That's not to say that I think giving underprivileged people tablets with Wikipedia is a good idea though.
It didn't work. Probably because gadgets aren't the solution to unequal distribution of privilege.
An alternative data point would be https://www.edutopia.org/blog/self-organized-learning-sugata... - the hole in the wall computer that showed giving access to the internet to poor children did have a dramatic effect.
It's not clear that it "didn't work" either. Does that mean no one benefited from it anywhere ever?
An obvious extension would be google-ai-tutor. Inspired by _Diamond Age_.
Software for getting children reading - in their own language first - is a great first step.
See the work being done by the Global Learning XPRIZE: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning
Text compressed well, especially if you have a lot of it and image files usually make up the bulk of any archival effort.
And then I thought about how Pi is actually a rather powerful desktop computer, by the standards of the time not so long ago. It's 1GHz CPU and 512Mb RAM - back in 2000, that would be a rather high-end PC (yes, I'm aware that CPU frequencies across architectures are apples and oranges).
If you think about it in those terms, it's insane how cheap compute has become, even relative to storage.
For home use it would be a definite no.
We use Sony FS5s and they can fill a 128 GB card in an hour with 4K video.
553GB for an hour of 8k
88GB for an hour of 4kThe SD standards have been moving up the transfer rates. The UHS-III does 624MB/sec. The new SD Express standard will do 985 MB/sec by presenting a PCIe Gen3 or NVMe directly. (Obviously more contacts, but they are backward compatible with the older interfaces.)
They just announced the SD Express interface for microSD cards as well. I'm not sure any products are available for SD Express yet.
-> Social media is slowly switching to video over still images (greater access to high bandwidth). So people will be taking editing and sharing more video instead of pictures and that increase storage requirements many many times over. I know most people who heavily use social media already find 32gb limiting when what they post most of are images.
-> Gamers, most AAA mobile games require large extra content downloads that are in multiples of gigabytes.
-> Geeks, because 1TB SD cards are quite a technological marvel.
-> Mobile Cinematographers, Laugh now but this will slowly become a thing. Looking at Sony and LG offering more and more bold mobile cinematography devices like the Xperia X1. These phones are able to deliver RAW footage files. Also Nokia's latest five camera flag ship puts out RAW stills that can be 10s of megabytes per image. I see a proliferation on the horizon.
-> Streamers, Mobile networks can be patchy, public wifi sketchy, and corporate internet to restricted so youtube, netflix, and showmax allow people to download movies to watch later. However low amounts of storage capacity currently limit the resolution of of content you can download.
I believe at least two of these use cases will hold true in the near future. But at the current high prices maybe only Geeks will buy them.
I can easily see a pro taking 20000 pictures during a sports weekend or an airshow. I took more than 3000 during an IndyCar day with several races.
The images are uploaded immediately and used for classification and analysis via ML.
What series do you work for if I may ask?
I work for each NASCAR series, so Cup, Xfinity, and Truck. We also work with ARCA, NHRA, and IMSA but I'm not sure if this particularly level of photography or application will ever make it down to the lower series.
Obviously this changes if you do 4K or 8k video. There a 1 TB is probably very useful.
You mean you're reporting them without buying them and testing them, based on what you think the capacity and price-point should be?
Yes. If someone's offering an impossibly too good to be true deal in an area that's rife with data-destroying counterfeiting [1], they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is a very well known and prevalent type of fraud.
Personally, I think Amazon is negligent for not very tightly controlling the vendors that are allowed to sell SD cards on its site. They're not doing enough to keep fraud out of their store.
[1] https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326059# (from 2015, capacities have obviously changed since then):
> Tests by the Counterfeit Report found that the cards will work at first, but generally speaking, buyers are purchasing what they think are cards with capacities of 32GB and up. Instead they are getting are cards with 7GB capacity. Counterfeiters simply overwrite the real memory capacity with a false capacity to match any capacity and model they print on the counterfeit packaging and card, Crosby explained. Users can’t determine the actual memory capacity of a counterfeit memory card by simply plugging it into their computer, phone, or camera. When the user hits the limit, the phony card starts overwriting files, which leads to lost data.
> The Counterfeit Report often comes across cards in capacities that don’t exist in any product line, and the cards it purchases and tests that are 32GB and up are usually always fake. The counterfeiters make a great profit on the fake cards, and there’s no consequence.
Seems abusive. I could report my competitors for selling cheaper than I do and hope they get banned.
I'm talking about stuff like a supposed 1TB generic MicroSD card going for $50, when a legit item would sell for ten times that. Here are some examples:
https://www.amazon.com/1024GB-Micro-Memory-Adapter-Camera/dp...
https://www.amazon.com/FidgetKute-Micro-Memory-Storage-1024G...
https://www.amazon.com/Generica-256GB-Micro-Memory-Adapter/d...
https://www.amazon.com/Generica-400GB-Micro-Memory-Adapter/d...
There's a 99-100% chance these are fake, and I don't have to buy one to tell.
It took two minutes for me to find them, by the way. A company as rich as Amazon should easily be able to pay someone to search for fakes like that full time, and even purchase cards to verify their fakeness.
> Seems abusive. I could report my competitors for selling cheaper than I do and hope they get banned.
Offering these things for sale is abusive, reporting them as fake is a public service.
What they say is
> [you are] able to review any product on Amazon.co.uk regardless of where you purchased that product
Which implies you must have purchased it somewhere.
I don't post reviews like that, but I totally approve of people who do. I'm not going to fret over the precise meaning of Amazon's terms and conditions if doing so means that innocent people will be more likely to be suckered by scammers.
Or just WiFi drives on rural buses that could transfer data from stop to stop.
Perhaps I’ve been reading too much post apocalyptic fiction
On a serious note if you wanted to play around with "infrastructure breakdown tolerant" stuff, a rtl-sdr is like 30$ on amazon and it's fun to mess around with. You can tune into HAM groups, police radio, the weather, traffic control, etc.
EDIT: Before others mention it, no broadcasting without knowing what you're doing! Listening is perfectly fine, but if you show up on the police scanner they might not be happy....
Reuter’s got its start by using carrier pigeons to bridge the gap between two telegram networks.
Implemented? Not to my knowledge. But there's an old RFC from 1999 for it: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549
It was even updated for IPV6, which means that it's possible to have birds communicate with a more modern protocol than many major ISPs: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6214
* No support for files over 1GB (videos can easily go beyond that on modern cameras)
* Poor access times/latency for anything not on the current card (you have to manually swap it)
* You have to use tape
* Depending on the pricing, I'd be curious but my bet is that 1024 actually decent micro SD cards will cost at least 1$ a piece , and the 1TB uSD is only $449.99, so good luck finding that many cheap, and usable uSD cards.
You can combine multiple physical drives into a single logical volume, e.g.:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/7002/how-to-set-up-multiple-...