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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

Is there anyone here that has a use-case for owning one of these at their current market price?

High resolution video cameras would be the first adopters I'd think. 4k out of the camera can be hundreds of GBs an hour and 8k chews up even more.

This was my first thought. I work in video production and we always carry around extra SD cards because our camera chews through them so fast.

We use Sony FS5s and they can fill a 128 GB card in an hour with 4K video.

With my 5d3 raw video I get 24 minutes of 1080p on 128gb. But I have to use a really fast cf card, because the sd cards aren't fast enough. It writes at around 100MB/sec for 14bit raw.

https://filecatalyst.com/how-to-move-large-video-files/

  553GB for an hour of 8k
  88GB for an hour of 4k

Video cameras can be able to shoot at higher bitrates than a post-processed 25fps Blu-ray, just using the same calculator as that site for 60fps you get 164 GB/hr for 4k

Which is about 45MB/second, about half of the published write speed for these 1TB cards.

The 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.

They're of limited utility in this application because of poor write speeds. Most high-end 4K cameras use Cfast, XQD, SxS or SATA recording media, because SD cards are a significant bottleneck.

god.. I don't even use 720p more than once a month

If I was going to build a datalogger for work that could log more data for longer (while being away from any network) the $450 would be no problem. Some years ago I was working on a seismic sensor that could have benefited from more flash.

For home use it would be a definite no.

Someone on a long trip with no reliable high speed internet could shoot in raw and never worry about space.

With my camera (Canon 5D Mark III), that's about 26,000 still images. On a busy day, I might take 200 photos. There is no way I would take a hundred day long trip and put all of the photos on a single card and risk losing the whole thing. Even if I could, I would absolutely use multiple smaller cards just to reduce the single point of failure.

"On a busy day, I might take 200 photos. "

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.

Yep. I work for a top motorsports company and our photographers take hundreds of photos in a very short time (we have multiple drivers), leading to many thousands over an entire race weekend.

The images are uploaded immediately and used for classification and analysis via ML.

At the IndyCar race I was shooting from a parking garage roof and there was a guy who took pictures and videos of all cars and streamed them to the team for engineering analysis. this was new to me but makes sense.

What series do you work for if I may ask?

Sorry, I have a habit of making comments and not following up in checking replies.

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.

Yeah, I'm not doing action photography, so my numbers tend to be much smaller because I don't need to do a lot of bursts.

I wouldn't trust one card with that amount of pictures. I use several 64 GB cards. That way if one goes bad, not all is lost.

just back it up frequently?

Sure. But why take such a monster card?

so you don't ever have to switch those tiny cards?

i have several which I often switch daily. They don’t take up much space so taking them is not a problem. Really big cards are often more expensive per GB and now you have a single failure point. Even reviewing pictures on the camera is a pain if you have too many.

Obviously this changes if you do 4K or 8k video. There a 1 TB is probably very useful.

of course when talking about storage you don't usually buy the largest capacity available if you are worried about money... same goes with hard-drives... you buy 8TB even if 10TB are available, because they are cheaper by the TB... but that should make 200GB and 512GB sd cards cheaper, at least

No, but the great thing is that prices seem to cascade down for very size when a new size becomes available. These ones put 256gb cards firmly in the affordable category for me.

Maybe something like a dashcam or security camera. Something where more hours of video footage retention is better.

in your phone, to be able to keep a local copy/backup of your family videos, your music, etc...

My thinking is the following people: -> Status symbols, Mobile Phones are the new Cars and mobile stats are the new horsepower, so being able to brag you have a n extra tb of storage over your other colleagues might be a thing. Esp in mobile nations like UK and India

-> 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.

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