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Comment by toxicFork | Hacker News Reader

Reading about SD cards reminds me of this idea I had. Is it possible at the moment to have a wifi or 4/5g transmitter small enough to fit into a chip within (or instead to bind to equivalent connectors of) sd cards to automatically upload sd card contents to a hub or router that can sync with the cloud? So that you can effectively have an unlimited capacity sd card? Anyone working on this?

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Not only does it exist, but it runs linux too:

https://www.amazon.com/Transcend-Wi-Fi-Class-Memory-TS32GWSD...

You can run custom code on it: http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=15.%20Transcend%20WiFiS...

Love this: New (2) from $5,000.00 & FREE shipping.

Personally, I used an Eye-Fi card when I needed wifi.

What do you expect? It's a discontinued, niche product that probably didn't sell a lot to begin with, so aftermarket prices are going to be insanely high.

Looks like there are several competing options from other OEMs in the $30-$100 range. Toshiba FlashAir to name one.

toshiba card is identical inside

Awesome post, thank you!

This has actually been around for many years: http://eyefi.com/

IIRC this requires SDIO. Back in the day when I was into this (around the time of the Nokia N810) this didn't work (well) on Linux.

Isn't SDIO for when you want the host to get access to the resource?

These cards work by inspecting the FAT32 filesystem on the card and separately connecting to wifi uploading the files on their own (so they work with any typical point-and-shoot or DSLR camera)

The only difficulty being how the thing is managed and such; I believe for the EyeFi at least, the camera has to have some level of support for the card so it doesn't power it off in the middle of a transmission.

Also, microSD's form factor is probably too small to effectively house a reliable antenna, much less the additional WiFi chip. SD is probably the smallest feasible form factor today, and CFExpress and other cards are larger and might afford a little more space.

Wouldn't the read latency be insane? A quick search say the Q1D1 IOPS for sd cards is between 1000 and 2000. That's 0.5 to 1 ms of latency. A wifi/4g uplink's latency would be orders of magnitude higher, making it unusable.

You could also use some FUSE filesystem like sshfs to do the same thing in software.

A lot of the remote FUSE filesystems actually cache to disk and upload asynchronously to avoid noticable latency.

NFS will give you better performance if you've got a trusted LAN.

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