WD launches 4TB SD card | Hacker News Reader

WD launches 4TB SD card

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75 pointsDeathArrow55 comments

Going to be a hard pass from me.

Western Digital has had several high profile data loss issues across multiple product lines: Western Digital SN850 [1], SanDisk Extreme [2].

Western Digital's response has been very PR and not at all helpful toward the people who have lost data due to the faults in their products.

Storage products have one job: reliably store your data. WD has shown lately that you roll the dice if your choose their products.

[1] https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-wd-black-sn850-sudde...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-ssds...

Name a storage brand without such a reputation?

There's a reason the usual advice is "Backup", not "Choose a good vendor of storage products".

Hitachi. Was too high quality to survive in lemon market.

Hitachi (HGST) was originally IBM's hard drive divison as ksec said, known for their Deathstar drives.

HGST (now owned by WD) never seemed to acquire a bad reputation. Always top of the charts in Backblaze's drive statistics. Longest warranties. I was sad when they got bought. Their factory still seems to produce better drives than WD in general, as of a couple years ago.

HGST itself came from IBM hard disk and the early days of HGST HDD were far from perfect.

Although Since then they have managed at least 15 years of decent reputation.

IBM drives were almost perfect :) I still dont know what the problem with Deskstar GXP was, were those firs IBM drives with Hoya glass platters? After fixing this one problem they became the best drives on the market under Hitachi.

> Name a storage brand without such a reputation?

Sorry, I should have included the qualifier recent.

Western Digital has had several recent high profile data loss issues

Of course you won't find a storage vendor with a spotless history, but Western Digital flash devices are spontaneously failing in the past 2 years and there's no solid indication that they've actually fixed the root cause in the affected products.

Storage devices aren't 100% reliable, and nobody is claiming them to be.

Backups and RAIDs is how we deal with that.

I will never not be astounded by the rate storage has increased in my lifetime. My first PC had a whopping 20 megabyte hard disk that occupied not one but TWO 5.25” drive bays and appeared something like the following

https://www.priceblaze.com/st4121-Seagate-Storage-Hard-Drive...

Agreed, it’s truly mind boggling. My moment: coming home from a computer show with a spectacular deal — $80 for an 80Mb drive to be installed in our Compaq 286 suitcase unit. (Imagine having 100mb!)

I'm not that astounded at all. Hard drive sizes have barely changed in 10 years.

Sure, flash storage keeps increasing, and 4TB on an SD card is pretty amazing, but it's not a hard drive, and SD cards aren't really that reliable, nor can they be used as long-term offline storage.

Good ol' spinning rust HDs are the only thing that make any sense for archiving data right now, unless you have enough data to make LTO tapes economical (and here you have to worry about the tapes being readable with newer generations of drives, so you still have to cycle the data to newer tapes). (Re)writable optical discs were supposed to serve this purpose, but they utterly failed at it.

>>Hard drive sizes have barely changed in 10 years.

I mean, they kinda have. From what I can find online, the largest capacity 3.5" drive you could buy in 2014 was 12TB.

Now in 2024, the largest drive seems to be this 30TB Seagate - not quite a 3x increase, but close:

https://petapixel.com/2024/01/18/seagates-new-30tb-hard-driv...

What hasn't really moved is the price - I feel like even few years ago a £100 could get me a 4TB drive, and the same is true today, the capacity vs cost ratio hasn't really followed the same curve as it did with SSDs.

That's because there's a floor to HDD prices regardless of size.

If you want maximum storage per unit of currency spent, you'll be looking at 16-20TB drives which go for 15-16€ per TB in my area.

By comparison, 4TB drives tend to go for 20€+ per TB.

But I agree that SSDs have moved much more rapidly and am looking forward to them finally surpassing HDDs on the price front too.

Meanwhile my internet speed has increased from 50Mbit/s to 8Gbit/s..

Basically, what's happened is that people aren't storing very much locally any more. Everything is on streaming services, stored on some server on the internet somewhere, and accessed on-demand. The only people who actually use lots of local storage are developers and pirates; everyone else only needs enough for their OS and installed apps plus some extra for cache and the the like. Most people just don't care about owning stuff any more, or having any real control over their data.

Mine has actually decreased in the last 10 years lol, in 2014 BT(British telecom) introduced their G-Fast packages with 150mbps speed, and that's what I've been on since then......except this year they said the G.Fast packages are all deprecated so if I want to stay with them I'll be put on the next highest package....which is a 76mbps FTTC connection.

The state of internet connectivity in the UK is dreadful, and 8Gbps is unheard of unless you have a business line, I think the highest offered to regular consumers is 2gbps and only in very few places.

> and SD cards aren't really that reliable, nor can they be used as long-term offline storage.

It would be very nice if there was storage that was more durable & reliable than current tech. As opposed to just bigger & cheaper.

Eg. that glass-based storage Microsoft is working on. If that makes it to market, even a few dozen GB per media, write-once, would be very tempting.

I don't need ever-increasing # of TBs. I need [whatever I have stored] to not disappear randomly. Hell, in this aspect even floppies in early 80s out-did current day flash storage.

Yeah I know good backup procedures protect against data loss. But that doesn't make random-failing-storage-without-warning any less pita.

>Hell, in this aspect even floppies in early 80s out-did current day flash storage.

As an interesting aside, you can roughly estimate's someone age from internet comments when they talk about the reliability of floppy disks (or lack thereof).

Somehow similar, started with 50MB. I remember when 1GB became the norm, when 10GB became affordable (and seemed infinite).. and 100GB .. 500 .. 1000.

Very strange feeling.

> My first PC had a whopping 20 megabyte hard disk that occupied not one but TWO 5.25” drive bays

My first HDD was for a Commodore Amiga 500 and it was sold with its enclosure, so it was quite big too. I remember it did cost (in Europe) the equivalent of about $1000:

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/36474/Reference-40MB...

This article makes several claims that are trivial to disprove:

> The 4TB capacity doubles that of the largest microSD cards, earning it the title for the world's largest removable memory card.

> CFexpress, known for its superior speed. Announced last year, the latest generation, CFexpress 4.0, supports up to four PCIe 4.0 lanes and 2GB/s per lane. Neither of those card formats can come close to offering 4TB of storage, however.

CFexpress cards are physically larger than SD cards and have no trouble squeezing in 4 TB. They're uncommon, but they do already exist: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1711327-REG/red_digit...

CFexpress is mostly just overpriced PCIe. You can make your own 4 TB CFexpress card with a small adapter and a 4 TB M.2 SSD that supports PCIe. It stands to reason that if there are 4 TB M.2 PCIe SSDs that are about the size of a CFexpress card, then there are also 4 TB CFexpress cards.

Does anyone have a better source?

MicroSD is the operative word you missed.

Alas, the article itself is touting a normal SD card, so in a way it's a weird comparison in the first place...

The sentence claims that this card is the world’s “largest removable memory card”—that’s false.

It then goes on to say it’s larger than any CFexpress card. Also false.

Yes, these RED cards basically just contain SSDs inside. However the title clearly says "SD"

The UHS-1 speed really limits what you can do with this; I think you might be able to do some light 4K video on some cameras in limited modes but generally I expect it'll be best for FHD which isn't as storage-hungry to begin with.

I think 4TB of 60FPS FHD ALL-I compression on my Canon R5 would take 38 hours of footage to fill; if you aren't going to do any grading and use a 24/30FPS FHD IPB that number jumps to 97 hours or 4 days of footage.

I also don't know how useful it would be for burst-mode; I filled 256GB in a few hours but that was on a v90 card and I expect on a UHS-1 card I'd have spent a good chunk of that time waiting for the buffer to clear.

I'm sure there's some application for this -- I just can't see it for videography or photography.

Year 1997, Seagate 4.3G, $200

I'm waiting for years for external 2.5" disks to go beyond 5 TB :-(

There are 16TB 2.5" SSDs now, unless it must be mechanical.

What vendor? All I can find is 3.5" :-(

What does that go for, price of a used car?

Dell sells a VisionTek 16TB for... $3800.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/visiontek-16tb-class-qlc-7mm...

(Rural problems: I tried to find a used car under $3800 on Craigslist here and there's less than 5 vehicles total 'by owner' and none of them drive on their own power. Maybe this is a good deal?)

Only a factor of 20 higher than the equivalent 16tb spinning rust. Not as bad as I expected to be honest.

If it were PCIe it would be a screaming deal, but it's sata. That would take a hot minute to fill at a max 500 megs/sec.

There are even ~62TB 2.5” ssds. I think there’s one from Solidigm/Intel.

Caveat: Only available if you have a budget on the order of $100-300k USD.

Seems like it’s around $8k. Which is obviously a lot, but not that bad when looking at $/GB cost. (61.4TB for $8k).

https://www.cdw.com/product/solidigm-d5-p5336-61.44-tb-solid...

Wow that is pretty incredible! Thanks for the correction.

What are you waiting for?

Buy this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OJ3UJ2S

Buy this, and stick this in that: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089C3TZL9

That usb a to usb a cable is beyond cursed.

Okay. That's pretty funny!

I didn't even notice, I just picked the first 2.5" enclosure Amazon showed me.

If only USB was peer to peer like FireWire. Then again, there'd probably be some trade-off to that.

USB 4, being thunderbolt, actually allows this I think

Thunderbolt is capable of doing this, but USB has had support for peer to peer and alternative client support for quite a while. USB OTG (On-The-Go), which allows a USB client device to also act as a host, has been around since the 2.0 spec. This is what lets USB devices like phones and tablets also connect to card readers, keyboards, and other USB devices.

What Thunderbolt can do however that is quite magical, is operate as a point to point network interface. Driver support can be a bit dodgy, but it's totally feasible to build a 3 node compute cluster with point to point cluster node networking over Thunderbolt at 20 Gb/s.

Before I understood the host/client nature of USB, I was convinced this magic non-existent USB-to-USB cable would let me connect any PC to any PC and copy between them like giant flash drives.

Mac’s _almost_ have a giant flash drives mode with target disk mode but via USB-C.

I've seen infomercial-tier products laid out like that back in the XP era. They use bespoke software, and probably some sort of IP over USB to work, but I've never needed to buy one.

Looking it up just now indicates that such products still exist. https://plugable.com/products/usb3-tran

The usb-c version of the same is even more confusing, either it's a normal type-c cable and the software is all you get, or it's a cursed bespoke type-c cable that will haunt you for years.

Get an a dual nvme enclosure and stick in two nvme 8TB drives. Or get two such enclosures and 4x 4TB drives (they are 4 times cheaper)

SanDisk is still SanDisk and I don't consider them to be Western Digital. Their products have always been dodgy and I still have heartburn over some of their thumb drives where it was impossible to remove the shovel-ware installed on them. It will continue to be nothing other than Samsung products for me in the foreseeable future.

what has Samsung done better? just curious.

When I was researching what SD card to use for a camera product a few years ago, Samsung's high-endurance cards were by far the best bang for the buck endurance-wise. The choice ultimately came down to Samsung "PRO Endurance" / 820 TBW / $20, versus SanDisk "MAX ENDURANCE" / 719 TBW / $31. In short, the SanDisk cards were a lot more expensive for a worse product.

It looks like the price of the SanDisk cards have come down a bit since then, but are still more expensive for worse specs than the Samsung cards.

At these densities would it make sense to have raid arrays in SD form factor instead of just a bare device?

Sadly new retro handhelds dont support this format.

UHS-1? Have fun getting your videos off of this

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