SanDisk introduces the first 8TB SD and 4TB microSD cards
liliputing.com
liliputing.com
It's crazy to me that the word "only" can be applied to 128 gigabytes of storage. It's over a thousand times more storage than what I had on my first computer, and the whole phone is physically smaller than just the storage of that computer.
To use a more modern comparison: 128 gigabytes is around 200 standard-sized CDs, which would be a pile of disks nearly a quarter of a meter high. I don't even want to calculate how tall the corresponding pile of floppy disks would be.
I do!
Assuming 3.5” floppies with 1.44MB capacity, and ignoring the split container overhead.
128GiB / 1.41MiB = 92960
92960 * 3.3mm = 307m
That’s just 7GiB away from being as tall as the Eiffel Tower!
Not saying use cases don’t exist. Just seem to be edge cases in the grand scheme of things.
Some people watch pirated movies.
Some people watch have curated FLAC music.
Some people are too poor / cheap to afford cloud services. (children are a huge demographic without a lot of money)
Some people play a lot of games which adds up.
Some people take a lot of videos in 4K.
Many people are some combination of the points above.
iCloud is $10 for 2 TB per month, which is $0.005 per GB/month, though it’s a bucket rather than pay-per-byte.
My conspiracy hat is tingling, but in this case it isn't setting off explicit collusion vibes, but instead - we can't overcharge for extra storage or cloud storage if the customer can just drop in a new card whenever they need one. More like a conspiracy to maximize profit by not offering what customers really want
/end-rant
As with anything, there are always lots of 'reasons', that are not the reason.
Not surprising, as flash has a limited number of write cycles, and the FTL for SD cards probably optimises for unexpected power loss instead of low write amplification or performance --- they have almost no cache RAM, after all.
Something tells me the reason they don’t appear on regular phones is similar to the reason Apple started soldering RAM onto motherboards, and many other PC makers followed. i.e. the reason they tell you is the reason isn’t the real reason.
This card in particular has theoretical speeds of 104 MB/s, the internal SSD on the iPhone 14 Pro SSD is a real-world 1400 MB/s and higher.
For something like a decent camera, you need more, but I'd expect phones would be fine. Most of the apps I have on my phone are in the 15-30 MB range, so a couple hundred ms if you had to read the whole thing to load. Seems reasonable to blame the app if it's slow.
With more space, you could also e.g. keep all of Wikipedia and all of your music on your phone, which will obviously be much faster than web services.
Actually, you're right. My old Samsung s10e has a microSD card slot beside the SIM card.
It was nicer. What's wrong with manufacturers? How could Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and Google all drop the ball and be so consumer-unfriendly?
Between this and eSIMs, it's almost like they want us to be at their mercy.
And most of those phones still have SIM slots. Putting microSD inside the same slot as the SIM is a solved problem.
They also make it easy to unlock the bootloader, so I've been running LineageOS since shortly after buying it.
I intended for this phone to be a stopgap until I got another flagship, but I like it so much that I'v just stick with it for the last couple of years.
The only complaints I have are that it's kind of big, and it's not at all waterproof. (Although being able to get a replacement for $1-200 somewhat negates the last issue.)
I was on a Pixel before this, and I kept running out of storage and also got screwed by Google locking the bootloader when I sent it in for a repair of a broken USB-C port.
The best we can do is advocate for a world where people can continue maintaining the software and hardware of the devices we love. I don't know how the industry will react to slowing upgrades, but nothing I'm seeing these days tempts me very much.
Bring the Digital Service Act worldwide. Make it illegal for Apple to design cloud storage APIs for themselves and not people that want to self-host or use a competing service.
This isn't an absurd ask, it's a reprisal of control over computers we own. Otherwise you will own nothing and be happy.
Am I wrong to expect the combination of those factors to give me good reliability and speed?
For temperature, a $110 1.5TB Sandisk Ultra card promises to operate up to 85°C. A phone should be well under that limit.
Also real SSDs are a similar price to SD cards. I don't think there's any real justification for phone storage prices other than lack of competition that lets them get away with it.
I wish they were stay alive today, to see a 8TB MicroSD card. ;-(
I wonder what the limit is.
It has a name: The Bekenstein bound
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound
(...granted, that's if you don't care about access-times)
ELI5:
Information can only be stored on energy (mass/light etc.), and the limit for how much energy you can get in a certain volume before it becomes a black hole happens to be proportional to the radius.
My dad asked me to pick up a USB stick, "the cheapest will do" he said, so I got a 1 GB one for £5 or so.
My grandmother was there when I handed it over, she asked how many books could it store.
"About 600 the size of the bible", I said. In retrospect think I'd underestimated the size of the bible by a factor of 3, but almost any compression would fix that easily.
Still, she was flabbergasted.
I think the same category is now 32 GB? I have more than I need, so I'm not buying them anymore.
I don't think any bits are individually addressable in Flash memory.
Digital storage is kind of pointless if we cannot know exactly which bit came from what logical location.
ie: it's not like analog audio tape, where we get some signal, but don't really know its exact position.
With all flash, a cell is the smallest addressable unit. Bits are stored in cells and depending on the flash type it can store anywhere from 1 to 5 bits per cell. So with SLC flash a cell is analogous to a bit, but for the multi-cell flash types a cell might mean 2, 3, 4 or 5 bits.
Flash cells are organized into strings, pages, blocks, planes, and then the flash die itself. Reading and writing of NAND flash occurs at the page level (4-16 KiB per page) but erasing occurs at the block level. So in the case of NAND, the controller cannot read/write a single bit of data.
So while you can specify that only 1 bit be changed in flash storage, there's an entire abstraction layer between you and the flash chip that hides the fact that a lot of data gets moved around to support a single bit being changed.
It was the original name, without the hyphen, though:
>> MicroSD form-factor memory cards were introduced in 2004 by SanDisk at CeBIT[16] and originally called T-Flash,[17] and later TransFlash,[18] which was abbreviated to "T-Flash" or "TF". T-Flash was renamed microSD in 2005 when it was adopted by the SDA.[19]
They can't shrink flash too much, because it becomes more delicate and has less retention and write endurance the smaller you get.
At 104MB/s it would take over 10h to transfer 4TB, and likewise 20h to transfer 8TB.
I'd rather they offer 2TB SLC SD and 1TB SLC microSD cards at the same price, which they could if these were QLC.
SSDs either have a cache or rely on the host's cache, and that means they are at much higher risk of corruption from unexpected power loss, but can absorb a lot of writes that don't actually reach the flash but are just updating the cache.
https://the-gadgeteer.com/2016/03/17/turn-10-micro-sd-cards-...
Using vertical connectors[1] you can cram quite a lot of them on there.
Idea was to use a FPGA to present them as one big NVMe drive to the host, though that was with smaller cards.
If I were a bored billionaire it's certainly something I'd do just for teh lulz. With 8TB cards you'd get a fairly impressive amount of storage.
[1]: https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/aces-group/ve... (random example)
Of course it may just be using to use M.2 SSD for NAS. Which apart from ASUStor others / synology doesn't have one yet.