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Comment by suprjami | Hacker News Reader

No. We have MicroSD Express. We don't need yet another form factor.

The SD and micro SD form factors are not the most robust or reliable. It would be nice to have a next step up form factor. In some ways, that's the motivation for CF Express Type B (and XQD before it), as popularized in digital photography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFexpress

Interesting, I didn't knew about this format. Curious picture selection on the Wikipedia, I didn't knew about this manufacturer until reading the Ars article above.

It was new-ish, and it barely caught on, only in some digital camera lines for some brands (Nikon and Sony). If anything, plenty of prosumers were annoyed that they now had to buy new cards to use the second slot. The rollout was also bad. Some manufacturers thought they could get away with one slot only (Nikon Z6 mark I had only the single XQD slot, a precursor to CF Express Type B), owing to the improved reliability of CF Express as a form factor, but that was a bad idea, and didn't account for failures in the underlying flash or controller, and that annoyed actual pros.

I blundered onto this when looking for a way to swap out m.2 SSDs without opening my case. There are apparently adapters for an m.2 drive to be used in a CFexpress slot. When looking at prices for regular CFexpress cards it seemed like everyone should use the adapters since m.2 drives were so much cheaper, at least when I was shopping.

A step up form factor is great. The thing in the article is not a step up though, it's smaller than an SD card, and there's no great reason for it. Since it's brand new it can guarantee a better minimum speed than SD express, but that advantage falls away fast and it's not worth the hassle of an extra format.

I'm reminded of XFMEXPRESS, a tech that had some justification to exist as a low profile replaceable and coolable main storage for small devices. But it doesn't look like it went anywhere.

Weird how this three day old comment shows up as 52 minutes old right now. What is going on with HN?

HN redates comments/submissions to boost engagement. Original post date is still available by hovering the date, in the alt text.

It's called the "second chance pool" for articles.

Would be nice if it were flagged as such with faithful timestamps.

What if it can offer better transfer speeds? A system that downloads large files often would presumably be bottlenecked by a MicroSD's write speeds.

it's microSD express, unless you have multi-gigabit network, you won't saturate it.

The biggest issue with these small form memory is heat, they heat up a lot, but seem like no one care.

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