SanDisk SD memory card 'largest ever' | Hacker News Reader

SanDisk SD memory card 'largest ever'

bbc.co.uk

53 pointsilghiro72 comments

Honestly, 512GB in a removable postage stamp is the stuff of Science Fiction. I remember when I was kid in the early 90s and in my school computer club and we sat down to sketch out what kind of computer we'd have in the YEAR 2100 and I put down the ridiculous storage size...something like 24GB or something. I wasn't even close.

1 of these could have easily stored a copy of all of the internet traffic that happened over the course of a day in 1993. [1]

Now we've got spaceships, VR, pocket sized personal computers with always on global network communications, video calls, amazing smart watches, and now half a terabyte in something the size of my big toenail.

It kind of feels like the future we were promised pre-internet is finally starting to happen.

My less than a year old desktop's main drive is the same storage size as this. In a year it will be the size of my fingernail and I can put it in my phone and my tablet.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte#Illustrative_usage_ex...

Now you can lose even more pictures and video when your SD goes bad. Woohoo!

There are a lot of photographers who won't use SDs larger than 8GB for just that reason--lose one, you don't lose everything.

Or you could just back things up regularly.

Its not about backup. Its about environmental stress. Photos are taken all over the place - yards, beaches, malls, in good weather and bad. SD cards are fragile. Its about, If you spend a day shooting and one of them doesn't make it back to the studio, how much have you lost?

"SD cards are fragile"

Are they, though? Because I use SD cards for photography and have for quite a few years and I take them not only to yards and beaches, but mountain peaks, spelunking in mud caves out in the desert, etc, and I have never had an SD card break on me either physically or in terms of data loss.

To be fair, though, for photos only (no video) even with high-res uncompressed RAW photos I can't imagine anyone practically needing SD cards anywhere near the 512 GB size. That's a lot of photos...

YMMV, I guess, maybe I'm totally lucky, but I have yet to personally have an incident which makes me worry about the robustness of decent quality SD cards.

With your magic instant remote backup machine?

Special SD cards with built-in wifi have been around for a while. That's pretty magical.

Sure...

http://www.amazon.com/EZOPower-Portable-Wireless-External-Sm...

I mean it does cost $35, but it's pretty much exactly a magic remote backup machine (that can also charge your gear!). Or you can spend more cash and get one with an integrated hard drive and need no other devices.

As a former wedding photographer, I typically went by the number of pictures I was willing to trust to a single card. Since file sizes went up at roughly the same time as storage sizes, I ratcheted up the maximum size SD card I'd use.

It used to be "won't use larger than 2GB". Right now it's around 8, but will likely become 16 in a couple of years.

Sounds like someone should do a 'RAISD' for cameras.

Higher end DSLRs (including mid-line ones like the Nikon D7000) support two SD card slots and "backup" mode where both cards are written to with every picture. That's probably enough for most paranoia.

One day I will have an original idea. Today is not that day.

Don't worry. I'm bankrupt on those, too.

Canon 5D Mk III has both SDXC and CF slots that you can duplicate as you shoot.

That's why most pro cameras have dual slots.

I am using at least two fast 64GB SD Cards in copy/mirror mode on my Nikon, and back up immediately to Blu-Ray after a photoshoot/hyperlapse/video. I would be absolutely happy to use 2x512GB!

Well, professional cameras often have double slots and can copy to both cards at once.

As for video, it's also common to stream to an external recorder from the DSLR etc.

This isn't targeted at the DSLR crowd. It's meant for videographers shooting 1080p raw or 4k video. This card will only hold around 5 hours of raw 1080p video for me.

I know people are going to scuff at the $800 price tag, but frankly it CAN be justified for certain things. For example a lot of studios use a direct feed to a terminal (e.g. WiFi/USB delivery of pictures as they're taken) but they also utilise an SD card as a "backup" in case the photo is somehow lost or the computer was down.

Changing out SD cards on an SLR doesn't really take very long, but it does disrupt the workflow (particularly when you have to take a thousand pictures in an hour or more, that could be a dozen SD card changes) and $800 for a card which might last you the whole day might be worth it.

It definitely won't be useful for your kid's birthday party or even to film your school project. But as an industrial tool there are definitely uses for a card such as this (although external SSDs are starting to become "big," so maybe less so than a year ago).

That $800 will be $29.95 before the decade is out. And by then it will be a micro-sd version.

If you don't mind my asking, what application would require a photographer to take 1,000 pictures / hour?

Sport events. Model shoots.

Sports photographers probably take 1000 photos/hour. :)

As for price, i don't think it will even take that long. In 2 years it will cost something like 50 bucks. A USB3.0 128GB flash drive (260MB/s read, 240MB/s write) from SanDisk now costs about $100.

A good indication is that the price of SD cards is largely down to "is this the currently largest card? If so, apply massive premium".

E.g. on Amazon UK right now I see a 256GB Lexar SD card for 300 GBP, or a 128GB SanDisk SD card for 70 GBP, or 64GB SD cards for around 30 GBP...

So expect the prices on the 256GB models to start falling shortly, and once 1TB versions arrive it won't take long until the 512GB versions drop to a quarter or less.

In some event photography situations, where the subject is not deliberately posing but engaged in some action, you can take a huge number of pictures and come up with only a few usable ones.

I've photographed some indoor dog agility events, for example; border collies running at top speed through moderately-lit facilities tends to mean lots of unusable photos.

For me it's perfect when we tether our shoots to an SSD Macbook Pro.

We can 'set and forget' the SD card in the SD slot and have ChronoSync automatically transfer anything in our tether folder to it. It's a great backup/scratch disk. $800 is chump change for a professional photography studio.

edit: I love that I was downvoted for this.

Possibly because there is zero connection between your comment and the parent comment?

Actually, there is and I got the connection perfectly. It's an automatic way to have a separate copy of a high volume shoot where you don't have to interrupt shooting because of the tethering.

Parent comment talks about the price and how in a bit is will be cheaper and smaller. And then asked about when a person would need 1000 pics an hour. You didn't really connect any of that. You talked about tethering.

edit: I'm not saying your comment was lame or stupid or wrong or whatever. It just didn't really fit as a reply to the parent. Perhaps someone else thought so too. I also would not have downvoted you for it. But maybe someone else did.

He replied to me, and I got the reference. I realized that the studio implied the 1000 pics / hour. That thought had not occurred to me but the example made it clear. You don't always need to have everything spelled out. The other example mentioned (sports photography) and fashion used to rely on motor drives, I had completely forgotten about those. And they would go through a roll of film like there was no tomorrow. It's just not something I ever used or did.

Also, I think you are confusing your parties in this thread.

my bad. I did confuse the two of you. never mind.

The article mentions video applications. 50-60 frames per second -> 180,000-216,000 frames per hour (possibly much more if you're shooting at a higher frame rate).

If you're shooting something that's impractical to retake (whether due to expense or it being an inherently one-time event) you want to use minimal compression, if any. Even if you are using compression, HD video eats gigs like popcorn. :-)

Well not just video, but 4K video...

> If you don't mind my asking, what application would require a photographer to take 1,000 pictures / hour?

ID badge "photo days" at large companies, conventions, celebrity-public photos (e.g. Comic Con-esk), etc.

They come in, snap, they leave. Rinse repeat.

Somewhat amusingly the Fhantom Flex4k hits ~33 Gbytes per second of RAW 4k footage at 1000FPS. http://www.visionresearch.com/Products/High-Speed-Cameras/Ph...

So, this is still to small to be useful for those videos. However, for more normal 4k videos @ 30-60FPS this is probably a good fit and a much nicer form factor than SSD.

A dozen SD card changes? What cards do you use? My camera shoots 20 MB RAW images, so that's 20 GB for a thousand. I have an SDHC 16 GB card that I got for $30-40 or so, and it's going to last me ages.

By the way, I think your post made me realize how professional photographers work: They shoot with burst and pick stuff out later.

I guess it makes sense, you want to maximize the odds of catching a great shot. I'm much more methodical, but maybe I shouldn't be.

Your camera is not the typical kit used by most professional photographers, though. Uncompressed RAW files from a Nikon 810, for instance, are 72MB so your 16G card could hold just over 200 shots a piece.

Of course, whether having an entire photoshoot on a single piece of (relatively fragile) storage is a good idea is another question entirely.

Sure, it's not full-frame, but it's no slouch. It's 20 MPel, whereas the 5D is 23. I doubt the file size is three times higher for three more MPel.

Hands-On Review: Nikon D810

"During these low-light tests I also had the chance to work with both the conventional RAW file size, which yielded approximately 77MB files" http://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/photography/hands-review...

Which seems odd as 36.3MP * 14bits / pixel ~= 63.5 MB though it does say it can save both raw a JPEG at the same time which may make up the difference. That or it's saving 17 bits / pixel.

77MB * 5pictures a second = 23GB / min.

Goddamnit, you're cherry-picking the worst case, and that's still "only" 77 GB. Nowhere near 512.

I suspect battery life will probably be more an issue than filling one of these up.

But, IMO your looking at it the wrong way as your not their target market. This is for HD video not camera's.

Still, the goal is not to fill the tings to capacity it's a cost / benefit trade-off is 500$ (800$ - 300$ for a 256 GB SD card) worth being able to take more than 256GB worth of pictures. And in that case it might be worth it simply to reduce the risk of missing a great shot. Even if they rarely want to go though 3,000 pictures looking for the best ones. There is utility in basically never running out of space. Plus a few applications where you might actually fill a 256GB card.

You seem personally offended that someone said they can see a potential use for a card of this size.

I am personally offended that I express disbelief that 1000 photos are 512 GB and people are arguing that the card is useful.

According to Nikon's user manual for the D810, a 14-bit RAW file from the camera takes approximately 73MB. It's a 36MP sensor. So, it's more than 3x as big a file and would only fit about 14 images per GB of storage...

You're not shooting video... It adds up quickly. My camera (Panasonic GH4) spits out video at 100Mbps which is a gigabyte every 82 seconds. Your 16GB card only fits 21 minutes of video.

512 is still excessive right now (and the price!), but bitrates aren't exactly decreasing.

The GP specifically mentioned 1000 photos, though. I didn't say it's impossible to fill a card, I said that 1000 photos aren't that big.

Would you recommend the GH4 over the Canon 5D Mark III?

It depends on your needs, but the GH4 is quite a bit cheaper and has more advanced video functionality. I already had a nice collection of micro four thirds lenses which made it an easy call.

That's retail price.

This time next year it will be 50 cents per GB or $250

Amazing, that is 320 GB/cm^3. I didn't know that we have possibly already passed the information density of the human brain (~80 GB/cm^3).

You can't really compare passive storage with combined processing and storage. The brain computes all over, it does not have a 'data bus' or a von Neumann like bottle-neck as far as we know today.

Of course not. However, I would have guessed that the 3-dimensional structure of the brain would still have higher information density compared to 2-dimensional IC's (+ wiring + heat regulation) by some orders of magnitude. But I guess neurons aren't that small after all.

They're not all that small and there is a ton of support infrastructure and deadweight around them.

Actually, if my math is correct the ratio of storage to size of a 128GB Micro SD is still greater.

In two dimensions, for simplicity's sake, since a micro SD is obviously slimmer than a regular SD:

512GB SD = 768mm^2

128GB Micro SD = 165mm^2

SD = 0.667 GB/mm^2

Micro SD = 0.776 GB/mm^2

If we add the third dimension the efficiency of a Micro SD will be even greater compared to a SD.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SD_Cards.svg

I love it how in one paragraph they state that capacity has increased over 3 (decimal) orders of magnitude but there is a magical hard cap of 2T (only a factor 4 removed from where we stand today). If that's correct then 2^10 = 1000, over 10 years that's one doubling per year so we are 2 years away from reaching the ceiling in SD cards. You read it first on the BBC website.

The article seems widely confused. It goes from SD cards to 4K movies to HD movie storage to the cloud.

Obviously the cloud is just a pile of SD cards connected together.

Is that a physical limit or a filesystem limit?

I wish more devices had SD slots. Particularly Windows Tablets. There's plenty of room in there, and SD cards are way better than microSD.

Is that in terms of capacity and/or speed, or do you just prefer the form factor of a full-size SD card?

I quite enjoy the fact that my car stereo has one, I use a 32G card to take along the majority of my music collection. Far better solution than Bluetooth from my phone; battery consumption; or cabling direct in my glovebox to iPod or similar.

The only inconvenience I have found is when you forget to watch the model your buying and end up with a slow transfer version. However for the most prat I use them in the place of USB sticks as its more common to find fast ones for good prices

Except when you tread on them. As I found out yesterday. I had another that got damaged in the post, bent and dead.

When I send them in the mail (which I do rarely but it does happen) I sandwich them between two taped together pieces of thin wood. That means it's no longer a very thin envelope but it increases the chances of safe arrival. They also always go registered.

USB sticks tend to be more robust.

What about the little plastic cases that they come in?

Don't the MicroSD cards come with plastic cases, but not the larger SD cards?

Every SD card I have gotten has arrived in a case. I'm sure there are exceptions, but you can also buy them cheaply (there's a 10-pack for sale as an add-on item for $4.25 at Amazon).

Since realised that I've bought both SD and MicroSD cards with and without cases. A MicroSD got bent in the post, bought as new. And a accidentally put my foot on an SD while shuffling cards.

MicroSD is at least something. I'd much rather that Apple tablets were able to use any kind of external storage without converters.

Also remember the 128GB microSD.

This new 512GB SD could be useful for 4K video and that kind of stuff.

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Adapter-SDSDQUAN-128G-G4A-Newe...

Is "Extreme Pro" really the best name they could come up with?

It would be sweet (as others have hinted towards) if there could be some built in redundancy, i.e. two 256GB partitions that act as a raid.

Not sure SDs fail that way - the flash is usually pretty reliable. I think its mechanical stress (flexing in your pocket; wet or humid conditions causing corrosion to fragile connections) or static shock that causes the on-board controller to fail. In those cases the flash is still good, but you can't get at it.

obligatory http://xkcd.com/691/

Obligatory links rarely are.

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