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SanDisk 1-terabyte microSD card is now available
- valleyjo 7y agoThis is incredible. MicroSD is so small! What is the theoretical limit of this storage medium? There must be a point where we can’t go any smaller?
- jbay808 7y agoI suppose you're asking about the theoretical limit of MicroSD rather than the theoretical limit in general, but there's never a bad time to read Feynman's essay, "There's plenty of room at the bottom"! https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf
- JudgeWapner 7y agoWe're going to have at least one new generation of these, assuming these were created with DUV (deep ultraviolet) lithography. EUV (extreme UV) is in development and will give even greater transistor density.
- imglorp 7y agoThe relevant XKCD from January 2013 addressed the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. It then shifted into microSD cards, whose density works out to 160 terabytes per kilogram. But those seem to have been 64Gb cards at the time (see label on milk jug). https://what-if.xkcd.com/31 https://what-if.xkcd.com/31 If you upgrade to 1Tb cards, that's about 2.5 petabytes/kg.
- visarga 7y agoThat's a pretty expensive wagon, though, at 1.4m$/kg. Maybe it would be more profitable as contraband.
- teraflop 7y agoI think you mean 2500 TB/kg, not PB/kg.
- mattmar96 7y agoSame difference
- Causality1 7y agoIf you're going to be tetchy about base 2 and base 10, recall that cards are labeled in base 10 so Munroe's math is wrong to start with.
- imglorp 7y agoYeah I did. Fixed.
- DebtDeflation 7y agoI cut my teeth on data warehousing in the mid 1990's and I remember when a 1TB database was considered a really big deal. As in, it required very expensive hardware and software an a ton of custom engineering. Now we have thumbnail sized microSD cards that size.
- andrewstuart2 7y agoWhich means you can now run a ~1TB database (poorly) on a $35 raspberry pi by adding a $450 card. Adjusted for 1990 inflation, that $500 becomes $298, though obviously it's not a very practical setup for somebody who would actually need a 1TB database.
- colejohnson66 7y agoI get you’re joking, but I wouldn’t trust a RPi anywhere near this card because of all the card corruption the RPi has done.
- atemerev 7y agoThat’s strange, never experienced any issues. Do you use proper power supply?
- colejohnson66 7y agoIt’s arguably a very common problem. Just google “raspberry pi corruption”
- TickleSteve 7y agolikely atime updates and no graceful shutdown... all filesystems are subject to that behaviour, nothing particular to RPi. There are well documented ways for making Sd cards reliable in embedded systems.
- jrowley 7y agoThink about the incredible amount engineering involved to design and manufacture this new card - millions of lines of code when you consider all the design and validation tools used. What a great time to be alive!
- gubby 7y agoWhat’s the bit error rate on a card like this? Does anyone know how long 1TB of data would actually last, with zero bit flips, in a drawer? Presumably the primary market is JPG/MPG capture, where a few flipped bits don’t matter.
- nostalgk 7y agoAnecdotal, but I have never found SD cards to be a resilient form of storage. I frequently back up any important data from SD cards, which is a nightmare considering the sluggish read and write speeds, because I have encountered many instances of corrupted data. My use case is generally portable gaming and older digital cameras, YMMV. Main brand I used was SanDisk, however.
- pkaye 7y agoThere is a reason they don't mention the retention spec.
- monocasa 7y agoAll of the major brands are crap if you really care that much about the data on the card. I've seen major brands fail even in RO. You want an "industrial" SD card if you have a hard need of recovering the data.
- mikepurvis 7y agoIsn't it usually a RAID-1 config of 2-3 cards in any situation that actually matters? Thinking of high end cameras, boot drives for VM hosts, etc: http://www.running-system.com/microsd-card-raid-1-vmware-esxi-boot-device/ http://www.running-system.com/microsd-card-raid-1-vmware-esx... https://www.howtogeek.com/392378/what%E2%80%99s-the-big-deal-about-dual-storage-card-slots-for-cameras/ https://www.howtogeek.com/392378/what%E2%80%99s-the-big-deal...
- monocasa 7y agoI've seen controller bugs that'll take out all 3 cards if given the same access pattern.
- Mizza 7y agoA bummer about the new Macbooks not having SD card slots, besides the inconvenience for camera/audio device users, is that the SD card slot offered an extremely convenient way to add extra storage space for not a lot of money.
- 781 7y agoApple designers hate holes and buttons. They are fighting really hard to remove as many as possible. No way they put a huge slot on the side for an SD card. The perfect notebook in the eyes of an Apple designer would be a solid slab of aluminium with no holes, no screen and no buttons. Perfection itself.
- megous 7y agoWell, it's comming: https://www.wired.com/story/lenovo-foldable-display-laptop/ https://www.wired.com/story/lenovo-foldable-display-laptop/
- JudgeWapner 7y ago> no buttons you know, this should be possible with AI and CV: train the NN with millions of words typed on a keyboard with stereo cameras (or perhaps even sonar) mounted just below the screen pointing directly at the fingers. between seeing where the fingers are landing and using some sort of auto-correct-style intelligence tied into dictionary lookups of what words could be produced, it should be possible to have a virtual keyboard. I'm not sure what the benefit of such a thing would be, and of course typing directly on metal wouldn't be comfortable. but there may be a use somewhere.
- clarry 7y agoOne day someone will invent wireless technology and we can forget slots.
- toyg 7y agoConsidering how crap the new keyboards are, you need a dock for the external keyboard anyway - and most decent docks have one or two card slots. Without my Caldigit Ts3+, I would have probably sold this laptop two years ago.
- GordonS 7y agoInteresting that it seems write speeds haven't improved much - 90MB/s doesn't rival most spinning HDDs.
- andrewstuart2 7y agoYou do have to sacrifice a little to fit a terabyte and all the right controllers onto something the size of a thumbnail.
- devoply 7y agoYeah in terms of reliability it's a lot. This form factor needs some sort of revolution to bring up its reliability to the same level as hard drives.
- hathawsh 7y agoIt might be enough to simply have a "raw" mode that bypasses most of the controller circuitry. That way data recovery companies could work their magic and we could choose to use more of the flash cells for error correction.
- TickleSteve 7y agoindustrial spec cards have bad block management and wear levelling, commercial cards do not (typically), hence their poor reputation.
- monocasa 7y agoPretty much all cards have wear leveling and bad block management. The commercial cards just have such shitty, bottom of the barrel Flash that they simply wouldn't work most of the time without those in place. ie. they're not features put in place for us users, or to differentiate their product line, but instead so they can hit the yields they're looking for.
- sebazzz 7y agoDon't SSDs "RAID0" their internal chips to gain some performance gain? If so, then that could also explain the difference.
- wcchandler 7y agoI’m wondering how many of these can be crammed into a 1U box. Might be an alternative for cold on-site storage. Managing tapes gets old and annoying quick.
- pigeonlaser 7y agoUsing SD cards is a terrible idea for cold storage since flash storage degrades over time. I recall reading somewhere that SD cards average 101 weeks.
- netsec_burn 7y agoOf continuous writes
- sp332 7y agoAt these physical sizes, you could build a robotic MicroSD card library in 1U. Like a tiny version of a robotic tape library. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMn7YpF8r8&t=192 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMn7YpF8r8&t=192
- monocasa 7y agoOr just hook them all up, and rely on the chip select line (and maybe selectively power them off too for thermal reasons). No moving parts necessary.
- jlarocco 7y agoAn entire room of tapes and a robot for a max capacity of 15.4 Tb, according to this: https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm_tape_library_dataserver https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm_tape_library_dataserver Upgrading to modern 20 Tb tapes would put it at 378 Pb.
- jolmg 7y agoAm I the only one that fantasizes going back in time and bragging about such things like having a consumer-affordable 1TB removable storage device the size of a thumbnail in my personal and cheap super-powerful computer that's comfortably in my pocket? How much would people in the past pay to even glance at or gasp touch such a marvelous thing?
- mywittyname 7y agoI'd love even a cheap modern SSD in my machine ~15 years ago. I remember thinking I was hot shit with my raided pair of 74gb Raptor drives.
- JudgeWapner 7y agoI thought I was hot shit for having 10k rpm Seagate Cheetah SCSI drives, Ultra 2 Wide, with 5ms seek times. 9gb was enough for anybody back then.
- jerrysievert 7y agoi remember working at the OSDL in 2001/2002 and being amazed that we had a whole terabyte spinning.
- nabla9 7y agoTop supercomputer in 2000 was ASCI Red. It 2000 had 1.2 TB memory and 1 Tflop computing capacity. High end smartphone in your pocket would be basically ASCI Red. Worth $67 million in real dollars.
- jolmg 7y agoMemory sounds like RAM / volatile memory. Is that really storage / non-volatile memory? EDIT: From looking at: https://web.archive.org/web/20110926225845/http://www.sandia.gov/ASCI/Red/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110926225845/http://www.sandia... It's RAM. Storage is at 12TB. 1.2TB of RAM... I think we still have a ways to go before our phones can do that.
- madez 7y agoGiven my experience with microSD cards, I wonder how reliable that device is. Is it even possible to write the full 1 terabyte successfully with a good chance?
- chinhodado 7y agoStrange, I have had dozens of USB sticks failing, but no microSD issue. Even those with the most writes (in dashcams) have been going strong for years now.
- gnode 7y agoI wonder if this is less a problem with the media, and more with unstable supply of power to the devices. Perhaps relevantly, SDHC and SDXC support two voltage modes.
- neilv 7y agoI immediately had a similar question, and have been wondering about why... SanDisk was very reputable for memory cards, such as their CF cards preferred by professional photographers, but (perhaps because of that) SanDisk was the first target I recall for eBay counterfeits. The counterfeits were sophisticated, including retail packaging, and I've heard of it also getting into the supply chains of some retailers. I wonder whether this early counterfeiting (even before problems on Amazon) ruined the market for reliable memory cards, and everyone switched to competing primarily on size, speed, and price. (If you're going to get lots of bad reviews anyway, due to counterfeits, you might not want to invest substantially in high quality that nevertheless only reduces bad reviews and RMAs a negligible amount.)
- jdietrich 7y agoSandisk Extreme cards are very reliable within their (relatively limited) write endurance. If you buy a Sandisk Extreme card from Amazon, it probably isn't a Sandisk Extreme card.
- mikepurvis 7y agoI've been using a Sandisk Extreme 64GB card in my GoPro daily for months without an issue. I've had maybe one or two videos in that whole time that had any issue at all, and even then, VLC was able to play everything other than a second or two around the problem.
- canada_dry 7y agoFor us old folks... it's the equivalent of roughly 1 million of these 25 year old storage devices: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Floppy_disk_300_dpi.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Floppy_d...
- LeonidasXIV 7y agoIs that the save icon?
- jsnider3 7y agoYes.
- leshokunin 7y agoI know it’s intended as a joke, but you’re right. It’s really nothing more than the save icon nowadays. We used to build them! :)
- jcadam 7y agoPfft, I could fit all that on like, 10,000 ZIP disks.
- bartread 7y agoI'm getting a 403 for this (and for every other URL I try on tomsguide.com). Is anyone else seeing this? Wondering if it's blanket blocking European users, which is a notion I wonder about only because I've seen it before, and it always seems quite rude to do so without so much as a message as to why.
- notinventedhear 7y agoI see the same from London.
- bartread 7y agoThank you - seems like it may be a very localised issue in that case (although the fact that Wayback is also struggling to grab the content suggests otherwise).
- jwilk 7y agoIt's something else going on. Here's an archived copy that works: https://web.archive.org/web/20190515152032/https://www.tomsguide.com/us/sandisk-1-tb-microsd-card,news-30079.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190515152032/https://www.tomsg... (Most other copies Wayback Machine archived are 403…)
- bartread 7y agoInteresting - thank you!
- LeonidasXIV 7y agoAlso in Europe, I am not getting a 403. Nor any "please agree to our 7000 cookies to track you" message. It is… mostly content, surprisingly.
- bartread 7y agoThanks - appreciate it!
- hamandchris 7y agoThe other day I was removing a MicroSD card and the spring caused it to be shot across the room, where I still haven't found it. I've also snapped them in half on multiple occasions. So no, I do not wish to be anywhere near a $450 MicroSD card.
- narrator 7y agoI don't know how I remember this random crap, but way back in 1998 there was some guy on the LKML who said that a company was going to come out with a 90gb drive made from reverse engineered UFO technology that would be as big as as poker chip. Everyone though he was a kook of course. Interesting to think we've exceeeded what would have been considered technology of extraterrestrial origin 20 years ago when it comes to data storage. https://lkml.org/lkml/1998/3/10/213 https://lkml.org/lkml/1998/3/10/213
- todd3834 7y agoStories like this make me optimistic about fully autonomous vehicles
- maxxxxx 7y agoOne thing the aliens are messing with us is that they only reveal technology to us that’s within a few decades of us developing it ourselves. They never show the real advanced stuff they have.
- cptskippy 7y agoThat's because they're only one step ahead of us. UFO sightings didn't drop because everyone started carrying cameras, it's because aliens developed cloaking technology.
- maxxxxx 7y ago“UFO sightings didn't drop because everyone started carrying cameras” But for some reason the quality of pictures doesn’t improve with quality of the cameras :)
- pilsetnieks 7y agoIt's maybe not the most common sci-fi trope but quite a few works touch on this, like Star Trek or Banks' Culture - there is little point to technology transfer that would be "indistinguishable from magic." If the recipients don't understand the underlying principles, cannot create or use the tooling to create or fix these technologies or lack some intermediate technology, they will be dependent on the provider or back to square one when the gifted tech fails. That's why it's better to reveal the technology or science one step at a time. You can only stand on the shoulders of giants by stepping on the shoulders of successively taller people.
- madez 7y ago> Actual user storage less. https://www.sandisk.com/home/memory-cards/microsd-cards/extremepro-microsd https://www.sandisk.com/home/memory-cards/microsd-cards/extr...
- colejohnson66 7y agoSame with any SD card. Some of it is provisioned for spare sectors. Also, it’s 1 TB, not 1 TiB, so actual capacity is about 930 GiB
- madez 7y agoI wonder what happened if car companies tried to pull off that stunt. "Now with seven seats. Actual user storage less."
- sebazzz 7y agoIt is a trick, but not illegal. It is just measuring with different units. Feet vs meters so to speak.
- madez 7y agoNo, the different units is a distinct issue.
- usrusr 7y ago> I wonder what happened if car companies tried to pull off that stunt. YMMV (sorry for the shorthand answer, but that acronym only exists because car companies are so very well acquainted with stunts like that)
- Hamuko 7y agoWell, the Porsche 911 is marketed as a four-seater. Seating four people in a Porsche 911 is however quite hard.
- 7y ago
- Tepix 7y agoMindboggling. I bought a 512MB Samsung MicroSD when eBay was flooded with them (after Christmas) after they got bundled with Samsung S9 phones. Paid less than $100. It's still rather empty. On the other hand, if you record 3D 360° video with a Vuze camera at 200MBit/s it's full after less than 6 hours.
- toyg 7y agoMicroSDs are an infosmuggler dream. You could probably store all financial and product information from an entire medium-size business in one of those bad boys. Pop it into your wallet in a fake coin, and you can take your flight home without ever risking online surveillance. Once you’re on friendly soil, you tip a not-really-bellboy or not-really-barman, and that’s it. Not that you couldn’t do it before - a lot of interesting info is in small Excel spreadsheets anyway - but now you don’t even have to worry about choosing what to take, just dump it all and let the buyer figure out what they want.
- asdff 7y agoMaybe if you are stealing government secrets, but for most companies with a little social engineering you can probably walk out of the front door with an entire corporate issued laptop and they wouldn't figure out for months, if at all.
- akeck 7y agoI've been looking forward to this, because it just about fits my digital media collection. I've been hacking together an HTML/JS media center on my Rasp Pi Zero.