8 ms·

SanDisk 1TB MicroSD Card Review

72 points by rahuldottech 7y ago

novok 7y ago
Now we need sd express versions and stop getting limited by 100mb/s speeds
debt 7y ago
Fascinating. A microSD card is 0.5 grams. I could tape one of these to a postcard, overnight for $25 using USPS and probably achieve a faster data rate than I could if I just send it over the air.
- hobs 7y ago
  It's been true for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
  - privong 7y ago
    It's been around longer than RFC-1149, dating back to station wagons carrying data tapes in the 1970s: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/20jlv3/never_underestimate_the_bandwidth_of_a_station/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/20jlv3/n...
- anamexis 7y ago
  Assuming a drop-off at 5 PM and a delivery at 9 AM, that's a data rate of 139 Mbps.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dijit 7y ago
    These metrics fail to account for the transfer to a more stable medium, or even just a single full read of the data.
  - gooseus 7y ago
    True, but it seems like the max weight for a letter/postcard is 3.5 ounces (~99 grams), also a postcard is about 148x105mm while a microSD is 15x11mm. I would propose making your postcard out of a 9x9 grid of 1TB microSDs and tape to give you an 81TB postcard that can be delivered overnight at the minimum price while providing 11.25 Gbps given the numbers you used.
    - kruffin 7y ago
      Sobering to think of the true (hardware only) price of that postcard in full view of anyone handling it: $36k ($450 * 81). But amazing to think how far technology has advanced.
      - setr 7y ago
        Exchanging data and money offline, in a very compact format :-)
- kevinsundar 7y ago
  Never underestimate sneakernet speeds. https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ It can "move 100 petabytes of data in as little as a few weeks, plus transport time. That same transfer could take more than 20 years to accomplish over a direct connect line with a 1Gbps connection."
  - bradknowles 7y ago
    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 57. ISBN 0-13-166836-6.
- izzydata 7y ago
  https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
- agumonkey 7y ago
  I was thinking of small inner city channels with floating storage keys the other day. Messages^14 in a bottle kind of.
- itsrajju 7y ago
  25 cents you mean? :)
Someone1234 7y ago
What's odd is that back when Compact Flash was the norm a lot of equipment had 2x slots for concurrent writes (i.e. your photograph/video is immediately duplicated in two places), whereas in 2019 even though SD/MicroSD is much smaller and their related sockets are too, combo write systems are fairly rare (only on the highest end pro systems). For example, I had a $500 camera that used CF and it had two sockets. You won't find anything below $1K that has that with SD Cards today, even if it is cheaper and smaller than ever. It is a really odd backslide.
- barrkel 7y ago
  As consumer product quality increases, market segmentation needs to find different features to charge professional customers more.
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    agreed “prosumer cameras” are weather sealed and fast and have high clean ISO for low light performance And all around light years ahead of “high end professional” gear from not even 10 years ago Its just arbitrary gatekeeping Use what achieves your use case.
- Youden 7y ago
  It's not quite as extreme as you say: Fujifilm's X-T3, Sony's A7III and Panaonic's GH5 for example all have two slots and they're definitely not the highest end pro systems, I'd say they're more like mid-range prosumer. This is speculation but it may have been that back when you bought your $500 camera, a single CF card wasn't been able to hold many photos, so you could insert two cards and start filling the second when the first was full. It could also have been that CF was relatively unreliable. Today, regular consumers can fit thousands of photos on a single SD card, which from a reputable brand will be pretty reliable (I've never had a Sandisk, Sony or Samsung SD card die on me while shooting). The only people who need extra reliability are professionals who lose a great deal of money in that 1 in 1000 case where an SD card dies.
  - 7y ago
mikehotel 7y ago
> I irresponsibly put a nearly full 400GB microSD card in my pocket and somehow lost the dang thing while fishing out change to tip my cab driver. Misery loves company. This has happened more times than people will want to admit. If only [DSLR] cameras supported encrypted memory cards. [Edit: With smartphone cameras improving so rapidly, perhaps this will become a moot point.]
- javagram 7y ago
  I dropped a microSD in my car once and despite looking around for 10 minutes with a flashlight eventually gave up (I think it probably fell through a crack into the inside of the car.) At least a lot of DSLR or mirrorless ILCs still use full size compactflash or SD cards which are easier to handle and not drop.
MrZongle2 7y ago
In 1991 the Army unit I was assigned to was getting modernized -- instead of paper maps, transparencies and grease pencils we were going the way of digital terrain data and maps via some custom software running on SPARCstations. I was particularly blown away by the large hard drive one of the contractors showed me -- a 20+ pound behemoth that had a whopping 1 Gigabyte of storage. At the time I had an Amiga 500 with two floppy drives, which paled in comparison. Seeing a commercially-available 1Tb SD card amazes me in the same manner.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  As someone who's first computer was an 8-bit machine with only 16k of RAM - and a cassette tape drive for storage (all circa 1984)... ...well, this is kinda neat.
  - bradknowles 7y ago
    My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20, with 5KB of RAM and we splurged hundreds of dollars for the cassette tape drive. I think that was 1982 or maybe 1983. Years later, I worked for Imprimis (since bought by Seagate), and I worked closely with the manufacturing engineer responsible for the Wren VII line of hard drives. Those were the first consumer-grade SCSI hard drives that had 1GB of raw storage. I've still got some of the magnet fragments taken from some of the early drives that came off the line. Those damn things can't be removed from your refrigerator just by pulling on them -- they're too strong. You can only slide them, or tip them, and hope you don't get your fingers caught. We've come a long way.
pcurve 7y ago
My head hurts processing how it's possible to put so much storage there. If you strip away the protective plastic and other non-storage components, how much physical space is there? Also, new spec sets the ceiling at 128TB. 128TB! I'm guessing there will be another format before we ever reach 128TB, but still. What an amazing time we live in. Btw, 400GB one is $53 on amazon.
pinche2 7y ago
Things has certainly changed... Here's a 5 MB (!) hard disk from back in the days: http://i.imgur.com/7iGch3c.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7iGch3c.jpg
- nkg 7y ago
  I have just forwarded this to my teammates who upload 9MB images!
hajile 7y ago
That's nice, but how many hours would it take to fill that space?
- eesmith 7y ago
  > According to my Disk Speed Test results, the 1TB microSD card plugged into the iMac (via a generic SD card adapter) was capable of write speeds up to 60MB/s and read speeds up to 90MB/s. That's 3 hours.
  - hajile 7y ago
    Is that consistent? Most cards seem to slow to a crawl on large writes
ChuckMcM 7y ago
I imagine at times like this a small USB-3.2 device which is a RAID-6 array of 20 or 30 microSD cards, probably a small FPGA to provide the 30 port SDIO device that can do 100MB/s per channel, a two gigabyte static ram with battery backup (coin cell) for holding open stripe state, and a SCSI or SAS export point for reporting out as a drive. Device is probably the size of a deck of cards, maybe smaller, consume or feed data at a GB/s all day. That would be pretty freaking amazing.
- jscheel 7y ago
  There are devices kinda like this, but they are hacky and unreliable.
- crest 7y ago
  It would offer good throughput but there is no way to hide the latency.
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    Could you elaborate on that thought? My experience is that it is possible to create a storage element with arbitrary throughput and latency (within a fairly wide design space) by composing storage elements.
    - naniwaduni 7y ago
      You can create a storage element with arbitrarily _large_ latency...
- boredishBoi 7y ago
  Have you seen the T series portable ssd’s by Samsung. Nowadays multiple companies make portable ssds that use the same nand in their internal ssds but in a smaller custom form factor. They’re exactly like what you described, about the size of a deck of cards and much much more reliable and cheaper than micro as cards.
- bradknowles 7y ago
dfeojm-zlib 7y ago
I think we're headed to a future where fast, permanent storage is mostly in a small slot (similar to MicroSD) form-factor, just like scifi/future movies of old. The slots will get smaller, hopefully there will be more than one on tablets and whatever passes for laptops/desktops. And I'm sure they'll figure out a way to converge these slots and USB-C into something else new to make everyone buy all new dongles and adapters "USB-D."
iam_varunnair 7y ago
Wow, Build for photographers and videographers.

72 points by rahuldottech 7y ago

Now we need sd express versions and stop getting limited by 100mb/s speeds

debt 7y ago

Fascinating. A microSD card is 0.5 grams. I could tape one of these to a postcard, overnight for $25 using USPS and probably achieve a faster data rate than I could if I just send it over the air.

hobs 7y ago
It's been true for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
- privong 7y ago
  It's been around longer than RFC-1149, dating back to station wagons carrying data tapes in the 1970s: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/20jlv3/never_underestimate_the_bandwidth_of_a_station/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/20jlv3/n...
anamexis 7y ago
Assuming a drop-off at 5 PM and a delivery at 9 AM, that's a data rate of 139 Mbps.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dijit 7y ago
  These metrics fail to account for the transfer to a more stable medium, or even just a single full read of the data.
- gooseus 7y ago
  True, but it seems like the max weight for a letter/postcard is 3.5 ounces (~99 grams), also a postcard is about 148x105mm while a microSD is 15x11mm. I would propose making your postcard out of a 9x9 grid of 1TB microSDs and tape to give you an 81TB postcard that can be delivered overnight at the minimum price while providing 11.25 Gbps given the numbers you used.
  - kruffin 7y ago
    Sobering to think of the true (hardware only) price of that postcard in full view of anyone handling it: $36k ($450 * 81). But amazing to think how far technology has advanced.
    - setr 7y ago
      Exchanging data and money offline, in a very compact format :-)
kevinsundar 7y ago
Never underestimate sneakernet speeds. https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ It can "move 100 petabytes of data in as little as a few weeks, plus transport time. That same transfer could take more than 20 years to accomplish over a direct connect line with a 1Gbps connection."
- bradknowles 7y ago
  From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1989). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 57. ISBN 0-13-166836-6.
izzydata 7y ago
https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
agumonkey 7y ago
I was thinking of small inner city channels with floating storage keys the other day. Messages^14 in a bottle kind of.
itsrajju 7y ago
25 cents you mean? :)

Someone1234 7y ago

What's odd is that back when Compact Flash was the norm a lot of equipment had 2x slots for concurrent writes (i.e. your photograph/video is immediately duplicated in two places), whereas in 2019 even though SD/MicroSD is much smaller and their related sockets are too, combo write systems are fairly rare (only on the highest end pro systems). For example, I had a $500 camera that used CF and it had two sockets. You won't find anything below $1K that has that with SD Cards today, even if it is cheaper and smaller than ever. It is a really odd backslide.

barrkel 7y ago
As consumer product quality increases, market segmentation needs to find different features to charge professional customers more.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  agreed “prosumer cameras” are weather sealed and fast and have high clean ISO for low light performance And all around light years ahead of “high end professional” gear from not even 10 years ago Its just arbitrary gatekeeping Use what achieves your use case.
Youden 7y ago
It's not quite as extreme as you say: Fujifilm's X-T3, Sony's A7III and Panaonic's GH5 for example all have two slots and they're definitely not the highest end pro systems, I'd say they're more like mid-range prosumer. This is speculation but it may have been that back when you bought your $500 camera, a single CF card wasn't been able to hold many photos, so you could insert two cards and start filling the second when the first was full. It could also have been that CF was relatively unreliable. Today, regular consumers can fit thousands of photos on a single SD card, which from a reputable brand will be pretty reliable (I've never had a Sandisk, Sony or Samsung SD card die on me while shooting). The only people who need extra reliability are professionals who lose a great deal of money in that 1 in 1000 case where an SD card dies.
- 7y ago

mikehotel 7y ago

> I irresponsibly put a nearly full 400GB microSD card in my pocket and somehow lost the dang thing while fishing out change to tip my cab driver. Misery loves company. This has happened more times than people will want to admit. If only [DSLR] cameras supported encrypted memory cards. [Edit: With smartphone cameras improving so rapidly, perhaps this will become a moot point.]

javagram 7y ago
I dropped a microSD in my car once and despite looking around for 10 minutes with a flashlight eventually gave up (I think it probably fell through a crack into the inside of the car.) At least a lot of DSLR or mirrorless ILCs still use full size compactflash or SD cards which are easier to handle and not drop.

MrZongle2 7y ago

In 1991 the Army unit I was assigned to was getting modernized -- instead of paper maps, transparencies and grease pencils we were going the way of digital terrain data and maps via some custom software running on SPARCstations. I was particularly blown away by the large hard drive one of the contractors showed me -- a 20+ pound behemoth that had a whopping 1 Gigabyte of storage. At the time I had an Amiga 500 with two floppy drives, which paled in comparison. Seeing a commercially-available 1Tb SD card amazes me in the same manner.

cr0sh 7y ago
As someone who's first computer was an 8-bit machine with only 16k of RAM - and a cassette tape drive for storage (all circa 1984)... ...well, this is kinda neat.
- bradknowles 7y ago
  My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20, with 5KB of RAM and we splurged hundreds of dollars for the cassette tape drive. I think that was 1982 or maybe 1983. Years later, I worked for Imprimis (since bought by Seagate), and I worked closely with the manufacturing engineer responsible for the Wren VII line of hard drives. Those were the first consumer-grade SCSI hard drives that had 1GB of raw storage. I've still got some of the magnet fragments taken from some of the early drives that came off the line. Those damn things can't be removed from your refrigerator just by pulling on them -- they're too strong. You can only slide them, or tip them, and hope you don't get your fingers caught. We've come a long way.

pcurve 7y ago

My head hurts processing how it's possible to put so much storage there. If you strip away the protective plastic and other non-storage components, how much physical space is there? Also, new spec sets the ceiling at 128TB. 128TB! I'm guessing there will be another format before we ever reach 128TB, but still. What an amazing time we live in. Btw, 400GB one is $53 on amazon.

pinche2 7y ago

Things has certainly changed... Here's a 5 MB (!) hard disk from back in the days: http://i.imgur.com/7iGch3c.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7iGch3c.jpg

nkg 7y ago
I have just forwarded this to my teammates who upload 9MB images!

hajile 7y ago

That's nice, but how many hours would it take to fill that space?

eesmith 7y ago
> According to my Disk Speed Test results, the 1TB microSD card plugged into the iMac (via a generic SD card adapter) was capable of write speeds up to 60MB/s and read speeds up to 90MB/s. That's 3 hours.
- hajile 7y ago
  Is that consistent? Most cards seem to slow to a crawl on large writes

ChuckMcM 7y ago

I imagine at times like this a small USB-3.2 device which is a RAID-6 array of 20 or 30 microSD cards, probably a small FPGA to provide the 30 port SDIO device that can do 100MB/s per channel, a two gigabyte static ram with battery backup (coin cell) for holding open stripe state, and a SCSI or SAS export point for reporting out as a drive. Device is probably the size of a deck of cards, maybe smaller, consume or feed data at a GB/s all day. That would be pretty freaking amazing.

jscheel 7y ago
There are devices kinda like this, but they are hacky and unreliable.
crest 7y ago
It would offer good throughput but there is no way to hide the latency.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  Could you elaborate on that thought? My experience is that it is possible to create a storage element with arbitrary throughput and latency (within a fairly wide design space) by composing storage elements.
  - naniwaduni 7y ago
    You can create a storage element with arbitrarily _large_ latency...
boredishBoi 7y ago
Have you seen the T series portable ssd’s by Samsung. Nowadays multiple companies make portable ssds that use the same nand in their internal ssds but in a smaller custom form factor. They’re exactly like what you described, about the size of a deck of cards and much much more reliable and cheaper than micro as cards.
bradknowles 7y ago

dfeojm-zlib 7y ago

I think we're headed to a future where fast, permanent storage is mostly in a small slot (similar to MicroSD) form-factor, just like scifi/future movies of old. The slots will get smaller, hopefully there will be more than one on tablets and whatever passes for laptops/desktops. And I'm sure they'll figure out a way to converge these slots and USB-C into something else new to make everyone buy all new dongles and adapters "USB-D."

iam_varunnair 7y ago

Wow, Build for photographers and videographers.