13 ms·

> I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower

> I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow. Too bad no flagship phones have removable storage anymore, because that would be a really easy fix to this problem.

vel0city 3y ago
If we're looking at older phones with removable storage, it usually limited what could be put on the SD card. And in the end the OS and system libraries were still on the on-board storage which would wear out over the years. And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliability compared to the storage on-board. Imagine if you had to re-image your device every few weeks after your storage device corrupted itself again. Not really a great experience.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Perhaps SDcard isn't the right standard. Or some stress testing certification is in order
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  IDK, I've never had a RPi corrupt an SD card to my knowledge. Also, there are now SD cards optimized for the load patterns similar to that of an OS. There's unfortunately slightly different issue here: if the phone vendor puts the OS on an user-replaceable SD card, then the UX quality and reliability of the device depends on the SD card vendor, which is a bad position to be in, given how much fraud is happening in this space.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Phones could ship with a good SD card which will get the vast majority of consumers to end-of-useful-life for their device. At that point if a user replaces it with crap, it's kind of on them. Similar to how cell phone chargers are now.
  - ascagnel_ 3y ago
    I've never had an RPi corrupt an SD card, but I had one (running pi-hole) wear out a card over the course of about six months. It was pretty easy to get everything back up and running (it needed a new card with the most recent version of the default OS package), and I was able to resolve the situation long-term by using log2ram to space out writes to the SD card (at the risk of losing a day's worth of logs).
- ethbr1 3y ago
  With cloud backup... this isn't as defensible as it used to be. Today, Apple/Google could design a phone with (a) a user-replacable battery & (b) no flash, only RAM + removable SD storage + long-life EEPROM. Boot loader, SD validator, and minimal image retrieval goes in EEPROM. Storage contents continually backed up, encrypted, to cloud with delta updates. Customer prompted to replace SD card and device reimagined whenever there's an issue. Apple/Google sell cloud storage subscriptions. Aka the cockroach phone. That they aren't even interested in that model is because they're in a Faustian bargain with cellular carriers to drive device renewals and post-paid plans. And integrated batteries and flash memory happen to be a convenient "Oh well, we can't possibly design it any other way" excuse.
  - admax88qqq 3y ago
    That's honestly not a good user experience. Having to buy a new sd card routinely, and better hope you system can detect impending as card failures accurately. Compared to 5 years of good on board storage performance, with no little bits to accidentally lose. And a gradually degradation of performance after that. They could possibly design a phone the way you outlined, but people won't buy it.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Not to mention what it’ll do the waterproof rating.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        Do that many people need their phone to be waterproof rated? I realize it's mandatory from a marketing perspective, but how often is it used? Accidentally jumping in the pool/ocean/lake with your phone. But past that, I'm not often in submerged situations.
        serf 3y ago
        I always sort of imagine it's a selling point less for the adventure aspect and more for the 'dropped in the toilet' angle. i've yet to be so unfortunate, but i've met a lot of people with a 'I dropped my phone in the toilet so it's in a bag of rice' story. let's hope they throw that rice out at the end of the process.
- redeeman 3y ago
  should just use m.2 2230 nvme. should be user replacable, its okay if it needs to be disassembled and its a 30 minute job, but that would solve a whole lot.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bpye 3y ago
    SD Express is PCIe and much smaller, but a full sized SD card still isn’t small. Supposedly microSD Express exists but I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen it…
    - p1necone 3y ago
      Aren't the speed constraints on SD cards due to the controllerless single flash chip design rather than the connector format? Unless you also shoved an ssd controller on the SD Express card I can't see it being much of an improvement.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  Most of that is because the OS defaults write about 20 times more crap than anyone needs, and devs consistently do not care about preserving write cycles. There's still a culture of "Beautiful code is everything, hardware is disposable and meant to be upgraded". An industrial SD card plus a few software changes would largely solve the problem, but I'm not sure it could be done in a backwards-compatible way, some apps might not work if you stopped letting people hammer the disk with crap. Even with a standard card, phones don't have any issues with FTL firmware level corruption due to power loss, they have a builtin UPS. But with phone-scale production there's no reason they couldn't define a new SD variant that had SMART diagnostics and guaranteed reliability properties for similar cost to eMMC.
- rjzzleep 3y ago
  I have a love/hate relationship with Sony Xperia phones, they look and feel nice, have a 3.5mm and a microSD slot. That said, unlike Pixels and OnePlus once the bootloader is unlocked you lose functionality and it's not relockable. It also almost always has some software quirks and I most recently found out that the Xperia 5 I've been eyeing will after 2-3 years of use randomly break and show vertical green or pink lines. There you have another "well" manufactured phone with external storage that becomes almost unusable faster than the storage degrades without the user being responsible for it.
- gtvwill 3y ago
  Ran a rpi for well > 1yr running Ubuntu server and 3cx off the SD card. Longest uptime was like 90+ days only dropped because my town regularly has power outages. Same card had been in use for a good year prior on another rpi doing a different function. Hasn't missed a beat. SanDisk gold colored one. It's now in another rpi... Microsd's used to suck(had plenty fail years ago) but it seems like they have gotten pretty good these days.
- walteweiss 3y ago
  I have an obsolete (with Lineage OS installed) Samsung smartphone with an SD-card. I use it for podcasts and audio books, as it has a jack, and I have a nice non-Bluetooth headphones that I wear most of the time of that listening time. I like to think my internal storage isn’t wearing over and over again, but the SD card, which I can super easily replace any time. Plus, I can replace it with something huge (like extra 128 GB or even more, what is supported) for very cheap. I cannot add extra 128 GB of storage to my iPhone, even if I’m willing to pay the premium. I have just one way: to sell my unit and buy another with more storage.
- ngfgnbdfv 3y ago
  all modern stern pinball machines (everything spike/spike ii, from 2015 on) boot linux on sd card
p1necone 3y ago
I just don't buy flagship phones, you can get midrange stuff with removable micro sd, oled, >60hz screen etc. Sure the CPU isn't as fast but unless you're playing games it makes almost no difference.

vel0city 3y ago

If we're looking at older phones with removable storage, it usually limited what could be put on the SD card. And in the end the OS and system libraries were still on the on-board storage which would wear out over the years. And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliability compared to the storage on-board. Imagine if you had to re-image your device every few weeks after your storage device corrupted itself again. Not really a great experience.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Perhaps SDcard isn't the right standard. Or some stress testing certification is in order
TeMPOraL 3y ago
IDK, I've never had a RPi corrupt an SD card to my knowledge. Also, there are now SD cards optimized for the load patterns similar to that of an OS. There's unfortunately slightly different issue here: if the phone vendor puts the OS on an user-replaceable SD card, then the UX quality and reliability of the device depends on the SD card vendor, which is a bad position to be in, given how much fraud is happening in this space.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Phones could ship with a good SD card which will get the vast majority of consumers to end-of-useful-life for their device. At that point if a user replaces it with crap, it's kind of on them. Similar to how cell phone chargers are now.
- ascagnel_ 3y ago
  I've never had an RPi corrupt an SD card, but I had one (running pi-hole) wear out a card over the course of about six months. It was pretty easy to get everything back up and running (it needed a new card with the most recent version of the default OS package), and I was able to resolve the situation long-term by using log2ram to space out writes to the SD card (at the risk of losing a day's worth of logs).
ethbr1 3y ago
With cloud backup... this isn't as defensible as it used to be. Today, Apple/Google could design a phone with (a) a user-replacable battery & (b) no flash, only RAM + removable SD storage + long-life EEPROM. Boot loader, SD validator, and minimal image retrieval goes in EEPROM. Storage contents continually backed up, encrypted, to cloud with delta updates. Customer prompted to replace SD card and device reimagined whenever there's an issue. Apple/Google sell cloud storage subscriptions. Aka the cockroach phone. That they aren't even interested in that model is because they're in a Faustian bargain with cellular carriers to drive device renewals and post-paid plans. And integrated batteries and flash memory happen to be a convenient "Oh well, we can't possibly design it any other way" excuse.
- admax88qqq 3y ago
  That's honestly not a good user experience. Having to buy a new sd card routinely, and better hope you system can detect impending as card failures accurately. Compared to 5 years of good on board storage performance, with no little bits to accidentally lose. And a gradually degradation of performance after that. They could possibly design a phone the way you outlined, but people won't buy it.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Not to mention what it’ll do the waterproof rating.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Do that many people need their phone to be waterproof rated? I realize it's mandatory from a marketing perspective, but how often is it used? Accidentally jumping in the pool/ocean/lake with your phone. But past that, I'm not often in submerged situations.
      - serf 3y ago
        I always sort of imagine it's a selling point less for the adventure aspect and more for the 'dropped in the toilet' angle. i've yet to be so unfortunate, but i've met a lot of people with a 'I dropped my phone in the toilet so it's in a bag of rice' story. let's hope they throw that rice out at the end of the process.
redeeman 3y ago
should just use m.2 2230 nvme. should be user replacable, its okay if it needs to be disassembled and its a 30 minute job, but that would solve a whole lot.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bpye 3y ago
  SD Express is PCIe and much smaller, but a full sized SD card still isn’t small. Supposedly microSD Express exists but I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen it…
  - p1necone 3y ago
    Aren't the speed constraints on SD cards due to the controllerless single flash chip design rather than the connector format? Unless you also shoved an ssd controller on the SD Express card I can't see it being much of an improvement.
eternityforest 3y ago
Most of that is because the OS defaults write about 20 times more crap than anyone needs, and devs consistently do not care about preserving write cycles. There's still a culture of "Beautiful code is everything, hardware is disposable and meant to be upgraded". An industrial SD card plus a few software changes would largely solve the problem, but I'm not sure it could be done in a backwards-compatible way, some apps might not work if you stopped letting people hammer the disk with crap. Even with a standard card, phones don't have any issues with FTL firmware level corruption due to power loss, they have a builtin UPS. But with phone-scale production there's no reason they couldn't define a new SD variant that had SMART diagnostics and guaranteed reliability properties for similar cost to eMMC.
rjzzleep 3y ago
I have a love/hate relationship with Sony Xperia phones, they look and feel nice, have a 3.5mm and a microSD slot. That said, unlike Pixels and OnePlus once the bootloader is unlocked you lose functionality and it's not relockable. It also almost always has some software quirks and I most recently found out that the Xperia 5 I've been eyeing will after 2-3 years of use randomly break and show vertical green or pink lines. There you have another "well" manufactured phone with external storage that becomes almost unusable faster than the storage degrades without the user being responsible for it.
gtvwill 3y ago
Ran a rpi for well > 1yr running Ubuntu server and 3cx off the SD card. Longest uptime was like 90+ days only dropped because my town regularly has power outages. Same card had been in use for a good year prior on another rpi doing a different function. Hasn't missed a beat. SanDisk gold colored one. It's now in another rpi... Microsd's used to suck(had plenty fail years ago) but it seems like they have gotten pretty good these days.
walteweiss 3y ago
I have an obsolete (with Lineage OS installed) Samsung smartphone with an SD-card. I use it for podcasts and audio books, as it has a jack, and I have a nice non-Bluetooth headphones that I wear most of the time of that listening time. I like to think my internal storage isn’t wearing over and over again, but the SD card, which I can super easily replace any time. Plus, I can replace it with something huge (like extra 128 GB or even more, what is supported) for very cheap. I cannot add extra 128 GB of storage to my iPhone, even if I’m willing to pay the premium. I have just one way: to sell my unit and buy another with more storage.
ngfgnbdfv 3y ago
all modern stern pinball machines (everything spike/spike ii, from 2015 on) boot linux on sd card

p1necone 3y ago

I just don't buy flagship phones, you can get midrange stuff with removable micro sd, oled, >60hz screen etc. Sure the CPU isn't as fast but unless you're playing games it makes almost no difference.