11 ms·

2TB microSD card is on the way early next year

121 points by brandrick 3y ago

hiddencost 3y ago
That's enough to store chat GPT. As you can imagine, infosec people are stressed.
guidedlight 3y ago
If you want to blow the mind of a non-tech person. Show them a high capacity MicroSD card and tell them how many 1’s and 0’s it can reliably store. A 2TB MicroSD card really is a modern marvel in engineering.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  how many can they store?
  - bagels 3y ago
    Approximately sixteen trillion. I suspect that number is not really comprehensible to a large population though.
    - 867-5309 3y ago
      so the grains of sand on TRAPPIST-1e
    - thelittleone 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - ninkendo 3y ago
        > Grains of Sand: If you were to count grains of sand, assuming roughly 10,000 grains per cup, you would need about 1.6 trillion cups of sand to reach 16 trillion grains. Math is not ChatGPT’s strong suit.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      It’s enough to store the name of every human being that has ever lived.
    - llamaInSouth 3y ago
      This video helped me visualize how big of a number 1 trillion is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoOJggESR8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoOJggESR8o Current US debt is almost 34 trillions? https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/
      - Cockbrand 3y ago
        So the debt is just a bit more than two of these microSD cards' worth of storage! I might have the unit conversion wrong, though.
    - wkjagt 3y ago
      If you were to count those at a rate of 1 per second, it would take about half a million years.
  - oburb 3y ago
    16,000,000,000,000
  - baal80spam 3y ago
    1 Byte = 8 bits 1 KByte = 8 * 1000 = 8 000 bits 1 MByte = 8000 * 1000 = 8 000 000 bits 1 GByte = 8000000 * 1000 = 8 000 000 000 bits 1 TByte = 8000000000 * 1000 = 8 000 000 000 000 bits 2 TBytes = 8000000000000 * 2 = 16 000 000 000 000 bits All values approximate.
- redserk 3y ago
  I have a frame of various media over the years over my desk including a 5.25" floppy, a 3.5" floppy, ZIP disk, CD, Blu-Ray, SD, microSD, etc. As a technical person, my mind keeps getting blown.
  - pjerem 3y ago
    That’s a really nice idea. Maybe I will steal it :)
    - redserk 3y ago
      It's a fantastic and quick project! I use two layers of thin black foam. The top layer of foam sheet has cut-outs for the various types of media except microSD card, which is held in place with a small dab of glue. They're pressed against the glass and has survived 2 moves without issue.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    No Jaz drive?
- crazygringo 3y ago
  That doesn't mean much though. How about when you tell them it can store 38 seasons of TV shows in HD?* Or 40 dual-layer Blu-Ray discs? Does it seem like a lot or a little? *Assuming 4 GB per 60-min drama episode in 1080p, and 13 episodes/season, all of which is pretty ballpark.
  - arccy 3y ago
    with most laypeople streaming, they don't really have a sense of how much space a season of tv shows is. you need something more relatable, like photos
    - stavros 3y ago
      There was a thread here the other day about how everyone just streams everything, and nobody knows what a file is any more. Why would someone know how big a photo is? They're all on Google anyway.
      - arccy 3y ago
        not everyone has google/icloud sync on. people run out of space on their phones all the time.
    - crooked-v 3y ago
      I think the obvious Americanized measurement here is "number of football fields covered by 4x6 photos".
  - tomcam 3y ago
    Or almost 1 copy of the Oppenheimer director’s cut
  - numpad0 3y ago
    Wait, if one microSD card holds more than a year's worth of TV shows for an average person, does that imply paying $10/month for unlimited streaming is a really stupid idea? Granted it's not about paying for the recording medium, but still.
- wkjagt 3y ago
  Depending on if they are old enough to remember floppy disks, tell them the tiny card holds as much information as almost 1.4 million 3.5 inch floppy disks (assuming 1.44mb each). If you pile those up, it would be about 4.5 km high. Or if you take the 720kb kind, your pile would be as high as Mount Everest.
  - gxs 3y ago
    Holy shit that’s a great way of putting it. I’m not double checking the math but that’s insane, 1.4 million, insane.
  - CapitalistCartr 3y ago
    They could put the capacity of every 3.5" floppy ever made in a suitcase full of microSD cards.
    - paulkrush 3y ago
      A wild guess of 3.5" floppy production is 30B. So you need 21,428 2TB micro SD cards. A 15mm x 11mm x 1mm you need 3 1/2 liters.
      - Kye 3y ago
        The bandwidth of a station wagon hurtling down the highway grows every year.
        xnx 3y ago
        Sneakernet remains undefeated. https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
        Kye 3y ago
        >> "A solid-state laptop drive weighs about 78 grams and can hold up to a terabyte." Amazing how we went from 1TB 2.5 inch drives to 8TB m.2 drives and 2TB microSD cards in 11 years. And it would be more like $7k in 4TB drives than $130k. Put $130k of modern drives in the same shoebox and you're probably into the petabyte range. Go to the then-top of the line microSD milk jug and it's getting up there with these 2TB cards.
- candiodari 3y ago
  If you want to blow the mind of a tech person, tell them how long it will store those 1's and 0's ... (~10 years max, flash doesn't hold it's contents over time)
- wslh 3y ago
  I remember showing my grandfather a Commodore Amiga playing a Genesis song from a 3.5" floppy disk [1] and he just said: "yes, it is just recorded on the disk". I tried to explain the complexity (digital to analog processes) of this but he just abstracted the idea thinking in other media like LPs, Casettes, and the new CDs. [1] https://youtu.be/_UnVy9w0xKk?si=kFwgo1qU6Dw9Y6sY https://youtu.be/_UnVy9w0xKk?si=kFwgo1qU6Dw9Y6sY
  - Cockbrand 3y ago
    Haha, I had a copy of that disk back in the day, but I certainly haven't thought of it in the last 30 years. Thank you for reminding me! While it was a bit of a marvel to put an entire pop song onto an 880k disk, the not-so-hifi sound quality was already apparent back then. I guess they forgot to switch off the low pass filter by turning off the power LED.
    - wslh 3y ago
      Thank you for teaching us abot the low pass filter! I searched that after your message since I was not aware: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.audio/c/6wBXmBoOIro https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.audio/c/6wBXmBoOI...
      - Cockbrand 3y ago
        On the other hand, I just learned from your link that there apparently were A500s where the low pass filter could not be switched off in software. AFAIR, toggling the LPF in software was already possible in the predecessor, the A1000. Anyhow, coupling the LPF to the power LED (and having a software controlled power LED in the first place) is a very Amiga thing to do. It's one of the platform's many nice idiosyncrasies.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    Should have shown him a tracker :)
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  > tell them how many 1’s and 0’s it can reliably store. Zero.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    On the largest capacity, you're at least not getting a card with tons of remapped sectors where half the flash has already died.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  Reliable? 0. Sdcards are not reliable
  - prawn 3y ago
    I was using one for filming a client job the other day, without a backup card. It cracked and bent in half and I thought I was going to have to entirely reshoot the location. Bent it back and put it in the laptop and got all the data fine. Never had one fail.
    - 0xDEADFED5 3y ago
      If you've never had one fail you haven't used them enough. Raspberry Pi usage seem to be pretty efficient at sorting the good ones from the bad ones
      - phito 3y ago
        I've been using RPIs since their first release and never had an SD card failure. Might just be luck though cause I know the problem is real and happens to many people.
        NewsyHacker 3y ago
        It depends on the distro. What especially hammers SD cards on Linux, eventually rendering the card read-only, is logs being written to disk. A lot of distros for Raspberry Pi therefore now keep logs in RAM.
        forty 3y ago
        This issue is true of any flash memory. See my sibling comment on using an USB stick to write data: I also destroyed a bunch with logs
        forty 3y ago
        I destroyed many SD cards with the original Pi. I ended up putting the card read only with the hardware switch and use a USB stick for writing data. No issue with microSD cards with more recent Pis (or other SBC) however
- soderfoo 3y ago
  The number of 1’s and 0’s is lower than the US national debt, which is kind of bonkers.
  - addaon 3y ago
    The US debt is currently around 271 terabits [0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_(money) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_(money)
- pseudosavant 3y ago
  In case anyone else was wondering what the number is: 17,592,186,044,416 bits. On a durable card that is smaller than a stamp.
  - Tempest1981 3y ago
    Sounds bigger than saying 2^44
    - 0cVlTeIATBs 3y ago
      I think you both have fallen for the bullshit marketing of storage manufacturers who want you to think you're getting 16 terabits of capacity. You're not. You get 16,000,000,000,000 bits.
      - 0cVlTeIATBs 3y ago
        Oops, I mean tibibits.
      - pseudosavant 3y ago
        If we are really going to get technical we’d need to determine how much over provisioning the card is designed with.
- _cenw 3y ago
  I hate to be a cynic on this one, but I never found micro SD cards reliable enough to store anything longer than absolutely neccessary. Usually that is until I can move the data to a better storage medium. The tech that runs on these devices is incredibly cursed, and keeps changing very fast. 30C3 had a fun talk about the internals of mSD cards. https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5294_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312291400_-_the_exploration_and_exploitation_of_an_sd_memory_card_-_bunnie_-_xobs https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5294_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312291...
- ComplexSystems 3y ago
  Even better, if you want to blow the mind of even most tech people, show them a high capacity MicroSD card and tell them how many 1's and 0's it can REALLY store. SD cards are many, many times larger than you think they are - often hundreds of times larger. This is because they use wear leveling to avoid read/writing too much to any one bit. It is quite possible that this one SD card could have hundreds of TB of storage space on it. I have often wished there were some easy way to access all of this space for situations where you know that you only want to write once to the card - meaning you know you only want to write once. Would be great for storage.
  - dannyw 3y ago
    No, not hundreds of times larger. Maybe ~5% larger.
  - Tenemo 3y ago
    It sounded extremely improbable to me, so tried googling and I wasn't able to find anything that would back up such claims. Can you provide a source for the information that MicroSD cards have more than e.g. double total physical capacity?
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Not double, but having extra space than the device is rated for is listed as a wear leveling technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling?#Techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling?#Techniques
- quechimba 3y ago
  I remember many years ago when my uncle explained to my grand dad how many photos he could fit in his cameras memory card. He was completely blown away, he couldn't believe it, he said it was impossible and laughed.
gjsman-1000 3y ago
With so many layers, I’d be deeply concerned about how fragile it is. Probably much better off being inserted in a semi-permanent role (Switch, Steam Deck), than camera storage.
- 2024throwaway 3y ago
  Modern cameras often utilize CFexpress cards rather than microSD
yellow_lead 3y ago
I almost can't believe this. Even 1TB is an insane amount of storage on something so small.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  And they get incredibly affordable. I bought a 512 GB microSD card for my Steam Deck a year ago for 38€. Although I guess a 1 TB card would still cost me a whopping 108€.
  - Etheryte 3y ago
    They're affordable, but also not all that reliable. I can't even begin to count how many I've had fail on me over the years.
    - fbdab103 3y ago
      I was thinking similarly. Do I really want to rely upon 2TB being stored in a SD card? Numerous failures over the year, and only consider them for temporary storage. How long does it even take to fill the drive?
      - pjerem 3y ago
        It depends on what you store and your backup strategy. You rarely have 2TB of really precious data on a microSD. microSD are meant to easily store a local copy of your data, not to be a reliable long term storage. You can also use it to store useful but not unique data like games on a switch or a Steam deck. If the card fail, all you lose is the time to redownload everything. Anyway except if you do a lot of video, the really important data (the really personal data you’ll want to backup) is rarely in TBs. It’s mostly pictures and documents.
    - NewsyHacker 3y ago
      I had a 1TB card fail on me, but that only meant that the card would no longer accept writes. I could still read everything off it. Since I was using the card to carry my entire music collection in FLAC on my phone, I was pretty OK with that. Eventually, when I wanted to update that copy of my music collection, I easily replaced the card under warranty.
msoad 3y ago
My first digital camera came with a 4MB SD card. What a time to be alive!
daveguy 3y ago
I remember when consumer external gigabyte hard drives were just coming available. They were still thousands of dollars. They weighed in the pounds, and about half a cubic foot in volume. I mean, I remember floppies and 5.25 format hard drives in the kb and multiple mb size too, but the gigabyte hard drive era seemed like a significant milestone, so it made an impression. That gb external drive was probably just multiple (4-8) 5.25 drives in a case. 1TB didn't make the same impression because we were already getting to the "more than you need for most use cases" range and the external formats were about as compact as the internal ones with laptop form factor drives. But TB scale in a micro SD format... Yeah, that is a similar impression to the GB HDD era.
gene-h 3y ago
The first 1TB microSD card was released in 2019[0]. It is disappointing that the time to double was about 4 years. [0]https://www.zdnet.com/article/micron-releases-worlds-first-1tb-microsd-card/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/micron-releases-worlds-first-1...
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  Well, we're getting to the point of diminishing returns. Who is going to be buying these? It's like with HDDs, very few consumers are buying these 20 TB HDDs. Unlike HDDs, MicroSD is largely a consumer product.
  - 9point6 3y ago
    The steam deck is a pretty good use case for these cards
    - cloudking 3y ago
      I was going to say, has OP downloaded a game recently? You can fit 10-20 modern games on this card tops.
    - brandrick 3y ago
      Baldur's Gate 3 is a 150GB install size, so with games of this size increasingly being the norm it will quickly get used up.
  - radiorental 3y ago
    Action sports cams, dashcams, handheld gaming device such as the switch and steamdeck, I'm sure there's plenty more application. All fairly niche but it's a market
    - jclardy 3y ago
      I feel gaming devices are the primary target...as someone who used to shoot wedding videography a few years ago, there is a limit of how much footage you want to store on one card - if only because you can easily lose them. The smaller storage limit is a feature, not a bug :) It forces "normal" users to actually figure out a backup solution. Most action cams are going to take a long while to fill up 2TB.
cmiller1 3y ago
That's a whole 25 Johnny Mnemonics! (Or 6 of him when he quadruples his capacity which is life threateningly dangerous.)
- redundantly 3y ago
  This is the best analogy in this thread by far.
Avshalom 3y ago
Does any more knowledgeable person know if this is something that will require hardware support or software support or should it just plug and play in any old microsd slot?
- londons_explore 3y ago
  The device itself will work in any old slot. Unfortunately the protocols that run on top, and the filesystems that are typically stored on them, both have maximum size limits. Generally, laptops/desktops will have no trouble. Your 2002 camera on the other hand probably won't work with it...
- simbolit 3y ago
  * There is microSD from 1999, max capacity is 2GB. * Then there is the 2006 update microSDHC, max capacity was 32GB. * And since 2009 we use microSDXC, max capacity is 2TB. * In 2019, the next update came out, microSDUC, max capacity is 128TB. As far as I know there are no actual products yet. You need a reader of the same type of your card or higher. Otherwise, it might not work at all, or you can only read the first x gb of your larger card. I am not knowledgeable, but I know how to use Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#microSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#microSD
  - Avshalom 3y ago
    The thing is that for instance my Moto-G https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-moto-g-power-5g/p?skuId=880 https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-moto-g-power-5g/p?sk... says it's supports up to 1TB, which is... none of those standards. So is this a situation where they're using 1TB because that's what currently exists as-of time of that website being written or is this a situation where no one actually bothers to implement the whole standard? That's why I was asking.
    - patrakov 3y ago
      When the Nokia N900 was the new thing, it was specced to support 16 GB MicroSD cards, which is, again, none of the standards. They did it because, at that time, there were no actual 32 GB cards on the market, so they could not test the support. De-facto, 32 GB cards worked.
B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
If you don't mind shopping a bit off-brand, like SanDian and Sansumg, they're already available, e.g. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006108748036.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006108748036.html (caution: read the one-star reviews)
- Stratoscope 3y ago
  Almost certainly fake. Amazon was flooded with cards like these a few years ago. For example, you could get a "1TB" card at a bargain price, less than 10% the cost of a legitimate 1TB card. But the actual capacity would be something like 8GB, and the firmware was hacked to report a larger capacity than actually existed. Steve Gibson has a free program to test for these fraudulent cards: https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
  - B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
    There's also 'h2testw', a simple (portable) windows executable, originally from a German magazine. But yeah, there's plenty of fake high-capacity SD and SSD at suspiciously low prices. What gets confusing is that you can also buy mid-performance real 32 or 64 GB SD cards for as cheap as 2 bucks. Perfectly good for occasional cam or tablet use, after testing.
cyanydeez 3y ago
corporate spies rejoice? whose filling up terabytes at this size?
- recursive 3y ago
  Smaller is better. Having a terabyte of data isn't all that unusual.
CrypticShift 3y ago
What about speed? Is the adoption of SD Express slow compared to previous standards? I never see any computer (or smartphone) specs advertising "microSD Express" speeds, and it is already 4 years old. The coming standard claims "up to 2GB/s possible." [1], and at this "speed" (of adoption, that is), this is not coming anytime soon. [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2124706/sd-express-9-1-new-standard-ensures-transfers-at-almost-2-gb-per-second.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2124706/sd-express-9-1-new-s...
- _joel 3y ago
  Says it in the artcice "The upcoming 2TB card, dubbed the 'EXCERIA PLUS G2' is said to have read speeds of up to 100 MB a second and write speeds of up to 90 MB a second. This 2TB size now hits the upper storage capacity of the defined SDXC standard." Not sure about IOPS but if you're streaming media or large game assets, sure that's fine.
- tpolzer 3y ago
  SD Express is basically dead as far as I can tell. SD card users who care about speed have UHS-II equipment, but SD Express and UHS-II use mutually incompatible high speed signalling on the same pins (so cards and readers are only supporting one of the two - I guess technically this could be fixable with special purpose chips, but at large cost). Users who care about speed but not about SD card compatibility are already using CFExpress, which is supported by most modern professional cameras and has much better hardware availability than SD Express.
pulse7 3y ago
Imagine storing whole internet text from November/December 2023 on 5 such microSD cards (CommonCrawl.org WET files for this crawl are 9.30 TiB)...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
CosmicShadow 3y ago
If only they'd let you put any SD card in a new phone, but nah, how about an extra $500 for like 256gb
- crtasm 3y ago
  You can if you buy the right phone, I believe?
  - Riseed 3y ago
    Every SD-accepting phone I’ve had has had a cap on the capacity card it would accept. Not sure whether that’s the norm or if I didn’t buy the right phones.
    - Stratoscope 3y ago
      Was it an actual hard limit, or just something listed in a datasheet? Device manufacturers will sometimes list a lower limit than what the device could actually support, simply because there were no larger capacity drives/memory available for testing at the time of release. I've seen this a few times with ThinkPads, not sure about phones.
      - est31 3y ago
        Capacity limits for drives exist because the maximum capacity of SD cards depends on the protocol used: SD, SDHC, SDXC, SDUC. Each protocol requires driver support in the device. Hardware wise, there isn't many changes required though, and to some degree this partitioning is also artificial because one can just make a standard that supports horribly gigantic capacities. But anyways, the limit exists, and this means that whether your device can support larger SD cards after it is released depends on whether the driver is getting updates or not. Android phones are quite known for not releasing driver updates, although often there is updates for Android phones as well. Thinkpads are IBM computers, and the update story is way better there.
        3y ago
KeplerBoy 3y ago
Are microSD cards the densest we can store information digital information? As in bytes/mm³ or bytes/gramm.
- Ralo 3y ago
  There has been storage at the atom level, which I would assume to be the highest density. Although, its not anything production ready any time soon.
  - KeplerBoy 3y ago
    I wondered how many bits per silicone atom these SD cards are capable of now. Quick back of the envelope calculations say we're at 300 million atoms per bit of capacity. Assumptions: micro sd cards weighing 250 mg, resulting in 0.25/28 moles of silicon.
    - jimbobthrowawy 3y ago
      I think the cards are mostly plastic by mass, and the silicon is doped with other elements. (mostly lighter, some heavier. IIRC) The actual metal storing magnetic charge in a hard drive is tiny also, with some drive platters being mostly ceramic. Regardless, if you were to personify the force of entropy, it would be greatly angered by humanity and modern computing.
      - KeplerBoy 3y ago
        Sure. I completely agree. Also micro sd cards are certainly not optimized for weight and I wouldn't be surprised if I made a mistake in my "calculation".
seanalltogether 3y ago
I would be happy just getting a micro SD UHS-II card with decent storage. All this storage space and it takes forever to transfer anything to it on UHS-I
amelius 3y ago
Just don't get them from Amazon.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Where's a good place to buy?
  - _cenw 3y ago
    Places you'd trust to buy photo gear from are a good start. Large electronics retailers works too. Just not from marketplaces with stock intermingling of returns and stock from different sellers with the same SKU.
- jimbobthrowawy 3y ago
  I've used f3 (fight flash fraud) on every SD card I've bought for myself or someone else. Never had a failure, but I've pretty much only bought cards direct from mixza on aliexpress. I'd certainly recommend testing any flash device you get, especially cheap ones. It might take eight hours to write and verify, but it's well worth it. (if you can abide disputes/returns) https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3 https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3
divbzero 3y ago
From the photo, the 2TB microSD card appears to be UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) and Video Speed Class 30 (V30) which correspond to a minimum of 30 MB/s transfer speed [1]. This is good but still pales in comparison with external SSDs with >1,000 MB/s transfer speeds [2] and internal SSDs with >7,000 MB/s transfer speeds [3]. [1]: https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/personal-storage/memory-card-speed-classes https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/personal-storage/memory-car... [2]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-external-hard-drive-ssd,5987.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-external-hard-driv... [3]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssds,3891.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssds,3891.html
- Sakos 3y ago
  I'm more concerned about the possible write endurance and long-term durability of the data. I've had more than one 512GB SD card fail recently despite not owning them for long.
wizardforhire 3y ago
Wow! Now I can have an 8TB iPod!
- LASR 3y ago
  Or a 2TB action camera. Not having to carry around multiple of these tiny things when going on vacation is a big QoL improvement. I’ve lost a few 256GB ones over the years. Only once with footage on it. But it was a whole day’s worth of my toddler’s first time in Disneyland. We were all very sad.
Havoc 3y ago
Really wish there was something between SD/usbstick and SSD in terms of speed and reliability.
- keyboard_slap 3y ago
  Portable SSD?
  - SushiHippie 3y ago
    Or a USB nvme enclosure.
- Shadowmist 3y ago
  https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ENVPMCA10/ https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ENVPMCA10/
  - Havoc 3y ago
    That looks like a really neat product. Thanks
urbandw311er 3y ago
I don’t know why I still get excited about huge storage capacity in tiny cards, but weirdly I really do.
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
If we're at the point of 2 TB microSD cards, why can't I buy a 6+ TB flash drive yet? As far as I can tell, non-fake ones top out at 1 TB.
ksec 3y ago
May be someday we could have a mini NAS build with microSD card. If I could have 8 of these in ZFS with 4 of them being for redundancy bring a total 8TB storage. In Raid it would still be able to saturate 2.5Gbps Ethernet.
0cVlTeIATBs 3y ago
I know we all like big numbers but >said to have read speeds of up to 100 MB a second and write speeds of up to 90 MB a second is useless to say, especially when write caches exist. I only care about minimum speeds, short of in depth analysis. The card is V30, which guarantees 30MB/s write.
timonoko 3y ago
Enough with floppy-analogies. Those who know, know that Algol-68 was 20 kbytes and it was one full roll of punched paper tape. Weighing 100 grams. So, 2 TB would require 10000 tons of papertape. (2e12/20e3/10/1e3) And as we all know Finland's yearly paper production is 4 million tons. Hence it could produce only one 2TB SD-disk worth of reliable paper tape storage in a day.

121 points by brandrick 3y ago

That's enough to store chat GPT. As you can imagine, infosec people are stressed.

If you want to blow the mind of a non-tech person. Show them a high capacity MicroSD card and tell them how many 1’s and 0’s it can reliably store. A 2TB MicroSD card really is a modern marvel in engineering.

hackernewds 3y ago
how many can they store?
- bagels 3y ago
  Approximately sixteen trillion. I suspect that number is not really comprehensible to a large population though.
  - 867-5309 3y ago
    so the grains of sand on TRAPPIST-1e
  - thelittleone 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - ninkendo 3y ago
      > Grains of Sand: If you were to count grains of sand, assuming roughly 10,000 grains per cup, you would need about 1.6 trillion cups of sand to reach 16 trillion grains. Math is not ChatGPT’s strong suit.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    It’s enough to store the name of every human being that has ever lived.
  - llamaInSouth 3y ago
    This video helped me visualize how big of a number 1 trillion is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoOJggESR8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoOJggESR8o Current US debt is almost 34 trillions? https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/
    - Cockbrand 3y ago
      So the debt is just a bit more than two of these microSD cards' worth of storage! I might have the unit conversion wrong, though.
  - wkjagt 3y ago
    If you were to count those at a rate of 1 per second, it would take about half a million years.
- oburb 3y ago
  16,000,000,000,000
- baal80spam 3y ago
  1 Byte = 8 bits 1 KByte = 8 * 1000 = 8 000 bits 1 MByte = 8000 * 1000 = 8 000 000 bits 1 GByte = 8000000 * 1000 = 8 000 000 000 bits 1 TByte = 8000000000 * 1000 = 8 000 000 000 000 bits 2 TBytes = 8000000000000 * 2 = 16 000 000 000 000 bits All values approximate.
redserk 3y ago
I have a frame of various media over the years over my desk including a 5.25" floppy, a 3.5" floppy, ZIP disk, CD, Blu-Ray, SD, microSD, etc. As a technical person, my mind keeps getting blown.
- pjerem 3y ago
  That’s a really nice idea. Maybe I will steal it :)
  - redserk 3y ago
    It's a fantastic and quick project! I use two layers of thin black foam. The top layer of foam sheet has cut-outs for the various types of media except microSD card, which is held in place with a small dab of glue. They're pressed against the glass and has survived 2 moves without issue.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  No Jaz drive?
crazygringo 3y ago
That doesn't mean much though. How about when you tell them it can store 38 seasons of TV shows in HD?* Or 40 dual-layer Blu-Ray discs? Does it seem like a lot or a little? *Assuming 4 GB per 60-min drama episode in 1080p, and 13 episodes/season, all of which is pretty ballpark.
- arccy 3y ago
  with most laypeople streaming, they don't really have a sense of how much space a season of tv shows is. you need something more relatable, like photos
  - stavros 3y ago
    There was a thread here the other day about how everyone just streams everything, and nobody knows what a file is any more. Why would someone know how big a photo is? They're all on Google anyway.
    - arccy 3y ago
      not everyone has google/icloud sync on. people run out of space on their phones all the time.
  - crooked-v 3y ago
    I think the obvious Americanized measurement here is "number of football fields covered by 4x6 photos".
- tomcam 3y ago
  Or almost 1 copy of the Oppenheimer director’s cut
- numpad0 3y ago
  Wait, if one microSD card holds more than a year's worth of TV shows for an average person, does that imply paying $10/month for unlimited streaming is a really stupid idea? Granted it's not about paying for the recording medium, but still.
wkjagt 3y ago
Depending on if they are old enough to remember floppy disks, tell them the tiny card holds as much information as almost 1.4 million 3.5 inch floppy disks (assuming 1.44mb each). If you pile those up, it would be about 4.5 km high. Or if you take the 720kb kind, your pile would be as high as Mount Everest.
- gxs 3y ago
  Holy shit that’s a great way of putting it. I’m not double checking the math but that’s insane, 1.4 million, insane.
- CapitalistCartr 3y ago
  They could put the capacity of every 3.5" floppy ever made in a suitcase full of microSD cards.
  - paulkrush 3y ago
    A wild guess of 3.5" floppy production is 30B. So you need 21,428 2TB micro SD cards. A 15mm x 11mm x 1mm you need 3 1/2 liters.
    - Kye 3y ago
      The bandwidth of a station wagon hurtling down the highway grows every year.
      - xnx 3y ago
        Sneakernet remains undefeated. https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
        Kye 3y ago
        >> "A solid-state laptop drive weighs about 78 grams and can hold up to a terabyte." Amazing how we went from 1TB 2.5 inch drives to 8TB m.2 drives and 2TB microSD cards in 11 years. And it would be more like $7k in 4TB drives than $130k. Put $130k of modern drives in the same shoebox and you're probably into the petabyte range. Go to the then-top of the line microSD milk jug and it's getting up there with these 2TB cards.
candiodari 3y ago
If you want to blow the mind of a tech person, tell them how long it will store those 1's and 0's ... (~10 years max, flash doesn't hold it's contents over time)
wslh 3y ago
I remember showing my grandfather a Commodore Amiga playing a Genesis song from a 3.5" floppy disk [1] and he just said: "yes, it is just recorded on the disk". I tried to explain the complexity (digital to analog processes) of this but he just abstracted the idea thinking in other media like LPs, Casettes, and the new CDs. [1] https://youtu.be/_UnVy9w0xKk?si=kFwgo1qU6Dw9Y6sY https://youtu.be/_UnVy9w0xKk?si=kFwgo1qU6Dw9Y6sY
- Cockbrand 3y ago
  Haha, I had a copy of that disk back in the day, but I certainly haven't thought of it in the last 30 years. Thank you for reminding me! While it was a bit of a marvel to put an entire pop song onto an 880k disk, the not-so-hifi sound quality was already apparent back then. I guess they forgot to switch off the low pass filter by turning off the power LED.
  - wslh 3y ago
    Thank you for teaching us abot the low pass filter! I searched that after your message since I was not aware: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.audio/c/6wBXmBoOIro https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.audio/c/6wBXmBoOI...
    - Cockbrand 3y ago
      On the other hand, I just learned from your link that there apparently were A500s where the low pass filter could not be switched off in software. AFAIR, toggling the LPF in software was already possible in the predecessor, the A1000. Anyhow, coupling the LPF to the power LED (and having a software controlled power LED in the first place) is a very Amiga thing to do. It's one of the platform's many nice idiosyncrasies.
- snvzz 3y ago
  Should have shown him a tracker :)
theandrewbailey 3y ago
> tell them how many 1’s and 0’s it can reliably store. Zero.
- _cenw 3y ago
  On the largest capacity, you're at least not getting a card with tons of remapped sectors where half the flash has already died.
jbverschoor 3y ago
Reliable? 0. Sdcards are not reliable
- prawn 3y ago
  I was using one for filming a client job the other day, without a backup card. It cracked and bent in half and I thought I was going to have to entirely reshoot the location. Bent it back and put it in the laptop and got all the data fine. Never had one fail.
  - 0xDEADFED5 3y ago
    If you've never had one fail you haven't used them enough. Raspberry Pi usage seem to be pretty efficient at sorting the good ones from the bad ones
    - phito 3y ago
      I've been using RPIs since their first release and never had an SD card failure. Might just be luck though cause I know the problem is real and happens to many people.
      - NewsyHacker 3y ago
        It depends on the distro. What especially hammers SD cards on Linux, eventually rendering the card read-only, is logs being written to disk. A lot of distros for Raspberry Pi therefore now keep logs in RAM.
        forty 3y ago
        This issue is true of any flash memory. See my sibling comment on using an USB stick to write data: I also destroyed a bunch with logs
      - forty 3y ago
        I destroyed many SD cards with the original Pi. I ended up putting the card read only with the hardware switch and use a USB stick for writing data. No issue with microSD cards with more recent Pis (or other SBC) however
soderfoo 3y ago
The number of 1’s and 0’s is lower than the US national debt, which is kind of bonkers.
- addaon 3y ago
  The US debt is currently around 271 terabits [0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_(money) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_(money)
pseudosavant 3y ago
In case anyone else was wondering what the number is: 17,592,186,044,416 bits. On a durable card that is smaller than a stamp.
- Tempest1981 3y ago
  Sounds bigger than saying 2^44
  - 0cVlTeIATBs 3y ago
    I think you both have fallen for the bullshit marketing of storage manufacturers who want you to think you're getting 16 terabits of capacity. You're not. You get 16,000,000,000,000 bits.
    - 0cVlTeIATBs 3y ago
      Oops, I mean tibibits.
    - pseudosavant 3y ago
      If we are really going to get technical we’d need to determine how much over provisioning the card is designed with.
_cenw 3y ago
I hate to be a cynic on this one, but I never found micro SD cards reliable enough to store anything longer than absolutely neccessary. Usually that is until I can move the data to a better storage medium. The tech that runs on these devices is incredibly cursed, and keeps changing very fast. 30C3 had a fun talk about the internals of mSD cards. https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5294_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312291400_-_the_exploration_and_exploitation_of_an_sd_memory_card_-_bunnie_-_xobs https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5294_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312291...
ComplexSystems 3y ago
Even better, if you want to blow the mind of even most tech people, show them a high capacity MicroSD card and tell them how many 1's and 0's it can REALLY store. SD cards are many, many times larger than you think they are - often hundreds of times larger. This is because they use wear leveling to avoid read/writing too much to any one bit. It is quite possible that this one SD card could have hundreds of TB of storage space on it. I have often wished there were some easy way to access all of this space for situations where you know that you only want to write once to the card - meaning you know you only want to write once. Would be great for storage.
- dannyw 3y ago
  No, not hundreds of times larger. Maybe ~5% larger.
- Tenemo 3y ago
  It sounded extremely improbable to me, so tried googling and I wasn't able to find anything that would back up such claims. Can you provide a source for the information that MicroSD cards have more than e.g. double total physical capacity?
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Not double, but having extra space than the device is rated for is listed as a wear leveling technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling?#Techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling?#Techniques
quechimba 3y ago
I remember many years ago when my uncle explained to my grand dad how many photos he could fit in his cameras memory card. He was completely blown away, he couldn't believe it, he said it was impossible and laughed.

gjsman-1000 3y ago

With so many layers, I’d be deeply concerned about how fragile it is. Probably much better off being inserted in a semi-permanent role (Switch, Steam Deck), than camera storage.

2024throwaway 3y ago
Modern cameras often utilize CFexpress cards rather than microSD

yellow_lead 3y ago

I almost can't believe this. Even 1TB is an insane amount of storage on something so small.

Hamuko 3y ago
And they get incredibly affordable. I bought a 512 GB microSD card for my Steam Deck a year ago for 38€. Although I guess a 1 TB card would still cost me a whopping 108€.
- Etheryte 3y ago
  They're affordable, but also not all that reliable. I can't even begin to count how many I've had fail on me over the years.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    I was thinking similarly. Do I really want to rely upon 2TB being stored in a SD card? Numerous failures over the year, and only consider them for temporary storage. How long does it even take to fill the drive?
    - pjerem 3y ago
      It depends on what you store and your backup strategy. You rarely have 2TB of really precious data on a microSD. microSD are meant to easily store a local copy of your data, not to be a reliable long term storage. You can also use it to store useful but not unique data like games on a switch or a Steam deck. If the card fail, all you lose is the time to redownload everything. Anyway except if you do a lot of video, the really important data (the really personal data you’ll want to backup) is rarely in TBs. It’s mostly pictures and documents.
  - NewsyHacker 3y ago
    I had a 1TB card fail on me, but that only meant that the card would no longer accept writes. I could still read everything off it. Since I was using the card to carry my entire music collection in FLAC on my phone, I was pretty OK with that. Eventually, when I wanted to update that copy of my music collection, I easily replaced the card under warranty.

msoad 3y ago

My first digital camera came with a 4MB SD card. What a time to be alive!

daveguy 3y ago

I remember when consumer external gigabyte hard drives were just coming available. They were still thousands of dollars. They weighed in the pounds, and about half a cubic foot in volume. I mean, I remember floppies and 5.25 format hard drives in the kb and multiple mb size too, but the gigabyte hard drive era seemed like a significant milestone, so it made an impression. That gb external drive was probably just multiple (4-8) 5.25 drives in a case. 1TB didn't make the same impression because we were already getting to the "more than you need for most use cases" range and the external formats were about as compact as the internal ones with laptop form factor drives. But TB scale in a micro SD format... Yeah, that is a similar impression to the GB HDD era.

gene-h 3y ago

The first 1TB microSD card was released in 2019[0]. It is disappointing that the time to double was about 4 years. [0]https://www.zdnet.com/article/micron-releases-worlds-first-1tb-microsd-card/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/micron-releases-worlds-first-1...

The_Colonel 3y ago
Well, we're getting to the point of diminishing returns. Who is going to be buying these? It's like with HDDs, very few consumers are buying these 20 TB HDDs. Unlike HDDs, MicroSD is largely a consumer product.
- 9point6 3y ago
  The steam deck is a pretty good use case for these cards
  - cloudking 3y ago
    I was going to say, has OP downloaded a game recently? You can fit 10-20 modern games on this card tops.
  - brandrick 3y ago
    Baldur's Gate 3 is a 150GB install size, so with games of this size increasingly being the norm it will quickly get used up.
- radiorental 3y ago
  Action sports cams, dashcams, handheld gaming device such as the switch and steamdeck, I'm sure there's plenty more application. All fairly niche but it's a market
  - jclardy 3y ago
    I feel gaming devices are the primary target...as someone who used to shoot wedding videography a few years ago, there is a limit of how much footage you want to store on one card - if only because you can easily lose them. The smaller storage limit is a feature, not a bug :) It forces "normal" users to actually figure out a backup solution. Most action cams are going to take a long while to fill up 2TB.

cmiller1 3y ago

That's a whole 25 Johnny Mnemonics! (Or 6 of him when he quadruples his capacity which is life threateningly dangerous.)

redundantly 3y ago
This is the best analogy in this thread by far.

Avshalom 3y ago

Does any more knowledgeable person know if this is something that will require hardware support or software support or should it just plug and play in any old microsd slot?

londons_explore 3y ago
The device itself will work in any old slot. Unfortunately the protocols that run on top, and the filesystems that are typically stored on them, both have maximum size limits. Generally, laptops/desktops will have no trouble. Your 2002 camera on the other hand probably won't work with it...
simbolit 3y ago
* There is microSD from 1999, max capacity is 2GB. * Then there is the 2006 update microSDHC, max capacity was 32GB. * And since 2009 we use microSDXC, max capacity is 2TB. * In 2019, the next update came out, microSDUC, max capacity is 128TB. As far as I know there are no actual products yet. You need a reader of the same type of your card or higher. Otherwise, it might not work at all, or you can only read the first x gb of your larger card. I am not knowledgeable, but I know how to use Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#microSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#microSD
- Avshalom 3y ago
  The thing is that for instance my Moto-G https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-moto-g-power-5g/p?skuId=880 https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-moto-g-power-5g/p?sk... says it's supports up to 1TB, which is... none of those standards. So is this a situation where they're using 1TB because that's what currently exists as-of time of that website being written or is this a situation where no one actually bothers to implement the whole standard? That's why I was asking.
  - patrakov 3y ago
    When the Nokia N900 was the new thing, it was specced to support 16 GB MicroSD cards, which is, again, none of the standards. They did it because, at that time, there were no actual 32 GB cards on the market, so they could not test the support. De-facto, 32 GB cards worked.

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago

If you don't mind shopping a bit off-brand, like SanDian and Sansumg, they're already available, e.g. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006108748036.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006108748036.html (caution: read the one-star reviews)

Stratoscope 3y ago
Almost certainly fake. Amazon was flooded with cards like these a few years ago. For example, you could get a "1TB" card at a bargain price, less than 10% the cost of a legitimate 1TB card. But the actual capacity would be something like 8GB, and the firmware was hacked to report a larger capacity than actually existed. Steve Gibson has a free program to test for these fraudulent cards: https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
  There's also 'h2testw', a simple (portable) windows executable, originally from a German magazine. But yeah, there's plenty of fake high-capacity SD and SSD at suspiciously low prices. What gets confusing is that you can also buy mid-performance real 32 or 64 GB SD cards for as cheap as 2 bucks. Perfectly good for occasional cam or tablet use, after testing.

cyanydeez 3y ago

corporate spies rejoice? whose filling up terabytes at this size?

recursive 3y ago
Smaller is better. Having a terabyte of data isn't all that unusual.

CrypticShift 3y ago

What about speed? Is the adoption of SD Express slow compared to previous standards? I never see any computer (or smartphone) specs advertising "microSD Express" speeds, and it is already 4 years old. The coming standard claims "up to 2GB/s possible." [1], and at this "speed" (of adoption, that is), this is not coming anytime soon. [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2124706/sd-express-9-1-new-standard-ensures-transfers-at-almost-2-gb-per-second.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2124706/sd-express-9-1-new-s...

_joel 3y ago
Says it in the artcice "The upcoming 2TB card, dubbed the 'EXCERIA PLUS G2' is said to have read speeds of up to 100 MB a second and write speeds of up to 90 MB a second. This 2TB size now hits the upper storage capacity of the defined SDXC standard." Not sure about IOPS but if you're streaming media or large game assets, sure that's fine.
tpolzer 3y ago
SD Express is basically dead as far as I can tell. SD card users who care about speed have UHS-II equipment, but SD Express and UHS-II use mutually incompatible high speed signalling on the same pins (so cards and readers are only supporting one of the two - I guess technically this could be fixable with special purpose chips, but at large cost). Users who care about speed but not about SD card compatibility are already using CFExpress, which is supported by most modern professional cameras and has much better hardware availability than SD Express.

pulse7 3y ago

Imagine storing whole internet text from November/December 2023 on 5 such microSD cards (CommonCrawl.org WET files for this crawl are 9.30 TiB)...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

CosmicShadow 3y ago

If only they'd let you put any SD card in a new phone, but nah, how about an extra $500 for like 256gb

crtasm 3y ago
You can if you buy the right phone, I believe?
- Riseed 3y ago
  Every SD-accepting phone I’ve had has had a cap on the capacity card it would accept. Not sure whether that’s the norm or if I didn’t buy the right phones.
  - Stratoscope 3y ago
    Was it an actual hard limit, or just something listed in a datasheet? Device manufacturers will sometimes list a lower limit than what the device could actually support, simply because there were no larger capacity drives/memory available for testing at the time of release. I've seen this a few times with ThinkPads, not sure about phones.
    - est31 3y ago
      Capacity limits for drives exist because the maximum capacity of SD cards depends on the protocol used: SD, SDHC, SDXC, SDUC. Each protocol requires driver support in the device. Hardware wise, there isn't many changes required though, and to some degree this partitioning is also artificial because one can just make a standard that supports horribly gigantic capacities. But anyways, the limit exists, and this means that whether your device can support larger SD cards after it is released depends on whether the driver is getting updates or not. Android phones are quite known for not releasing driver updates, although often there is updates for Android phones as well. Thinkpads are IBM computers, and the update story is way better there.
      - 3y ago

KeplerBoy 3y ago

Are microSD cards the densest we can store information digital information? As in bytes/mm³ or bytes/gramm.

Ralo 3y ago
There has been storage at the atom level, which I would assume to be the highest density. Although, its not anything production ready any time soon.
- KeplerBoy 3y ago
  I wondered how many bits per silicone atom these SD cards are capable of now. Quick back of the envelope calculations say we're at 300 million atoms per bit of capacity. Assumptions: micro sd cards weighing 250 mg, resulting in 0.25/28 moles of silicon.
  - jimbobthrowawy 3y ago
    I think the cards are mostly plastic by mass, and the silicon is doped with other elements. (mostly lighter, some heavier. IIRC) The actual metal storing magnetic charge in a hard drive is tiny also, with some drive platters being mostly ceramic. Regardless, if you were to personify the force of entropy, it would be greatly angered by humanity and modern computing.
    - KeplerBoy 3y ago
      Sure. I completely agree. Also micro sd cards are certainly not optimized for weight and I wouldn't be surprised if I made a mistake in my "calculation".

seanalltogether 3y ago

I would be happy just getting a micro SD UHS-II card with decent storage. All this storage space and it takes forever to transfer anything to it on UHS-I

amelius 3y ago

Just don't get them from Amazon.

acidburnNSA 3y ago
Where's a good place to buy?
- _cenw 3y ago
  Places you'd trust to buy photo gear from are a good start. Large electronics retailers works too. Just not from marketplaces with stock intermingling of returns and stock from different sellers with the same SKU.
jimbobthrowawy 3y ago
I've used f3 (fight flash fraud) on every SD card I've bought for myself or someone else. Never had a failure, but I've pretty much only bought cards direct from mixza on aliexpress. I'd certainly recommend testing any flash device you get, especially cheap ones. It might take eight hours to write and verify, but it's well worth it. (if you can abide disputes/returns) https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3 https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3

divbzero 3y ago

From the photo, the 2TB microSD card appears to be UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) and Video Speed Class 30 (V30) which correspond to a minimum of 30 MB/s transfer speed [1]. This is good but still pales in comparison with external SSDs with >1,000 MB/s transfer speeds [2] and internal SSDs with >7,000 MB/s transfer speeds [3]. [1]: https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/personal-storage/memory-card-speed-classes https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/personal-storage/memory-car... [2]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-external-hard-drive-ssd,5987.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-external-hard-driv... [3]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssds,3891.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssds,3891.html

Sakos 3y ago
I'm more concerned about the possible write endurance and long-term durability of the data. I've had more than one 512GB SD card fail recently despite not owning them for long.

wizardforhire 3y ago

Wow! Now I can have an 8TB iPod!

LASR 3y ago
Or a 2TB action camera. Not having to carry around multiple of these tiny things when going on vacation is a big QoL improvement. I’ve lost a few 256GB ones over the years. Only once with footage on it. But it was a whole day’s worth of my toddler’s first time in Disneyland. We were all very sad.

Havoc 3y ago

Really wish there was something between SD/usbstick and SSD in terms of speed and reliability.

keyboard_slap 3y ago
Portable SSD?
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  Or a USB nvme enclosure.
Shadowmist 3y ago
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ENVPMCA10/ https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/ENVPMCA10/
- Havoc 3y ago
  That looks like a really neat product. Thanks

urbandw311er 3y ago

I don’t know why I still get excited about huge storage capacity in tiny cards, but weirdly I really do.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

If we're at the point of 2 TB microSD cards, why can't I buy a 6+ TB flash drive yet? As far as I can tell, non-fake ones top out at 1 TB.

ksec 3y ago

May be someday we could have a mini NAS build with microSD card. If I could have 8 of these in ZFS with 4 of them being for redundancy bring a total 8TB storage. In Raid it would still be able to saturate 2.5Gbps Ethernet.

0cVlTeIATBs 3y ago

I know we all like big numbers but >said to have read speeds of up to 100 MB a second and write speeds of up to 90 MB a second is useless to say, especially when write caches exist. I only care about minimum speeds, short of in depth analysis. The card is V30, which guarantees 30MB/s write.

timonoko 3y ago

Enough with floppy-analogies. Those who know, know that Algol-68 was 20 kbytes and it was one full roll of punched paper tape. Weighing 100 grams. So, 2 TB would require 10000 tons of papertape. (2e12/20e3/10/1e3) And as we all know Finland's yearly paper production is 4 million tons. Hence it could produce only one 2TB SD-disk worth of reliable paper tape storage in a day.