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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 Micro
by 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 agohow many can they store?
- bagels 3y agoApproximately sixteen trillion. I suspect that number is not really comprehensible to a large population though.
- 867-5309 3y agoso 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 agoIt’s enough to store the name of every human being that has ever lived.
- llamaInSouth 3y agoThis 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 agoSo 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 agoIf you were to count those at a rate of 1 per second, it would take about half a million years.
- oburb 3y ago16,000,000,000,000
- baal80spam 3y ago1 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 agoI 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 agoThat’s a really nice idea. Maybe I will steal it :)
- redserk 3y agoIt'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 agoNo Jaz drive?
- crazygringo 3y agoThat 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 agowith 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 agoThere 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 agonot everyone has google/icloud sync on. people run out of space on their phones all the time.
- crooked-v 3y agoI think the obvious Americanized measurement here is "number of football fields covered by 4x6 photos".
- tomcam 3y agoOr almost 1 copy of the Oppenheimer director’s cut
- numpad0 3y agoWait, 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 agoDepending 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 agoHoly 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 agoThey could put the capacity of every 3.5" floppy ever made in a suitcase full of microSD cards.
- paulkrush 3y agoA 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 agoThe bandwidth of a station wagon hurtling down the highway grows every year.
- xnx 3y agoSneakernet 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 agoIf 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 agoI 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 agoHaha, 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 agoThank 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 agoOn 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 agoShould have shown him a tracker :)
- theandrewbailey 3y ago> tell them how many 1’s and 0’s it can reliably store. Zero.
- _cenw 3y agoOn 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 agoReliable? 0. Sdcards are not reliable
- prawn 3y agoI 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 agoIf 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 agoI'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 agoIt 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 agoThis 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 agoI 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 agoThe number of 1’s and 0’s is lower than the US national debt, which is kind of bonkers.
- addaon 3y agoThe 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 agoIn 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 agoSounds bigger than saying 2^44
- 0cVlTeIATBs 3y agoI 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 agoOops, I mean tibibits.
- pseudosavant 3y agoIf we are really going to get technical we’d need to determine how much over provisioning the card is designed with.
- _cenw 3y agoI 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 agoEven 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 agoNo, not hundreds of times larger. Maybe ~5% larger.
- Tenemo 3y agoIt 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 agoNot 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 agoI 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.