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Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds
- userbinator 1y agoThe Verge reports that a Chinese company called Biwin has developed the "Mini SSD," a 15 by 17 mm-thick card that supports read speeds of up to 3,700MB per second due to a two-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface. So this is basically a smaller NVMe SSD?
- MBCook 1y agoYes. A very very small one.
- PaulKeeble 1y agoAnd presumably a mechanical interface designed to be external to a device to allow plugging them in and out.
- unwind 1y agoThat size obviously doesn't parse, so it's hard to tell. It's how thick, again? I guess they just mean "15x17x1 mm" but somehow edited the 1 out and ... I don't know.
- throwawayben 1y ago"if you multiply by 1 it's always the same so that's pointless - I should remove that"
- lxgr 1y ago> So this is basically a smaller NVMe SSD? Yes, but so is microSD Express, which already has a significant shipped base of supporting devices including the Nintendo Switch 2!
- superkuh 1y agoI can see the needed use case for portable devices. But I also get the feeling this shrinking down of physical volume for storage that's going to be generally available for A tier games (like on a steamdeck) is a status quo setting us back to 2010 levels of actual storage available. Again! Just when normal desktop computer SSD were finally rising in actual capacity beyond 2TB. And right when SSD storage is hitting the wall with no more multi-level cell improvements available.
- Seattle3503 1y agoAny chance someone builds a phone with removable storage now that we have better SD cards?
- DiabloD3 1y agoWe already have this though. SD Express, which allows SD cards to actually protocol switch to one lane PCI-E NVME. It's been part of the spec officially since 2018, and an enhancement slightly later to add more pins to allow a second lane. And since, underneath, it becomes a standard PCI-E NVME with standard lanes, there is no inherent speed limit from the bus itself, only from the fact that SD cards are tiny and any real controller is going to cook.
- seabrookmx 1y agoWorth mentioning that the Nintendo Switch 2 supports SD Express, so in a few years millions of households will have these cards laying around.
- echelon 1y agoI need this slot added back to my phone. Thank you very much, phone manufacturers.
- mitthrowaway2 1y agoTry a Sony Xperia! Vote with your dollar or else they'll stop making them!
- Namidairo 1y agoThey've pulled out of my market (Australia) 6 years ago, so that's not really an option, even if I imported one. If I imported one, the majority of the handsets released before this year wouldn't be able to register on a network, given that the networks have gone and blocked the IMEI TAC associated with most of Sony's handsets.[1] This is due to Sony not having the correct carrier settings in order to roam onto them for emergency calls, and a ham-fisted direction to have working emergency calls post-3G shutdown. [1] https://isthisphoneblocked.net.au/device-brands/sony https://isthisphoneblocked.net.au/device-brands/sony
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- MBCook 1y agoDespite the title of the article, this seems useful in phones or laptops to me. Even if not user replaceable without opening the device it would make it possible to have replaceable drives at a tiny fraction of the current minimum size. Even just for relatability compared to soldered on storage it would be a plus.
- userbinator 1y agoit would make it possible to have replaceable drives The manufacturers don't seem to want that. Even the small Chinese companies which were the last holdouts have gone full forced-obsolescence.
- mschuster91 1y agoThere's a multitude of problems with SD card support, purely from a hardware design standpoint: - water tightness. Yes, seals are a thing, a few Samsung models (Tab Active 3) support that... but guess where I had damage from water ingress on mine? Yup, through the SD card slot. Rubber seals eventually dry out. - power. SD cards tend to require large amounts of power during writes and behave unpredictably when the power is jittery for whatever reason. - thermals. Getting the heat away from an SD card, particularly a high-speed one, during writes is tough. - quality. Even if you buy a brand name SD card, chances are too high you end up with counterfeits. Phone companies do not want the support effort associated with that any more. And with cheap SD cards, you have to account for delivering actually clean and stable power because they don't have enough onboard capacitors. - BOM complexity and cost. SD card slots take up board space and parts - the card enclosure, capacitors, voltage regulators, fuses (you don't want a broken/dirty SD card to fry the main power rail), high-speed data lanes, at least one GPIO for card presence detection... best to avoid that.
- lxgr 1y ago> - water tightness. Yes, seals are a thing, a few Samsung models (Tab Active 3) support that... but guess where I had damage from water ingress on mine? Yup, through the SD card slot. Rubber seals eventually dry out. In most of the world, physical SIM cards are still a thing, yet most phones have been waterproof for a while now. > - quality. Even if you buy a brand name SD card, chances are too high you end up with counterfeits. Phone companies do not want the support effort associated with that any more. Very solvable: Run a mandatory performance and "lying about storage size" benchmark upon formatting. > - BOM complexity and cost. I'd pay hundreds of dollars extra for being able to upgrade the storage on my phone. The real reason is that device manufacturers would never willingly give up the privilege of being able to charge hefty premiums on storage capacity.
- KingOfCoders 1y agoI was so amazed when I held the Microdrive harddisk in my hands for the first time. And later the first iPod that was made possible with a Microdrive. These things lead to new gadget categories, not only making existing ones better.
- wao0uuno 1y agoCFexpress type B already exists and does the same thing.
- uoaei 1y agoThis is obviously the direction of persistent storage: SD meets SSD. Technological innovations are reliably predictable at this relatively high level. If you didn't see it coming, better get in quick before everyone else catches on!
- pftburger 1y agoSo, uh, game cartridges?
- amelius 1y agoWhat happened to ROM cartridges?
- ethagknight 1y agoOh so now you want the game developer to actually complete the game and make sure it works before shipping it??
- mrguyorama 1y agoMask ROM is actually pretty expensive to manufacture, which is why original DS game carts were so small you could fit a hundred of them onto a $20 MicroSD card during the same time period. The upside of course is that your original DS cartridge might never go bad, even if you lose it under the sofa for 30 years. This is not true of modern switch cartridges.
- nullbyte808 1y agoAnother dumb move by Nintendont. UFS has been around since 2010 and is much faster.
- zeroq 1y agoSD download option is the answer. I think this whole issue shouldn't exist in the first place. I do understand that full voice over and 4k ready textures comes at a price but some devs are getting lazy and some games are just ridiculous. We're talking about handhelds like Steam Deck. Even if I plug it in as a console it won't have the juice to run at full resolution. When I want to quickly grab an episode of a tv series to watch on my mobile I'll be super happy with 300mb 720p version. I don't need a 50gb rip in 4k in HDR with Atmos sound. Same option should be available for games.
- Zenst 1y agoI think many would be amazed at how the space used on a game today is broken down in space usage. Most will be along the lines of cut scenes, graphics, audio......library and librarys galore...logic code of the program that is unique to the game and finally some text file hidden away. But talking your AAA kind of titles that seem to be the norm, not your chess games, though even then, graphics sure has gained space in those programs. Though I'm sure somebody active in the industry could paint a better picture. Anybody active in the industry able to offer or point to better breakdown?
- codebje 1y agoIn general: code << world < audio << textures << video Executable code is pretty tiny relative to everything else, including libraries. Libraries only get really big when they include media assets. When it comes to media, even high fidelity audio is relatively small. 44kHz stereo 16-bit sample audio, uncompressed, is 176kb per second of audio. A 1024x1024 texture, at 32bpp, is 4mb, uncompressed. Video depends heavily on codec, but roughly consider that 4k video is something like 4096x2160, so eight times the size of our static texture for a single frame. Encodings don't just store every frame whole, of course, but keyframes add up quick.
- acomjean 1y agoI had “Sargon” (chess game) on cassette tape for the Apple 2. Slow load times though it took very little memory. (The Apple 2 typically had 64kb of ram)
- suprjami 1y agoNo. We have MicroSD Express. We don't need yet another form factor.
- SnuffBox 1y agoWhat if it can offer better transfer speeds? A system that downloads large files often would presumably be bottlenecked by a MicroSD's write speeds.
- mrheosuper 1y agoit's microSD express, unless you have multi-gigabit network, you won't saturate it. The biggest issue with these small form memory is heat, they heat up a lot, but seem like no one care.
- RainyDayTmrw 1y agoThe SD and micro SD form factors are not the most robust or reliable. It would be nice to have a next step up form factor. In some ways, that's the motivation for CF Express Type B (and XQD before it), as popularized in digital photography.
- a1o 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFexpress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFexpress Interesting, I didn't knew about this format. Curious picture selection on the Wikipedia, I didn't knew about this manufacturer until reading the Ars article above.
- RainyDayTmrw 1y agoIt was new-ish, and it barely caught on, only in some digital camera lines for some brands (Nikon and Sony). If anything, plenty of prosumers were annoyed that they now had to buy new cards to use the second slot. The rollout was also bad. Some manufacturers thought they could get away with one slot only (Nikon Z6 mark I had only the single XQD slot, a precursor to CF Express Type B), owing to the improved reliability of CF Express as a form factor, but that was a bad idea, and didn't account for failures in the underlying flash or controller, and that annoyed actual pros.
- laidoffamazon 1y agoI’m still surprised the steam deck runs so well even with games installed to microSD - I’m not sure how they do it.
- LeoPanthera 1y agoThe answer is probably that disk read speed just isn't that important for casual applications like games. We had a lot of great games even when storage was spinning rust.
- dontlaugh 1y agoIt’s actually essential for more serious games without loading screens, which is why for example the PS5 ships with and mandates fast SSDs.
- LeoPanthera 1y agoI would guess that's only a small percentage of popular games, though. The Steam Deck and the PS5 probably don't attract the same kind of gamer.
- MYEUHD 1y agoGrand theft auto games on the PS2 ran without loading screens
- dontlaugh 1y agoMany games have done it historically, almost always with trade offs. Today it’s possible to do it in almost any game if you are guaranteed a fast SSD and the consoles do that.
- Palomides 1y agodecent SD cards can do 200 or 300 MB/s of reads now
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