5 ms·

Despite 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 possib

by MBCook 1y ago

Despite 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 ago
it 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 ago
  There'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.

by MBCook 1y ago

userbinator 1y ago

it 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 ago
There'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.