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Microsoft tries to address that issue by including an SD card slot for expanded storage. However, the +$300 that you have to pay to Apple to upgrade from 128GB

by Osiris 14y ago

Microsoft tries to address that issue by including an SD card slot for expanded storage. However, the +$300 that you have to pay to Apple to upgrade from 128GB to 256GB is also completely absurd.

miloshadzic 14y ago
You can do that on the MBA as well.
kabdib 14y ago
That jump in storage is like printing money. Flash is, what, less than a buck a gigabyte?
- lloeki 14y ago
  And is dead in minutes under heavy writing. SD cards are really bad working storage, and should only be used as transitive medium.
  - kabdib 14y ago
    The numbers I'm familiar with were under a dollar for Flash that you'd want to have in a computer, with decent bandwidth. Not garbage flash drives made from a chip fab's borderline rejects. Apple is making at least 50% margins on this, probably /much much/ more.
  - hackmiester 14y ago
    I would like to see someone kill an SD card in "minutes." My camera shoots HD video at some stupidly high bit rate and stores it onto my SD card at damn near as fast as the card will take it, and I do this a lot. There are thousands of people who do it even more than I do, and it can take months or years to go through a card.
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      I'm sure longevity is good for taking photos. I bet it wouldn't be so great for compiles on a dev box. Of course, no one would ever do that. It would be just too slow.
    - lloeki 14y ago
      The problem is inconsistency[0]: > (April 17th) We are currently testing a sample of 40 4GB microSD cards from Sandisk to failure > Its May now and still no cards have failed. > we were testing a card from a customer yesterday on a TS-7553 and it failed the DoubleStore stress tests within the day. [...] The test failed at approximately 13 GB of raw data written > The ATP card failed a 3rd time after 65GB of data written. > Another, separate ATP card failed after 877 GB of write activity If the card is MLC and there's no or limited wear leveling, repeated local writes will shut the card dead quickly ("limited" as in wear leveling being applied only among e.g a 4MB group of cells, Sandisk happens to do that). I've also heard of some controllers implementing wear leveling, muddling the test results. Some cards are truly reliable, others are craptastic, and everything in between is possible. The problem is you can't trust a brand and go for it, and getting the technical details, if at all possible, involves digging into cryptic and hard to find documentations. I can't find the link again to a test of someone who tested various card brands and had them die semi-reliably within 15 minutes. [0]: http://forum.embeddedarm.com/showthread.php?3-SD-card-endurance-test http://forum.embeddedarm.com/showthread.php?3-SD-card-endura...
- yozmsn 14y ago
  Well it does go up with capacity. at >64GB it's about $2/gb Plus speed and reliability are also more expensive. I have a 256GB flash drive... made in china by some knockoff, not kingston and it shows. I've had to reformat it like 3-4 times, and it's read/write speed is a joke. Still it cost me less than some 64gb drives so it's all relative. I agree that adding >$100 for a 16gb upgrade in a phone or even 32gb is a little much but to step it up from 128gb and keep speed and some form of reliability is gonna cost you.
- Osiris 14y ago
  Less than $1/GB retail, not wholesale. I bet Apple gets a killer deal on their flash chips.
dereg 14y ago
There is an SD card slot on the MacBook Air.
- adrr 14y ago
  Not on the 11"
bunderbunder 14y ago
An SD storage slot is not equivalent to having more space on the internal disk drive. It might be fine for storing a large music library or something like that, but for applications where disk latency or bandwidth really matter, there's just no comparison.

by Osiris 14y ago

Microsoft tries to address that issue by including an SD card slot for expanded storage. However, the +$300 that you have to pay to Apple to upgrade from 128GB to 256GB is also completely absurd.

miloshadzic 14y ago

You can do that on the MBA as well.

kabdib 14y ago

That jump in storage is like printing money. Flash is, what, less than a buck a gigabyte?

lloeki 14y ago
And is dead in minutes under heavy writing. SD cards are really bad working storage, and should only be used as transitive medium.
- kabdib 14y ago
  The numbers I'm familiar with were under a dollar for Flash that you'd want to have in a computer, with decent bandwidth. Not garbage flash drives made from a chip fab's borderline rejects. Apple is making at least 50% margins on this, probably /much much/ more.
- hackmiester 14y ago
  I would like to see someone kill an SD card in "minutes." My camera shoots HD video at some stupidly high bit rate and stores it onto my SD card at damn near as fast as the card will take it, and I do this a lot. There are thousands of people who do it even more than I do, and it can take months or years to go through a card.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    I'm sure longevity is good for taking photos. I bet it wouldn't be so great for compiles on a dev box. Of course, no one would ever do that. It would be just too slow.
  - lloeki 14y ago
    The problem is inconsistency[0]: > (April 17th) We are currently testing a sample of 40 4GB microSD cards from Sandisk to failure > Its May now and still no cards have failed. > we were testing a card from a customer yesterday on a TS-7553 and it failed the DoubleStore stress tests within the day. [...] The test failed at approximately 13 GB of raw data written > The ATP card failed a 3rd time after 65GB of data written. > Another, separate ATP card failed after 877 GB of write activity If the card is MLC and there's no or limited wear leveling, repeated local writes will shut the card dead quickly ("limited" as in wear leveling being applied only among e.g a 4MB group of cells, Sandisk happens to do that). I've also heard of some controllers implementing wear leveling, muddling the test results. Some cards are truly reliable, others are craptastic, and everything in between is possible. The problem is you can't trust a brand and go for it, and getting the technical details, if at all possible, involves digging into cryptic and hard to find documentations. I can't find the link again to a test of someone who tested various card brands and had them die semi-reliably within 15 minutes. [0]: http://forum.embeddedarm.com/showthread.php?3-SD-card-endurance-test http://forum.embeddedarm.com/showthread.php?3-SD-card-endura...
yozmsn 14y ago
Well it does go up with capacity. at >64GB it's about $2/gb Plus speed and reliability are also more expensive. I have a 256GB flash drive... made in china by some knockoff, not kingston and it shows. I've had to reformat it like 3-4 times, and it's read/write speed is a joke. Still it cost me less than some 64gb drives so it's all relative. I agree that adding >$100 for a 16gb upgrade in a phone or even 32gb is a little much but to step it up from 128gb and keep speed and some form of reliability is gonna cost you.
Osiris 14y ago
Less than $1/GB retail, not wholesale. I bet Apple gets a killer deal on their flash chips.

dereg 14y ago

There is an SD card slot on the MacBook Air.

adrr 14y ago
Not on the 11"

bunderbunder 14y ago

An SD storage slot is not equivalent to having more space on the internal disk drive. It might be fine for storing a large music library or something like that, but for applications where disk latency or bandwidth really matter, there's just no comparison.