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SanDisk releases 128GB microSD card
- dchuk 13y agoI've always thought that if time traveler was possible, and someone came to the present day from the 1950s, that a microSD card would be one of the best ways to blow their mind. I still feel a bit of awe when I'm holding a fingernail sized piece of plastic that can contain all of Wikipedia with room to spare.
- scrabble 13y agoForget the '50's. It would have blown my mind as a kid. If you told me there were more than 100 movies on something the size of a fingernail. And that they were higher quality than on my VHS tapes. Without proof I never would have believed someone who even tried to tell me that.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- chavesn 13y agoYep -- a person in the 50s may not have even had enough context to be as blown away by this as someone who knew about hard drives. My earliest memory of a hard drive capacity -- about 21 years ago -- is 130 MB (although that most certainly wasn't the upper limit). So you could have told me "This card is 1/2000th the size and has 1000 times the capacity." 2,000,000 times the data density! That's doubled almost 21 times!
- protomyth 13y agoI remember buying, with my father, a 5mb Corvus hard drive. It was amazingly huge compared to the ~70kbyte floppy drive. I was in awe of how many documents it could hold. Seeing this is just amazing.
- georgemcbay 13y agoYeah my first harddrive was a 5 megabyte drive running off the side expansion port of an Amiga 500 -- I was pretty sure there was no way I'd ever fill that drive up when I first got it.
- kstenerud 13y agoThat was an A590. It came with a 20mb XT drive that made an annoying squeaking noise whenever it did a seek operation, but also had a SCSI connector which I eventually hooked a Quantum 100mb drive to.
- georgemcbay 13y agoMine wasn't an A590, I was too poor to afford that at the time. I had some knock-off third-party unit I bought at the "local" (not really local, but closest one to where I lived) Amiga store (Memory Location in Wellesley, MA). Worked pretty well, as far as I can remember.
- 10feet 13y agoSure, but you would also have to bring along a phone/tablet to show it off, or laptop/adapter. Then how would you prove it had that much data? You can fake a sd card right now to show it has a huge amount of data on it. I can hold up a piece of dust and claim it can hold 20tb, but no one will believe me.
- userbinator 13y agoThat piece of dust might well hold 20Tb of dead genetic material from whatever created it... consider that a single human cell contains 3.2Gb of data in its DNA.
- objclxt 13y ago> a single human cell contains 3.2Gb of data in its DNA DNA is actually closer to 750MB (2.9 billion base pairs, 2 bits to one DNA sequence, so one byte to four sequences). Of course, a cell has other things going on in it (mitochondrial DNA, etc, so overall you're probably still right!
- Dylan16807 13y agoMitochondrial DNA is only 17k base pairs. More important is the two main DNA copies per cell. But if you really want impressive numbers look at certain species of amphibians and plants that reach the 100 billion base pair range.
- hnriot 13y agoa microSD card would probably impress some guys at IBM, but take an iPhone (and the internet) and you'll blow everyone's mind. Just google maps alone in the palm of your hand is amazing. iPhone (or any hand held computer) plus wikipedia, google maps and of course tumblr for cats and people in the 50's would likely either kill you or start a cult for you. (or in the case of Jesus, both)
- vacri 13y ago'take the internet'? That's quite a lot of stuff you're taking with you, from layer 1 all the way up. You couldn't 'take the internet' even with a giant fleet of trucks.
- LancerSykera 13y agoHow about a series of pipes? Will that work?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- georgemcbay 13y agoUnfortunately an iPhone taken back to the 1950s is going to be a local-apps-only affair.
- thedrbrian 13y agoEven showing off the hardware would be hard. "Lemme show you the awesome pictures I can take with this iPhone, right plug this cable into your computer's USB por.......oh"
- jevinskie 13y agoHow many people in the 1950s could really comprehend what 128 GB is? You'd have to resort to terrible Library of Congresses or Volkswagen full of core memory analogies.
- MichaelGG 13y agoI glanced down at my Nexus 7 last night while walking and realised how futuristic stuff is. It seems so light and handy, and I said that about the previous N7 last year. In '96, I only had 1GB of storage total in my PC, across several hard drives. I thought that was amazingly huge.
- marquis 13y agoIn 96 I upgraded my 200mb internal to 2G. I felt like the Queen of England for a good couple of years with that. What's great about these microSDs is that you can put them anywhere - cameras, sensor devices whathaveyou. Maybe one day we really will have enough data to understand the world.
- jbigelow76 13y agoThere's a funny bit from a comedian named Shane Mauss about time travel that goes: "... I wish I had a real time machine, I'd go back like 300 years ago, I'd bring some piece of modern technology to really wow them. I'd be like (in futurey sci-fi inflection) 'and this is called a computer!' and they would be all like 'yeah, computer that's neat... say is that time machine you just stepped out of? Because that is far more impressive'" That bit isn't on Youtube but here he is explaining truck commercials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKSZsURPFyA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKSZsURPFyA (I think I posted his stuff on another forum you frequent so you've probably seen it but the time machine talk is apt)
- agumonkey 13y agoMy cousin is often profoundly amazed by GB large usb keys. He (We) went through many steps in perception of digital data. I think someone from the 50s would have a hard time realizing what it could mean.
- userbinator 13y agoThe other thing to consider is that in 60 years from now, would the data on that microSD still be there? Many books from the 1950s are still perfectly readable today (I have several), I also have some floppies from the 80s whose contents are intact, but what about modern high-density NAND flash, which is inherently unstable? Will it have mostly erased itself in a few decades?
- ja27 13y agoThe total storage is impressive enough, but what keeps amazing me is that today I toss around 4 gig files like they're nothing. Those are bigger than the entire disk array my medical imaging research lab had when I was a grad student.
- null_ptr 13y agomicroSD cards are a pain to handle though, unless you have tweezers for hands. CF cards all the way!
- r00fus 13y agoWith a 128GB card, you might not have to do much handling. Just put it in and you have as much memory as the biggest iPad. I heard that KitKat isn't too friendly towards app usage of external media. With that and the lack of card slots for newer smartphones, what the biggest usage today of such media?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- manicdee 13y agoIf you're a photographer, that card is likely to be coming out of your camera every time you finish a shoot. The camera certainly isn't going to get the data off the card at the full 90MB/s over USB 2.0. SD card gets the format right for me: I find SIMs to be the limit of my manual dexterity. The microSD format is just a data loss disaster waiting for a place to happen.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoSolution: SD card for caching, but transfer off of cameras using 802.11ac.
- guyzero 13y agoThe just-released Galaxy S 5 has a MicroSD slot. So not all Android phones have removed SD storage.
- rasz_pl 13y agoDont worry, Google just removed full SD access for apps in kitkat :) so that slot is great for storing cat videos you record, and not much else.
- krazydad 13y agoThey are a few months late from meeting Moore's law. Their 64GB microSD card came out on Sep 18th, 2011. http://www.slashgear.com/sandisk-releases-64gb-class-6-microsd-card-16180538/ http://www.slashgear.com/sandisk-releases-64gb-class-6-micro...
- dwd 13y agoAmazing piece of engineering, but I'll be holding out for the 128Gb version of their Cruser Fit as it protrudes less that a standard SD card adapter on my 2011 Air. Haven't had much luck with microSD cards: I once bricked a 32Gb card after knocking the SD adapter again a chain arm on a train and had a failing 4Gb card get so hot it melt the provided USB adapter.
- mindslight 13y agoI cannot comprehend why there are not many more flash drives with the form factor of the Cruzer Fit.
- mkeblx 13y agoThat's why you have to go with a microSD card adapter that doesn't protrude at all. http://theniftyminidrive.com/ http://theniftyminidrive.com/
- jonmrodriguez 13y agoI second this - I have a Nifty and it's perfect
- johnchristopher 13y agoI have been playing with RPi's for some months now and I'd be anxious to use an SD card (be it micro or standard size) for reliable additional storage space or backup. Are SD cards reliable enough for normal usage (excluding RPi's brutal power-off which are often prone to corruption) ?
- e12e 13y agoYou might want to give nilfs2 a try, it should be rather well suited to sdcard storage: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=16289 http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=16289 Note that nilfs doesn't do checksumming -- for that you'd have to look at btrfs or zfs. I'm not sure how btrfs is in terms of ram usage, but generally zfs needs lots of ram -- and if you want to get the guarantees it provides for data, you need ecc ram.
- userbinator 13y agoNote how they very carefully avoid saying anything about write endurance or data retention... SanDisk had 4-bit MLC NAND almost 5 years ago so maybe they've improved their process, but if the retention and endurance characteristics of current 3-bit MLC is any indication, I'll pass on this --- it's almost certainly going to be 3-bit MLC, if not 4-bit.
- cordite 13y agoThat's as much as I have on my retina.
- jonknee 13y agoThat's a nice boost for GoPro right before its IPO. Now their cameras get even more recording time.
- shubhamjain 13y agoSomewhere I read that cost of manufacturing a 4GB card and a 64GB card are more or less the same. Is it true? Why then is there a colossal difference between their prices?
- WalterBright 13y agoIt's possible that the 4Gb cards are 64Gb cards where 93% of it doesn't work.
- batiudrami 13y agoOr does work and is just disabled. I don't know about high end cards but it's hard to believe Sandisk would have a completely separate manufacturing process for 2GB and 4GB cards when they're both sold at less than $10 each.
- jonmrodriguez 13y agoI doubt they would willingly downgrade a working 64GB to a 4GB (and lose all the profit they could have made). That's just not a sane business practice in the flash industry. Keep in mind, even the major brands are re-branding flash they buy from other manufacturers. So e.g. maybe Sandisk manufactures the high-end 64GB cards themselves using an advanced process, but they purchase the 4GB cards from some shitty manufacturer using a decade-old process.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago> I doubt they would willingly downgrade a working 64GB to a 4GB (and lose all the profit they could have made). That's just not a sane business practice in the flash industry. It doesn't work like that. The model your parent comment is discussing goes like this: 1. Sandisk decides how much to charge for 64GB cards. 2. That price creates a certain level of demand for 64GB cards. 3. Sandisk manufactures many, many more 64GB cards than it can sell at the price it established in step (1). 4. Sandisk downgrades the surplus cards to lower capacity so it can still sell them without eating into 64GB card profits. What you appear to be missing is that if you have extra 64GB cards, you can't necessarily sell them without lowering the price of 64GB cards across the board, leaving you having sold more cards for less money. So that "profit they could have made" that you refer to is illusory.
- greggman 13y agoSo why is my 1GIG ssd drive not the size of 8 of these microSD cards? In fact I could easily fit 16 of these cards in USB stick. Someone MAKE IT SO! :D
- wtallis 13y agoI think it's mainly a matter of pin count - SATA SSDs want to be able to access the NAND devices independently in order to stripe accesses. That's how they're able to offer such high sequential speeds. So a typical SSD will include 4-8 packages containing only a few NAND dies each, rather than one or two with 8 dies each.
- sparky 13y agoWe also aren't that far off with 1TB mSATA (about 1x2 inches) drives available today. 2.5" drives are obviously much bigger than 8 microSD cards because the form factor was designed for spinning platters.
- sahaskatta 13y agoThere already is a 1TB mSATA http://www.anandtech.com/show/7594/samsung-ssd-840-evo-msata-120gb-250gb-500gb-1tb-review http://www.anandtech.com/show/7594/samsung-ssd-840-evo-msata...
- wtallis 13y agoBut that sacrifices a lot, by using TLC (since 128Gb MLC isn't available yet), and by stacking stacking 16 dies per package, and by having less spare area than most drives. The end result is significantly lower performance and longevity than other mSATA drives, and it's currently got a 25% premium over the 2.5" counterpart.
- supercoder 13y agoDamn, stores 125 apps. I've got 126 :/
- martin-adams 13y agoI've always wondered why is it we never see something like a 96GB SD card, but always double? When you're working at that size, it would seem logical to me to go from 64GB to 96GB, than to 128GB. Anyone know the answer? I suspect it's to do with some addressing mechanism.
- fit2rule 13y agoI recently got a Cumulus drive for my Oric-1/Atmos collection. The Oric-1 is an ancient 8-bit computer from the 80's with 48k RAM (64k if you're tricky..) .. and now with the Cumulus .. it has an 8-gigabyte storage system. Yes, a 48k machine: with 8gigs of storage. WTF, amiright? :P its hell fun having such a system, crammed with everything .. and still trying to figure out what to do with it. 8-bit Wikipedia dump on the horizon!
- userbinator 13y agoMany of the cheap MP3/MP4 players have an 8-bit CPU (Z80, 8051, or similar vintage) with a few hundred K of (banked) RAM and several G of flash, so it's not that weird of a configuration.
- ipsin 13y ago128GB / (15mm × 11mm × 1mm) ~= 800GB per cubic centimeter. Granted, that doesn't include any volume for the equipment needed to address or power all that memory, but it's pretty an impressive information density. Nothing compared to the upper bounds on what can be stored in that volume, but the technology has come far in 50 years.
- cik 13y agoUpon reading this, I immediately went to Bestbuy and Amazon (both .com and .ca, just for kicks) only to not find the product that "is available worldwide". Sadness.