10 ms·

SanDisk SD memory card 'largest ever'

53 points by ilghiro 12y ago

BenoitEssiambre 12y ago
obligatory http://xkcd.com/691/ http://xkcd.com/691/
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Obligatory links rarely are.
jacquesm 12y ago
I love it how in one paragraph they state that capacity has increased over 3 (decimal) orders of magnitude but there is a magical hard cap of 2T (only a factor 4 removed from where we stand today). If that's correct then 2^10 = 1000, over 10 years that's one doubling per year so we are 2 years away from reaching the ceiling in SD cards. You read it first on the BBC website.
- revelation 12y ago
  The article seems widely confused. It goes from SD cards to 4K movies to HD movie storage to the cloud.
  - astrodust 12y ago
    Obviously the cloud is just a pile of SD cards connected together.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  Is that a physical limit or a filesystem limit?
namlem 12y ago
I wish more devices had SD slots. Particularly Windows Tablets. There's plenty of room in there, and SD cards are way better than microSD.
- alexhawdon 12y ago
  Is that in terms of capacity and/or speed, or do you just prefer the form factor of a full-size SD card?
- Shivetya 12y ago
  I quite enjoy the fact that my car stereo has one, I use a 32G card to take along the majority of my music collection. Far better solution than Bluetooth from my phone; battery consumption; or cabling direct in my glovebox to iPod or similar. The only inconvenience I have found is when you forget to watch the model your buying and end up with a slow transfer version. However for the most prat I use them in the place of USB sticks as its more common to find fast ones for good prices
- insky 12y ago
  Except when you tread on them. As I found out yesterday. I had another that got damaged in the post, bent and dead.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    When I send them in the mail (which I do rarely but it does happen) I sandwich them between two taped together pieces of thin wood. That means it's no longer a very thin envelope but it increases the chances of safe arrival. They also always go registered. USB sticks tend to be more robust.
    - jonknee 12y ago
      What about the little plastic cases that they come in?
      - insky 12y ago
        Don't the MicroSD cards come with plastic cases, but not the larger SD cards?
        12y ago
Someone1234 12y ago
I know people are going to scuff at the $800 price tag, but frankly it CAN be justified for certain things. For example a lot of studios use a direct feed to a terminal (e.g. WiFi/USB delivery of pictures as they're taken) but they also utilise an SD card as a "backup" in case the photo is somehow lost or the computer was down. Changing out SD cards on an SLR doesn't really take very long, but it does disrupt the workflow (particularly when you have to take a thousand pictures in an hour or more, that could be a dozen SD card changes) and $800 for a card which might last you the whole day might be worth it. It definitely won't be useful for your kid's birthday party or even to film your school project. But as an industrial tool there are definitely uses for a card such as this (although external SSDs are starting to become "big," so maybe less so than a year ago).
- jacquesm 12y ago
  That $800 will be $29.95 before the decade is out. And by then it will be a micro-sd version. If you don't mind my asking, what application would require a photographer to take 1,000 pictures / hour?
  - spacefight 12y ago
    Sport events. Model shoots.
  - marcocampos 12y ago
    Sports photographers probably take 1000 photos/hour. :) As for price, i don't think it will even take that long. In 2 years it will cost something like 50 bucks. A USB3.0 128GB flash drive (260MB/s read, 240MB/s write) from SanDisk now costs about $100.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      A good indication is that the price of SD cards is largely down to "is this the currently largest card? If so, apply massive premium". E.g. on Amazon UK right now I see a 256GB Lexar SD card for 300 GBP, or a 128GB SanDisk SD card for 70 GBP, or 64GB SD cards for around 30 GBP... So expect the prices on the 256GB models to start falling shortly, and once 1TB versions arrive it won't take long until the 512GB versions drop to a quarter or less.
3rd3 12y ago
Amazing, that is 320 GB/cm^3. I didn't know that we have possibly already passed the information density of the human brain (~80 GB/cm^3).
- jacquesm 12y ago
  You can't really compare passive storage with combined processing and storage. The brain computes all over, it does not have a 'data bus' or a von Neumann like bottle-neck as far as we know today.
  - 3rd3 12y ago
    Of course not. However, I would have guessed that the 3-dimensional structure of the brain would still have higher information density compared to 2-dimensional IC's (+ wiring + heat regulation) by some orders of magnitude. But I guess neurons aren't that small after all.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      They're not all that small and there is a ton of support infrastructure and deadweight around them.
- josu 12y ago
  Actually, if my math is correct the ratio of storage to size of a 128GB Micro SD is still greater. In two dimensions, for simplicity's sake, since a micro SD is obviously slimmer than a regular SD: 512GB SD = 768mm^2 128GB Micro SD = 165mm^2 SD = 0.667 GB/mm^2 Micro SD = 0.776 GB/mm^2 If we add the third dimension the efficiency of a Micro SD will be even greater compared to a SD. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SD_Cards.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SD_Cards.svg
flynnieous 12y ago
Now you can lose even more pictures and video when your SD goes bad. Woohoo! There are a lot of photographers who won't use SDs larger than 8GB for just that reason--lose one, you don't lose everything.
- mpeg 12y ago
  Or you could just back things up regularly.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Its not about backup. Its about environmental stress. Photos are taken all over the place - yards, beaches, malls, in good weather and bad. SD cards are fragile. Its about, If you spend a day shooting and one of them doesn't make it back to the studio, how much have you lost?
    - georgemcbay 12y ago
      "SD cards are fragile" Are they, though? Because I use SD cards for photography and have for quite a few years and I take them not only to yards and beaches, but mountain peaks, spelunking in mud caves out in the desert, etc, and I have never had an SD card break on me either physically or in terms of data loss. To be fair, though, for photos only (no video) even with high-res uncompressed RAW photos I can't imagine anyone practically needing SD cards anywhere near the 512 GB size. That's a lot of photos... YMMV, I guess, maybe I'm totally lucky, but I have yet to personally have an incident which makes me worry about the robustness of decent quality SD cards.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    With your magic instant remote backup machine?
    - TillE 12y ago
      Special SD cards with built-in wifi have been around for a while. That's pretty magical.
menriquez 12y ago
cloud storage for many 5G files? uhhh no thanks...the ul/dl times will measured in DAYS.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
martin_ 12y ago
Is "Extreme Pro" really the best name they could come up with? It would be sweet (as others have hinted towards) if there could be some built in redundancy, i.e. two 256GB partitions that act as a raid.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Not sure SDs fail that way - the flash is usually pretty reliable. I think its mechanical stress (flexing in your pocket; wet or humid conditions causing corrosion to fragile connections) or static shock that causes the on-board controller to fail. In those cases the flash is still good, but you can't get at it.
bane 12y ago
Honestly, 512GB in a removable postage stamp is the stuff of Science Fiction. I remember when I was kid in the early 90s and in my school computer club and we sat down to sketch out what kind of computer we'd have in the YEAR 2100 and I put down the ridiculous storage size...something like 24GB or something. I wasn't even close. 1 of these could have easily stored a copy of all of the internet traffic that happened over the course of a day in 1993. [1] Now we've got spaceships, VR, pocket sized personal computers with always on global network communications, video calls, amazing smart watches, and now half a terabyte in something the size of my big toenail. It kind of feels like the future we were promised pre-internet is finally starting to happen. My less than a year old desktop's main drive is the same storage size as this. In a year it will be the size of my fingernail and I can put it in my phone and my tablet. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte#Illustrative_usage_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte#Illustrative_usage_ex...
carlosvega 12y ago
Also remember the 128GB microSD. This new 512GB SD could be useful for 4K video and that kind of stuff. http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Adapter-SDSDQUAN-128G-G4A-Newest-Version/dp/B00M562LF4/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1410622135&sr=1-1&keywords=128GB+sandisk+micro+sd http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Adapter-SDSDQUAN-128G-G4A-Newe...

53 points by ilghiro 12y ago

BenoitEssiambre 12y ago

obligatory http://xkcd.com/691/ http://xkcd.com/691/

jacquesm 12y ago
Obligatory links rarely are.

jacquesm 12y ago

I love it how in one paragraph they state that capacity has increased over 3 (decimal) orders of magnitude but there is a magical hard cap of 2T (only a factor 4 removed from where we stand today). If that's correct then 2^10 = 1000, over 10 years that's one doubling per year so we are 2 years away from reaching the ceiling in SD cards. You read it first on the BBC website.

revelation 12y ago
The article seems widely confused. It goes from SD cards to 4K movies to HD movie storage to the cloud.
- astrodust 12y ago
  Obviously the cloud is just a pile of SD cards connected together.
nitrogen 12y ago
Is that a physical limit or a filesystem limit?

namlem 12y ago

I wish more devices had SD slots. Particularly Windows Tablets. There's plenty of room in there, and SD cards are way better than microSD.

alexhawdon 12y ago
Is that in terms of capacity and/or speed, or do you just prefer the form factor of a full-size SD card?
Shivetya 12y ago
I quite enjoy the fact that my car stereo has one, I use a 32G card to take along the majority of my music collection. Far better solution than Bluetooth from my phone; battery consumption; or cabling direct in my glovebox to iPod or similar. The only inconvenience I have found is when you forget to watch the model your buying and end up with a slow transfer version. However for the most prat I use them in the place of USB sticks as its more common to find fast ones for good prices
insky 12y ago
Except when you tread on them. As I found out yesterday. I had another that got damaged in the post, bent and dead.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  When I send them in the mail (which I do rarely but it does happen) I sandwich them between two taped together pieces of thin wood. That means it's no longer a very thin envelope but it increases the chances of safe arrival. They also always go registered. USB sticks tend to be more robust.
  - jonknee 12y ago
    What about the little plastic cases that they come in?
    - insky 12y ago
      Don't the MicroSD cards come with plastic cases, but not the larger SD cards?
      - 12y ago

Someone1234 12y ago

I know people are going to scuff at the $800 price tag, but frankly it CAN be justified for certain things. For example a lot of studios use a direct feed to a terminal (e.g. WiFi/USB delivery of pictures as they're taken) but they also utilise an SD card as a "backup" in case the photo is somehow lost or the computer was down. Changing out SD cards on an SLR doesn't really take very long, but it does disrupt the workflow (particularly when you have to take a thousand pictures in an hour or more, that could be a dozen SD card changes) and $800 for a card which might last you the whole day might be worth it. It definitely won't be useful for your kid's birthday party or even to film your school project. But as an industrial tool there are definitely uses for a card such as this (although external SSDs are starting to become "big," so maybe less so than a year ago).

jacquesm 12y ago
That $800 will be $29.95 before the decade is out. And by then it will be a micro-sd version. If you don't mind my asking, what application would require a photographer to take 1,000 pictures / hour?
- spacefight 12y ago
  Sport events. Model shoots.
- marcocampos 12y ago
  Sports photographers probably take 1000 photos/hour. :) As for price, i don't think it will even take that long. In 2 years it will cost something like 50 bucks. A USB3.0 128GB flash drive (260MB/s read, 240MB/s write) from SanDisk now costs about $100.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    A good indication is that the price of SD cards is largely down to "is this the currently largest card? If so, apply massive premium". E.g. on Amazon UK right now I see a 256GB Lexar SD card for 300 GBP, or a 128GB SanDisk SD card for 70 GBP, or 64GB SD cards for around 30 GBP... So expect the prices on the 256GB models to start falling shortly, and once 1TB versions arrive it won't take long until the 512GB versions drop to a quarter or less.

3rd3 12y ago

Amazing, that is 320 GB/cm^3. I didn't know that we have possibly already passed the information density of the human brain (~80 GB/cm^3).

jacquesm 12y ago
You can't really compare passive storage with combined processing and storage. The brain computes all over, it does not have a 'data bus' or a von Neumann like bottle-neck as far as we know today.
- 3rd3 12y ago
  Of course not. However, I would have guessed that the 3-dimensional structure of the brain would still have higher information density compared to 2-dimensional IC's (+ wiring + heat regulation) by some orders of magnitude. But I guess neurons aren't that small after all.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    They're not all that small and there is a ton of support infrastructure and deadweight around them.
josu 12y ago
Actually, if my math is correct the ratio of storage to size of a 128GB Micro SD is still greater. In two dimensions, for simplicity's sake, since a micro SD is obviously slimmer than a regular SD: 512GB SD = 768mm^2 128GB Micro SD = 165mm^2 SD = 0.667 GB/mm^2 Micro SD = 0.776 GB/mm^2 If we add the third dimension the efficiency of a Micro SD will be even greater compared to a SD. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SD_Cards.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SD_Cards.svg

flynnieous 12y ago

Now you can lose even more pictures and video when your SD goes bad. Woohoo! There are a lot of photographers who won't use SDs larger than 8GB for just that reason--lose one, you don't lose everything.

mpeg 12y ago
Or you could just back things up regularly.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Its not about backup. Its about environmental stress. Photos are taken all over the place - yards, beaches, malls, in good weather and bad. SD cards are fragile. Its about, If you spend a day shooting and one of them doesn't make it back to the studio, how much have you lost?
  - georgemcbay 12y ago
    "SD cards are fragile" Are they, though? Because I use SD cards for photography and have for quite a few years and I take them not only to yards and beaches, but mountain peaks, spelunking in mud caves out in the desert, etc, and I have never had an SD card break on me either physically or in terms of data loss. To be fair, though, for photos only (no video) even with high-res uncompressed RAW photos I can't imagine anyone practically needing SD cards anywhere near the 512 GB size. That's a lot of photos... YMMV, I guess, maybe I'm totally lucky, but I have yet to personally have an incident which makes me worry about the robustness of decent quality SD cards.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  With your magic instant remote backup machine?
  - TillE 12y ago
    Special SD cards with built-in wifi have been around for a while. That's pretty magical.

menriquez 12y ago

cloud storage for many 5G files? uhhh no thanks...the ul/dl times will measured in DAYS.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

martin_ 12y ago

Is "Extreme Pro" really the best name they could come up with? It would be sweet (as others have hinted towards) if there could be some built in redundancy, i.e. two 256GB partitions that act as a raid.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Not sure SDs fail that way - the flash is usually pretty reliable. I think its mechanical stress (flexing in your pocket; wet or humid conditions causing corrosion to fragile connections) or static shock that causes the on-board controller to fail. In those cases the flash is still good, but you can't get at it.

bane 12y ago

Honestly, 512GB in a removable postage stamp is the stuff of Science Fiction. I remember when I was kid in the early 90s and in my school computer club and we sat down to sketch out what kind of computer we'd have in the YEAR 2100 and I put down the ridiculous storage size...something like 24GB or something. I wasn't even close. 1 of these could have easily stored a copy of all of the internet traffic that happened over the course of a day in 1993. [1] Now we've got spaceships, VR, pocket sized personal computers with always on global network communications, video calls, amazing smart watches, and now half a terabyte in something the size of my big toenail. It kind of feels like the future we were promised pre-internet is finally starting to happen. My less than a year old desktop's main drive is the same storage size as this. In a year it will be the size of my fingernail and I can put it in my phone and my tablet. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte#Illustrative_usage_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte#Illustrative_usage_ex...

carlosvega 12y ago

Also remember the 128GB microSD. This new 512GB SD could be useful for 4K video and that kind of stuff. http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Adapter-SDSDQUAN-128G-G4A-Newest-Version/dp/B00M562LF4/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1410622135&sr=1-1&keywords=128GB+sandisk+micro+sd http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Adapter-SDSDQUAN-128G-G4A-Newe...