1TB microSD cards

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/2/25/18239433/1tb-microsd-card-sandisk-micron-price-release

by jbegley • 7 years ago

171 169 7 years ago

theverge.com

tehsauce• 7 years ago

As of about a year and a half ago. (Edit: nevermind, I must have been mistaken)

mehrdadn• 7 years ago

Holy cow. Here I was being impressed by 400GB cards just a few days ago.

wtallis2• 7 years ago

Are you failing to distinguish between full size SD cards and microSD, or can you cite a specific retail product from 1.5 years ago?

izzydata3• 7 years ago

Is there anyone here that has a use-case for owning one of these at their current market price?

zwieback2• 7 years ago

If I was going to build a datalogger for work that could log more data for longer (while being away from any network) the $450 would be no problem. Some years ago I was working on a seismic sensor that could have benefited from more flash.

For home use it would be a definite no.

treis• 7 years ago

High resolution video cameras would be the first adopters I'd think. 4k out of the camera can be hundreds of GBs an hour and 8k chews up even more.

iwasakabukiman• 7 years ago

This was my first thought. I work in video production and we always carry around extra SD cards because our camera chews through them so fast.

We use Sony FS5s and they can fill a 128 GB card in an hour with 4K video.

Beltiras• 7 years ago

https://filecatalyst.com/how-to-move-large-video-files/

  553GB for an hour of 8k
  88GB for an hour of 4k

jdietrich2• 7 years ago

They're of limited utility in this application because of poor write speeds. Most high-end 4K cameras use Cfast, XQD, SxS or SATA recording media, because SD cards are a significant bottleneck.

agumonkey2• 7 years ago

god.. I don't even use 720p more than once a month

demarq• 7 years ago

My thinking is the following people: -> Status symbols, Mobile Phones are the new Cars and mobile stats are the new horsepower, so being able to brag you have a n extra tb of storage over your other colleagues might be a thing. Esp in mobile nations like UK and India

-> Social media is slowly switching to video over still images (greater access to high bandwidth). So people will be taking editing and sharing more video instead of pictures and that increase storage requirements many many times over. I know most people who heavily use social media already find 32gb limiting when what they post most of are images.

-> Gamers, most AAA mobile games require large extra content downloads that are in multiples of gigabytes.

-> Geeks, because 1TB SD cards are quite a technological marvel.

-> Mobile Cinematographers, Laugh now but this will slowly become a thing. Looking at Sony and LG offering more and more bold mobile cinematography devices like the Xperia X1. These phones are able to deliver RAW footage files. Also Nokia's latest five camera flag ship puts out RAW stills that can be 10s of megabytes per image. I see a proliferation on the horizon.

-> Streamers, Mobile networks can be patchy, public wifi sketchy, and corporate internet to restricted so youtube, netflix, and showmax allow people to download movies to watch later. However low amounts of storage capacity currently limit the resolution of of content you can download.

I believe at least two of these use cases will hold true in the near future. But at the current high prices maybe only Geeks will buy them.

CondensedBrain• 7 years ago

Someone on a long trip with no reliable high speed internet could shoot in raw and never worry about space.

munificent2• 7 years ago

With my camera (Canon 5D Mark III), that's about 26,000 still images. On a busy day, I might take 200 photos. There is no way I would take a hundred day long trip and put all of the photos on a single card and risk losing the whole thing. Even if I could, I would absolutely use multiple smaller cards just to reduce the single point of failure.

maxxxxx7• 7 years ago

I wouldn't trust one card with that amount of pictures. I use several 64 GB cards. That way if one goes bad, not all is lost.

trumped4• 7 years ago

in your phone, to be able to keep a local copy/backup of your family videos, your music, etc...

adrianmonk• 7 years ago

Maybe something like a dashcam or security camera. Something where more hours of video footage retention is better.

nicoburns2• 7 years ago

No, but the great thing is that prices seem to cascade down for very size when a new size becomes available. These ones put 256gb cards firmly in the affordable category for me.

LAMike• 7 years ago

Wish I could fill up the world's knowledge in 1TB and put it in a low cost tablet and deploy it to a billion underprivileged people in their language to spark the next Einstein, along with millions of other educated people who were able to improve their lives through data

hombre_fatal2• 7 years ago

Sounds about as popular as reading encyclopedias for fun. I bet I'd be hard pressed to find one person who genuinely reads Wikipedia as a hobby outside of the lone HNer who will claim "but I do."

I just don't think underprivileged people are so desperate for entertainment that they'll browse a 1TB SD card for morsels of wisdom.

Unless you meant you're going to pack it full of movies, music, and games, which actually sounds interesting.

bitzun• 7 years ago

Anecdotally I know several people who "get lost" reading Wikipedia after looking up something on a whim, myself included. I find this comment a bit odd on a site people browse to stay informed on tech or tech-near subjects, which is not just movies and videogames and the like.

est31• 7 years ago

But I do!! I sometimes get bored and there isn't anything particularly interesting on hn so I open Wikipedia, think of a random thing, and read its article from start to end.

RegBarclay2• 7 years ago

I...uh... used to browse print encyclopedias for fun when I was kid. I frequently ponder what I might have learned or accomplished as a kid when I had all the time in the world to go deep on an interest or a skill if I'd had YouTube and Wikipedia back then.

matwood• 7 years ago

Sounds about as popular as reading encyclopedias for fun.

As a kid I did this for fun all the time. It was either them or read through the 100s of back issues of Nat Geo that my grand parents had.

Today I easily get lost in wikipedia, and need to make sure I do not waste too much time when I go in looking for a single fact.

Meing4im• 7 years ago

https://xkcd.com/214/

mrguyorama• 7 years ago

I bet I'd be hard pressed to find one person who genuinely reads Wikipedia as a hobby outside of the lone HNer who will claim "but I do."

Sounding off: I was 12 years old, with a dialup connection and a barely functional windows 98 computer, in a shithole town with no future. I got lost reading into the history of video game consoles, and from there, the history of computing and processors in general. I wouldn't have gotten into computers (and therefore, software development and an actual escape from the shithole town) without my limited access to Wikipedia.

What you're missing is that I wasn't looking for entertainment, I was looking for knowledge. Plenty of people seek it out for it's own merits, and I would love if people in other shitholes were able to be introduced to their hobby or passion.

In fact, before wikipedia, we had an actual, 1970s vintage cheapo encyclopedia set, and I read those multiple times. After that, we had Encarta 2000 on CD-ROM. Thank goodness too, because I probably would have moved on to our dictionary from that point

asteli• 7 years ago

When I was a kid I had The Dorling Kindersley Visual Encyclopedia. It contained detailed drawings of plants, machines, spacecraft, artistic implements, motorcycles. I browsed that book at random, cover to cover, several times over (it's a 450 page book!). I credit it with being part of my inspiration to build things as a kid, and eventually become an engineer.

atemerev• 7 years ago

I have read encyclopedias for fun since I was 5. Still reading something from Wikipedia out of context almost every day.

Encyclopedias (yes, the dusty paper versions) enabled my development; I would be a completely different person if I didn’t have one when I was a child.

NickHoff• 7 years ago

When I was in college and grad school, I used to read the mathematica documentation for fun. It's very well written.

wmeredith• 7 years ago

I don’t think disappearing down a Wikipedia rabbit hole is as novel or boring as you make it sound.

Smithalicious2• 7 years ago

Many people read random Wikipedia articles for fun. I do it all the time, but even your average Joe does this. Random trivia and factoids are super popular in general, hence the large number of TV shows and books about them.

That's not to say that I think giving underprivileged people tablets with Wikipedia is a good idea though.

ebg13• 7 years ago

This happened already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader

It didn't work. Probably because gadgets aren't the solution to unequal distribution of privilege.

mmastrac2• 7 years ago

I don't think WikiReader was every "widely distributed". As far as I remember from watching Techmoan's video on the topic, it was a consumer product with no market.

An alternative data point would be https://www.edutopia.org/blog/self-organized-learning-sugata... - the hole in the wall computer that showed giving access to the internet to poor children did have a dramatic effect.

LMYahooTFY• 7 years ago

Your derision doesn't include the fact that there is no "the solution" for unequal distribution of privilege.

It's not clear that it "didn't work" either. Does that mean no one benefited from it anywhere ever?

owenversteeg• 7 years ago

I had one, until I accidentally killed it - it was a great gadget. The $99 price point is what killed it, though.

mrybczyn• 7 years ago

Google assistant or similar limited-AIs are a much more likely future. My kids already have (silly) conversations with google-assistant all the time.

An obvious extension would be google-ai-tutor. Inspired by _Diamond Age_.

rexpop• 7 years ago

Thank you for pointing this out. Most Hacker News comments are so wrapped up in their ideology--as evidenced by the response which reads your assertion as derisive.

jammmety• 7 years ago

There is evidence that education technology can be effective, but perhaps the global community should be focussing on the hundreds of millions of children in school but not learning: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/feb/02/h...

Software for getting children reading - in their own language first - is a great first step.

See the work being done by the Global Learning XPRIZE: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning

brocket• 7 years ago

This is kind of what non-profit Worldreader does, takes Kindles loaded up with books and ships them to schools in Africa. See https://www.worldreader.org/our-solution/products/blue-box/

maxxxxx7• 7 years ago

You can't just provide information. People also need help to do something with it. Most of us won't become math experts by reading a pile of math books. You also need teachers who help processing the material.

vidanay• 7 years ago

We should rename teachers to catalysts.

zaarn• 7 years ago

If you don't include images, the world's knowledge should be able to fit into a 1TB µSD card; most fandom wikia's + random wikis from the web + wikipedia + wikiquote + wiktionary + wikibooks.

Text compressed well, especially if you have a lot of it and image files usually make up the bulk of any archival effort.

justfor1comment• 7 years ago

Fun fact: You can download the entire set of articles on Wikipedia. The English set is roughly 25GB in size. At 1TB you could probably store 40 different languages in your tablet. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

int_19h4• 7 years ago

This is without images, which makes many articles that much less useful. A full point-in-time snapshot of English Wikipedia, with images, without videos, and with xz compression applied to all data, is on the order of 80 Gb.

int_19h4• 7 years ago

https://www.kiwix.org/

beqcq• 7 years ago

How does this compare to taking 1024 1GB SD cards and affixing them with tape?

penagwin4• 7 years ago

Your method has a few downsides, namely:

* No support for files over 1GB (videos can easily go beyond that on modern cameras)

* Poor access times/latency for anything not on the current card (you have to manually swap it)

* You have to use tape

* Depending on the pricing, I'd be curious but my bet is that 1024 actually decent micro SD cards will cost at least 1$ a piece , and the 1TB uSD is only $449.99, so good luck finding that many cheap, and usable uSD cards.

amelius• 7 years ago

No support for files over 1GB (videos can easily go beyond that on modern cameras)

You can combine multiple physical drives into a single logical volume, e.g.:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/7002/how-to-set-up-multiple-...

zwieback2• 7 years ago

Inside, that's how those things basically work. NAND stacked on NAND. They probably don't use tape, though.

afandian4• 7 years ago

Depending on the tape, you could end up with some very nasty electrostatic discharge.

CharlesColeman4• 7 years ago

This is going to make it a bit harder to report counterfeit SD cards on Amazon. It used to be pretty easy because they often claimed to be 500GB or 1TB, and those capacities just plain didn't exist at all. Now I'll have to make an argument based on capacity and price-point when I find them.

chrisseaton3• 7 years ago

Now I'll have to make an argument based on capacity and price-point when I find them.

You mean you're reporting them without buying them and testing them, based on what you think the capacity and price-point should be?

wtallis2• 7 years ago

It's perfectly reasonable to do this for egregious cases, such as if somebody is advertising something for 6¢/GB when the cheapest legitimate entry-level products are at 10¢/GB. The market for flash storage devices is efficient enough that it really is possible to know when prices are too good to be true.

CharlesColeman4• 7 years ago

You mean you're reporting them without buying them and testing them, based on what you think the capacity and price-point should be?

Yes. If someone's offering an impossibly too good to be true deal in an area that's rife with data-destroying counterfeiting [1], they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is a very well known and prevalent type of fraud.

Personally, I think Amazon is negligent for not very tightly controlling the vendors that are allowed to sell SD cards on its site. They're not doing enough to keep fraud out of their store.

[1] https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326059# (from 2015, capacities have obviously changed since then):

Tests by the Counterfeit Report found that the cards will work at first, but generally speaking, buyers are purchasing what they think are cards with capacities of 32GB and up. Instead they are getting are cards with 7GB capacity. Counterfeiters simply overwrite the real memory capacity with a false capacity to match any capacity and model they print on the counterfeit packaging and card, Crosby explained. Users can’t determine the actual memory capacity of a counterfeit memory card by simply plugging it into their computer, phone, or camera. When the user hits the limit, the phony card starts overwriting files, which leads to lost data.
The Counterfeit Report often comes across cards in capacities that don’t exist in any product line, and the cards it purchases and tests that are 32GB and up are usually always fake. The counterfeiters make a great profit on the fake cards, and there’s no consequence.

bluedino• 7 years ago

You could aggregate these in a credit card sized device with a SATA adapter and put what, 20TB ina 2.5” form factor?

cptskippy4• 7 years ago

Yes but why?

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10-ports-Micro-SD-TF-Memory-...

reaperducer4• 7 years ago

Wow. That's almost exactly what I was looking for last week.

I have an old machine I'd like to turn into a WORM server, but I want it to be silent and would rather re-use a bunch of old memory cards than spend money on new storage.

All I could find was a device that put two MicrSD cards into a single SD card. This is even better.

I'd buy it if there was a USB version, since the computer I want to re-use only has USB ports.

izzydata3• 7 years ago

So you could have a slow $5000 10TB flash drive.

pjc50• 7 years ago

That is an impressively mad product.

dmix• 7 years ago

You can use 1 , 2 , 4 , 8 ,10 Micro SD Cards at one time. Do not support 3/5/7/9 Micro SD cards together.

I don't know why but I found this note in the description really amusing.

zaroth• 7 years ago

Love that this reply includes a link to exactly the device imagined for sale for $33.

In this case 10 mSD slots, single sided.

squarefoot• 7 years ago

Isn't that thing really really dangerous? It does use Raid 0 (ie, no redundancy) on one of the fastest wearing media out there. Unless I missed some recent development, SD cards are a lot more subject to wearing than SSD drives, therefore any use of them to build a disk with striping would be just crazy.

Fnoord• 7 years ago

You could, but with the failure rate of non-industrial grade microSD cards I would not rely on these.

close042• 7 years ago

A 15TB 2.5" SSD (MZILT15THMLA) is ~$6000, or $12000 for the 30TB (MZILT30THMLA), both at $400/TB. 10 of these cards are $4500 for 10TB at $450/TB. If you pay that much on storage you'll probably want something that offers you more capacity, performance, and reliability then a multi-microSD setup.

[updated to correct pricing and calculation based on observation made by the fellow commenter below]

Aissen• 7 years ago

Where does one buy a 20TB SD at $2000 ? Asking for a friend. The closest I found was this 16TB SSD at 6500 GBP: https://www.span.com/product/Samsung-Enterprise-SSD-PM1643-M... (or double that for the 30TB model).

dspillett• 7 years ago

I'd never trust a single 15TB device though, so would need to consider the cost of multiples of them in my VFM calculations.

Then again even 1Tb devices make me nervous due to the amount of time it can take to rebuild your redundancy level after replacing iffy units, and might insist on straight mirrors (R10) rather than something more space efficient like R5 to try keep rebuild time down as low as possible.

herogreen• 7 years ago

I wonder what these are for ? Is it for devices with limited hardware (single 2.5" slot), or is it because it is sometimes the cheapest way to accelerate a system (hard to beleive) ?

meruru2• 7 years ago

I would love to see multi-terabyte servers in a netbook form-factor.

penagwin4• 7 years ago

Relevant xkcd (what if) for this, https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

zeristor2• 7 years ago

Has anyone implemented ipfs with carrier pigeons and bluetooth memory pigeon anklets? Drones could do this, but I like the idea of using pigeons.

Or just WiFi drives on rural buses that could transfer data from stop to stop.

Perhaps I’ve been reading too much post apocalyptic fiction

penagwin4• 7 years ago

I think the HAM radio operators have us covered there.

On a serious note if you wanted to play around with "infrastructure breakdown tolerant" stuff, a rtl-sdr is like 30$ on amazon and it's fun to mess around with. You can tune into HAM groups, police radio, the weather, traffic control, etc.

EDIT: Before others mention it, no broadcasting without knowing what you're doing! Listening is perfectly fine, but if you show up on the police scanner they might not be happy....

reaperducer4• 7 years ago

Has anyone implemented ipfs with carrier pigeons and bluetooth memory pigeon anklets?

Implemented? Not to my knowledge. But there's an old RFC from 1999 for it: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549

It was even updated for IPV6, which means that it's possible to have birds communicate with a more modern protocol than many major ISPs: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6214

logfromblammo2• 7 years ago

So... large enough that the most important numbers on the spec sheet are now read speed and write speed.

znpy• 7 years ago

I was surprised no one said this earlier. These cards are big enough that at the current read/write speeds for SD card they might not be actually usable.

Paul-ish• 7 years ago

We have SD Express to look forward to [1]. The bus speed of express is 985 MB/s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#SD_Express

afandian4• 7 years ago

One thought experiment that blew my mind even with the first generation of solid state digital storage.

Imagine an uncompressed image large enough to fill the card, at the size where you can make out every pixel, like 1mm pitch. Then imagine how small each pixel would be if you shrank it down to the size of the chip.

For 1 bit monochrome, 1TB is 2828427 x 2828427. At 1mm pitch, that's is 3 square miles. Imagine shrinking that down to 5mm.

(Edit in response to replies. This example is purposefully simplistic to demonstrate the point about shrinking pixels. A real photo wouldn't be monochrome, or 1-bit depth, or have a dot pitch of 1mm, or be uncompressed, or, for that matter, be 3 square miles big. I mean, who has that much ink?)

Edit 2: For a 2MB Compact Flash card from 1990s the equivalent is 16 square metres. That's still a lot of pixels to squeeze into such a tiny package.

frabert• 7 years ago

Just an observation: 1mm pitch is awful.

rpeden• 7 years ago

Always? If I'm standing 10 metres away, I don't think it would be too bad. Even at 1 metre away it would be fine.

With images as large as the OP is talking about, at typical viewing distances pitch substantially larger than 1mm would be just fine.

afandian4• 7 years ago

Awful for what?

When intuitively visualising the number of pixels in a terrabyte I think it's quite good.

mark-r3• 7 years ago

Yes, 0.1mm would be much better, that's 254 DPI. You'd also want 24 bits (3 bytes) per pixel instead of 1 bit. That gives you 0.43x0.43 miles, which is still mighty impressive.

7952• 7 years ago

I have some TIF files that are about that size uncompressed. They are 50cm resolution lidar images of England.

samstave• 7 years ago

Mind sharing those...

cma• 7 years ago

To visualize chip density my go-to used to be thread count on bedding sheets.

For 400 thread count sheets (which means 200 widthwise, 200 lengthwise threads per square inch), that 1990s compact flash card would be about 1.6ft squared. You could sort of imagine a tape-out of that complexity being shrunk down through projection.

Now at these densities it is no longer holding up well. 1TB would be a sheet that was about 1100ft x 1100ft. The tape-out itself seems like it would have to be sized to already be the after-shrunk-down version of 1990's tape-outs.

KozmoNau7• 7 years ago

We'll soon be talking about terrabytes, not terabytes :-)

Causality1• 7 years ago

$200 to $450 is actually a significantly lower convenience fee than any other level change. 200GB to 400GB is a jump from $36 to $109.

agumonkey2• 7 years ago

Introducing the AVID-ITy line of products

joering2• 7 years ago

$450 for 1TB. Who else other than spies moving large volumes of data in as tiny item as possible, is going to buy them?

Ultramanoid5• 7 years ago

Me in a couple of years. Price will fall to reasonable levels, and then further, as it has for the 200 GB and the 400 GB ones I currently use but certainly did not buy when they just came out.

magduf3• 7 years ago

As mentioned above, people with video cameras.

JungleGymSam• 7 years ago

Why aren't these tiny cards being used in the 100s in 1U rack systems? Is there no gain from it? Perhaps even for slower medium-term storage?

chungy• 7 years ago

It would be extremely cost-inefficient, as well as giving poor I/O performance.

nicoburns2• 7 years ago

It really is incredible how much storage you can fit in such a tiny volume. However, I think the read/write speeds are now the bottleneck on these devices. They seem to all cap out at around 100MB/s (maybe a little more if you get a premium card), which isn't very fast when your device have 1TB of storage.

I'm looking forward to SD Express https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/286390-sd-association-ann... which aims to solve this issue.

freedomben• 7 years ago

Agreed. I have tried to supplement a primary drive that is too small and I/O is definitely the bottleneck. So much so that you can't really watch HD video straight from an SD card because it will drop frames or cause other issues due to slow throughput.

LeifCarrotson• 7 years ago

That depends on your use-case.

The typical use for a microSD card is to store media (photos, audio, short video clips), and if you add it gradually and consume it from a managed media library, you'll have smooth sailing until you one day decide to export it or back it up and find that it takes 2.5 hours to transfer everything, assuming you don't get thermally throttled!

akeck2• 7 years ago

Even though it takes even longer, I've used rsync with bandwidth limiting to get around thermal issues during large reads.

dimensi0nal• 7 years ago

So now SD cards get DMA. Fun!

zouhair• 7 years ago

And easily lost.

Smithalicious2• 7 years ago

What are people even doing that they need more than 100MB/s? I can't see myself ever needing more than that for personal use. Even if you need to read or write the whole thing (which I've essentially never had to do for any storage device), it'd take less than 3 hours to do, which isn't very long

freefaler• 7 years ago

The problem is the speed of non-sequential writes and reads. Writes can fall down to Kb/s in some cases, due to the way flash storage works and onboard controllers, that are optimised for sequential loads. So can't use them as a cheap HDD upgrade options.

int_19h4• 7 years ago

I bought a Raspberry Pi Zero W recently, and while shopping for an SD card for it, I suddenly realized that a decent 64Gb card costs more than Pi itself ($10).

And then I thought about how Pi is actually a rather powerful desktop computer, by the standards of the time not so long ago. It's 1GHz CPU and 512Mb RAM - back in 2000, that would be a rather high-end PC (yes, I'm aware that CPU frequencies across architectures are apples and oranges).

If you think about it in those terms, it's insane how cheap compute has become, even relative to storage.

1TB microSD cards

Related Stories