SanDisk SD memory card 'largest ever'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29175093

by ilghiro • 12 years ago

53 72 12 years ago

bbc.co.uk

BenoitEssiambre• 12 years ago

obligatory http://xkcd.com/691/

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

Obligatory links rarely are.

jacquesm10• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

The article seems widely confused. It goes from SD cards to 4K movies to HD movie storage to the cloud.

astrodust• 12 years ago

Obviously the cloud is just a pile of SD cards connected together.

nitrogen• 12 years ago

Is that a physical limit or a filesystem limit?

namlem• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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

insky3• 12 years ago

Except when you tread on them. As I found out yesterday. I had another that got damaged in the post, bent and dead.

jacquesm10• 12 years 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.

lucb1e• 12 years ago

MicroSD is at least something. I'd much rather that Apple tablets were able to use any kind of external storage without converters.

Someone12342• 12 years 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).

jacquesm10• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Sport events. Model shoots.

marcocampos• 12 years 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.

tjr• 12 years ago

In some event photography situations, where the subject is not deliberately posing but engaged in some action, you can take a huge number of pictures and come up with only a few usable ones.

I've photographed some indoor dog agility events, for example; border collies running at top speed through moderately-lit facilities tends to mean lots of unusable photos.

photoGrant• 12 years ago

For me it's perfect when we tether our shoots to an SSD Macbook Pro.

We can 'set and forget' the SD card in the SD slot and have ChronoSync automatically transfer anything in our tether folder to it. It's a great backup/scratch disk. $800 is chump change for a professional photography studio.

edit: I love that I was downvoted for this.

Turing_Machine• 12 years ago

The article mentions video applications. 50-60 frames per second -> 180,000-216,000 frames per hour (possibly much more if you're shooting at a higher frame rate).

If you're shooting something that's impractical to retake (whether due to expense or it being an inherently one-time event) you want to use minimal compression, if any. Even if you are using compression, HD video eats gigs like popcorn. :-)

Someone12342• 12 years ago

If you don't mind my asking, what application would require a photographer to take 1,000 pictures / hour?

ID badge "photo days" at large companies, conventions, celebrity-public photos (e.g. Comic Con-esk), etc.

They come in, snap, they leave. Rinse repeat.

Retric3• 12 years ago

Somewhat amusingly the Fhantom Flex4k hits ~33 Gbytes per second of RAW 4k footage at 1000FPS. http://www.visionresearch.com/Products/High-Speed-Cameras/Ph...

So, this is still to small to be useful for those videos. However, for more normal 4k videos @ 30-60FPS this is probably a good fit and a much nicer form factor than SSD.

StavrosK5• 12 years ago

A dozen SD card changes? What cards do you use? My camera shoots 20 MB RAW images, so that's 20 GB for a thousand. I have an SDHC 16 GB card that I got for $30-40 or so, and it's going to last me ages.

By the way, I think your post made me realize how professional photographers work: They shoot with burst and pick stuff out later.

I guess it makes sense, you want to maximize the odds of catching a great shot. I'm much more methodical, but maybe I shouldn't be.

fr0sty• 12 years ago

Your camera is not the typical kit used by most professional photographers, though. Uncompressed RAW files from a Nikon 810, for instance, are 72MB so your 16G card could hold just over 200 shots a piece.

Of course, whether having an entire photoshoot on a single piece of (relatively fragile) storage is a good idea is another question entirely.

jonknee5• 12 years ago

You're not shooting video... It adds up quickly. My camera (Panasonic GH4) spits out video at 100Mbps which is a gigabyte every 82 seconds. Your 16GB card only fits 21 minutes of video.

512 is still excessive right now (and the price!), but bitrates aren't exactly decreasing.

ck2• 12 years ago

That's retail price.

This time next year it will be 50 cents per GB or $250

3rd32• 12 years 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).

jacquesm10• 12 years 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.

3rd32• 12 years 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.

josu• 12 years 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

flynnieous• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Or you could just back things up regularly.

JoeAltmaier2• 12 years 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?

pessimizer• 12 years ago

With your magic instant remote backup machine?

mfringel• 12 years ago

As a former wedding photographer, I typically went by the number of pictures I was willing to trust to a single card. Since file sizes went up at roughly the same time as storage sizes, I ratcheted up the maximum size SD card I'd use.

It used to be "won't use larger than 2GB". Right now it's around 8, but will likely become 16 in a couple of years.

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

Sounds like someone should do a 'RAISD' for cameras.

AtlasLion• 12 years ago

That's why most pro cameras have dual slots.

bitL• 12 years ago

I am using at least two fast 64GB SD Cards in copy/mirror mode on my Nikon, and back up immediately to Blu-Ray after a photoshoot/hyperlapse/video. I would be absolutely happy to use 2x512GB!

coldtea• 12 years ago

Well, professional cameras often have double slots and can copy to both cards at once.

As for video, it's also common to stream to an external recorder from the DSLR etc.

brandonl222• 12 years ago

This isn't targeted at the DSLR crowd. It's meant for videographers shooting 1080p raw or 4k video. This card will only hold around 5 hours of raw 1080p video for me.

martin_• 12 years 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.

JoeAltmaier2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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_ex...

carlosvega• 12 years 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-Newe...

SanDisk SD memory card 'largest ever'

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