[HN Gopher] 2TB microSD card is on the way early next year
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2TB microSD card is on the way early next year
Author : brandrick
Score : 82 points
Date : 2023-12-23 20:49 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (overkill.wtf)
(TXT) w3m dump (overkill.wtf)
| guidedlight wrote:
| If you want to blow the mind of a non-tech person. Show them a
| high capacity MicroSD card and tell them how many 1's and 0's it
| can reliably store.
|
| A 2TB MicroSD card really is a modern marvel in engineering.
| hackernewds wrote:
| how many can they store?
| bagels wrote:
| Approximately sixteen trillion. I suspect that number is not
| really comprehensible to a large population though.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| so the grains of sand on TRAPPIST-1e
| midasuni wrote:
| It's enough to store the name of every human being that has
| ever lived.
| llamaInSouth wrote:
| This video helped me visualize how big of a number 1
| trillion is:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoOJggESR8o
|
| Current US debt is almost 34 trillions?
| https://www.usdebtclock.org/
| wkjagt wrote:
| If you were to count those at a rate of 1 per second, it
| would take about half a million years.
| oburb wrote:
| 16,000,000,000,000
| baal80spam wrote:
| 1 Byte = 8 bits
|
| 1 KByte = 8 * 1000 = 8 000 bits
|
| 1 MByte = 8000 * 1000 = 8 000 000 bits
|
| 1 GByte = 8000000 * 1000 = 8 000 000 000 bits
|
| 1 TByte = 8000000000 * 1000 = 8 000 000 000 000 bits
|
| 2 TBytes = 8000000000000 * 2 = 16 000 000 000 000 bits
|
| All values approximate.
| redserk wrote:
| I have a frame of various media over the years over my desk
| including a 5.25" floppy, a 3.5" floppy, ZIP disk, CD, Blu-Ray,
| SD, microSD, etc.
|
| As a technical person, my mind keeps getting blown.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| No Jaz drive?
| pjerem wrote:
| That's a really nice idea. Maybe I will steal it :)
| crazygringo wrote:
| That doesn't mean much though.
|
| How about when you tell them it can store 38 seasons of TV
| shows in HD?*
|
| Or 40 dual-layer Blu-Ray discs?
|
| Does it seem like a lot or a little?
|
| *Assuming 4 GB per 60-min drama episode in 1080p, and 13
| episodes/season, all of which is pretty ballpark.
| arccy wrote:
| with most laypeople streaming, they don't really have a sense
| of how much space a season of tv shows is. you need something
| more relatable, like photos
| stavros wrote:
| There was a thread here the other day about how everyone
| just streams everything, and nobody knows what a file is
| any more. Why would someone know how big a photo is?
| They're all on Google anyway.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I think the obvious Americanized measurement here is
| "number of football fields covered by 4x6 photos".
| tomcam wrote:
| Or almost 1 copy of the Oppenheimer director's cut
| wkjagt wrote:
| Depending on if they are old enough to remember floppy disks,
| tell them the tiny card holds as much information as almost 1.4
| million 3.5 inch floppy disks (assuming 1.44mb each). If you
| pile those up, it would be about 4.5 km high. Or if you take
| the 720kb kind, your pile would be as high as Mount Everest.
| gxs wrote:
| Holy shit that's a great way of putting it.
|
| I'm not double checking the math but that's insane, 1.4
| million, insane.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I am old enough to have used 5 1/4 inches floppies on PCs
| running MS-DOS, 3" microdrives on ZX Spectrum 3+, and tapes
| on Timex 2068.
|
| One of my teachers broke the compilation record of
| compilation submissions per day, on the computing center,
| with punched cards.
|
| On my first trip to a computing center of the post office
| during high school, they still used punched tape.
|
| The modern SD cards are indeed a wonder.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Yeah this is the corollary to "use boring technology" - at
| some point, jump.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| They could put the capacity of every 3.5" floppy ever made in
| a suitcase full of microSD cards.
| paulkrush wrote:
| A wild guess of 3.5 is 30B. So you need 21,428 SD cards. A
| 15mm x 11mm x 1mm you need 3 1/2 liters.
| Kye wrote:
| The bandwidth of a station wagon hurtling down the
| highway grows every year.
| blowski wrote:
| "I could have a bodycam record everything that happens to me
| for a whole month, 24/7, in high-definition and store it on
| something smaller than my fingernail."
| Domenic_S wrote:
| HD (1080p) video @ 30fps is from 130-149MB/sec
|
| 2TB / 149MB = 13,422 minutes == 223.7 hours == 9.32 days
|
| I'm being facetious of course but I was surprised by just
| how much storage space I needed to record security cameras.
| I have a mix of 4k & HD, and 10tb doesn't even get me a
| month of 24/7.
| michaelt wrote:
| YouTube's 1080p is 5 megabits per second, not 130
| megabytes per second.
|
| So 2TB lasts 37 days, meaning blowski is right.
|
| Of course powering that bodycam will be a different
| matter.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| Of course this is all academic: the file size depends on
| the codec, ie how much you want to trade power for space.
| YT/Netflix/etc obviously trade for file size very well.
| But a body-worn device isn't as capable.
|
| Take the Axon Body 2 as an example, the gold standard for
| police bodycams. According to its specs [0] it'll record
| 12 hours of 1080p video on its 64GB internal storage.
|
| So using H.264 it produces 64gb/12hr == 5.333 (repeating
| of course) GB/hr, making 2TB / 5.333GB == 375 hours, or
| about 15.625 days
|
| [0] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cms-
| nppgov.resources/app/...
| LASR wrote:
| Video compression. Another separate modern marvel of
| mathematics.
|
| Not sure what security cameras you're using, but mine all
| use H.264 1080p compressed streams. I get about 15 days
| worth on a 2TB spinning rust across 6 cameras.
|
| Even going by your own numbers, you almost certainly are
| using compression too. 9.32 days on 2TB does not get you
| a month on 10TB if you "have a mix of 4K & HD".
| Domenic_S wrote:
| [delayed]
| stavros wrote:
| This seems like it would work, but the average person has no
| idea how high mount Everest is. My favorite way of explaining
| it is when I was looking at Mount Olympus from the beach, and
| said "you see the mountain? If you stack two more Olympuses
| on top of that, it still wouldn't reach Everest".
| wkjagt wrote:
| Another way: taking the 720kb variety floppy, if you lay
| them side by side it would form a line of 250km in length.
| Or in other words: driving at highway speed, it would take
| 2 and a half hours to drive by all the floppies it would
| take to store what one of these new micro SD card can hold.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Oh I love that!
| candiodari wrote:
| If you want to blow the mind of a tech person, tell them how
| long it will store those 1's and 0's ... (~10 years max, flash
| doesn't hold it's contents over time)
| wslh wrote:
| I remember showing my grandfather a Commodore Amiga playing a
| Genesis song from a 3.5" floppy disk [1] and he just said:
| "yes, it is just recorded on the disk". I tried to explain the
| complexity (digital to analog processes) of this but he just
| abstracted the idea thinking in other media like LPs, Casettes,
| and the new CDs.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/_UnVy9w0xKk?si=kFwgo1qU6Dw9Y6sY
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Haha, I had a copy of that disk back in the day, but I
| certainly haven't thought of it in the last 30 years. Thank
| you for reminding me! While it was a bit of a marvel to put
| an entire pop song onto an 880k disk, the not-so-hifi sound
| quality was already apparent back then. I guess they forgot
| to switch off the low pass filter by turning off the power
| LED.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > tell them how many 1's and 0's it can _reliably_ store.
|
| Zero.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Reliable? 0. Sdcards are not reliable
| prawn wrote:
| I was using one for filming a client job the other day,
| without a backup card. It cracked and bent in half and I
| thought I was going to have to entirely reshoot the location.
| Bent it back and put it in the laptop and got all the data
| fine. Never had one fail.
| soderfoo wrote:
| The number of 1's and 0's is lower than the US national debt,
| which is kind of bonkers.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| In case anyone else was wondering what the number is:
| 17,592,186,044,416 bits. On a durable card that is smaller than
| a stamp.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Sounds bigger than saying 2^44
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| With so many layers, I'd be deeply concerned about how fragile it
| is. Probably much better off being inserted in a semi-permanent
| role (Switch, Steam Deck), than camera storage.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| Modern cameras often utilize CFexpress cards rather than
| microSD
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I almost can't believe this. Even 1TB is an insane amount of
| storage on something so small.
| Hamuko wrote:
| And they get incredibly affordable. I bought a 512 GB microSD
| card for my Steam Deck a year ago for 38EUR.
|
| Although I guess a 1 TB card would still cost me a whopping
| 108EUR.
| Etheryte wrote:
| They're affordable, but also not all that reliable. I can't
| even begin to count how many I've had fail on me over the
| years.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I was thinking similarly. Do I really want to rely upon 2TB
| being stored in a SD card? Numerous failures over the year,
| and only consider them for temporary storage.
|
| How long does it even take to fill the drive?
| pjerem wrote:
| It depends on what you store and your backup strategy.
| You rarely have 2TB of really precious data on a microSD.
|
| microSD are meant to easily store a local copy of your
| data, not to be a reliable long term storage.
|
| You can also use it to store useful but not unique data
| like games on a switch or a Steam deck. If the card fail,
| all you lose is the time to redownload everything. Anyway
| except if you do a lot of video, the really important
| data (the really personal data you'll want to backup) is
| rarely in TBs. It's mostly pictures and documents.
| NewsyHacker wrote:
| I had a 1TB card fail on me, but that only meant that the
| card would no longer accept writes. I could still read
| everything off it. Since I was using the card to carry my
| entire music collection in FLAC on my phone, I was pretty
| OK with that. Eventually, when I wanted to update that copy
| of my music collection, I easily replaced the card under
| warranty.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| I remember paying $50 for a 512 MB Memory Stick Pro Duo for a
| PSP back in 2004
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick
|
| And then anyone else remember the 16 MB Memory Card for
| Playstation? That was $20 in the early 2000s I believe
|
| Crazy how much things change...
| Hamuko wrote:
| I paid 36EUR for a 16 GB PlayStation Vita memory card just
| 9 years ago.
| msoad wrote:
| My first digital camera came with a 4MB SD card. What a time to
| be alive!
| daveguy wrote:
| I remember when consumer external gigabyte hard drives were just
| coming available. They were still thousands of dollars. They
| weighed in the pounds, and about half a cubic foot in volume.
|
| I mean, I remember floppies and 5.25 format hard drives in the kb
| and multiple mb size too, but the gigabyte hard drive era seemed
| like a significant milestone, so it made an impression. That gb
| external drive was probably just multiple (4-8) 5.25 drives in a
| case.
|
| 1TB didn't make the same impression because we were already
| getting to the "more than you need for most use cases" range and
| the external formats were about as compact as the internal ones
| with laptop form factor drives.
|
| But TB scale in a micro SD format... Yeah, that is a similar
| impression to the GB HDD era.
| gene-h wrote:
| The first 1TB microSD card was released in 2019[0]. It is
| disappointing that the time to double was about 4 years.
|
| [0]https://www.zdnet.com/article/micron-releases-worlds-
| first-1...
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Well, we're getting to the point of diminishing returns. Who is
| going to be buying these?
|
| It's like with HDDs, very few consumers are buying these 20 TB
| HDDs. Unlike HDDs, MicroSD is largely a consumer product.
| 9point6 wrote:
| The steam deck is a pretty good use case for these cards
| brandrick wrote:
| Baldur's Gate 3 is a 150GB install size, so with games of
| this size increasingly being the norm it will quickly get
| used up.
| cloudking wrote:
| I was going to say, has OP downloaded a game recently? You
| can fit 10-20 modern games on this card tops.
| radiorental wrote:
| Action sports cams, dashcams, handheld gaming device such as
| the switch and steamdeck, I'm sure there's plenty more
| application. All fairly niche but it's a market
| Hamuko wrote:
| The Nintendo Switch has sold 132 million units, so I'm not
| sure how niche that is. Presumably the successor is going
| to keep using microSD cards, and filesizes will increase in
| line with graphical capabilities.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Cartridges are pretty popular, if only because you can
| sell / borrow them.
|
| I have an SD card for the online-only titles, but it's
| pretty small IIRC.
|
| But yeah, this still seems like a major use case for
| larger MicroSD cards.
| jclardy wrote:
| I feel gaming devices are the primary target...as someone
| who used to shoot wedding videography a few years ago,
| there is a limit of how much footage you want to store on
| one card - if only because you can easily lose them. The
| smaller storage limit is a feature, not a bug :) It forces
| "normal" users to actually figure out a backup solution.
| Most action cams are going to take a long while to fill up
| 2TB.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I have a steam deck and have no interest in a 2tb sd
| card, i am subscribed to some steam deck communities and
| the preference, given the reliability of sd cards, is to
| have multiple smaller rather than risk a single big sd
| card to fail and having to reinstall them all
| redundantly wrote:
| I have a steam deck and my primary interest would be to
| use it on mine. I'd apply the WORM method with it. Load
| it up with ROMs and only ROMs. I have a back up of all
| that data so suffering a failure would be a minor
| inconvenience.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| We're hitting diminishing returns in manufacturing,
| irrespective of consumer vs enterprise markets. The biggest
| datacenter SSD today is 100TB, up from 60TB in 2016. That's
| just 67% growth over 7 years. And the price per TB has risen
| significantly for these high end drives since then, so it is
| a lot more economical to just buy more smaller drives.
| thorum wrote:
| The average person's storage needs will likely increase a lot
| over the next decade: AI models, AR/VR, and six-degrees-of-
| freedom video are very storage intensive technologies that
| are close to going mainstream.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| I have strong doubts that an average person will have an
| offline AI model.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| I use microSDs for offline backups. Every Friday I zip my
| home folder and copy it onto one of two rotating 1TB SSD. One
| SSD stays at the house, another at my office, so I always
| have a fairly recent offsite backup.
|
| Using 1TB as my backup size I keep my active development
| projects to a size limit of 1TB. That's fine for code, it can
| fit all type typescript I want. I've began branching out into
| asset heavy projects, such as video editing and game
| development, and that 1TB limit is feeling more and more
| constraining. Now every quarter or so I "archive" projects
| out of my documents folder, which is a lengthier backup
| process.
|
| I know there are cloud based backup solutions, but I find
| this way to be cheaper and having a physical copy to hold
| gives me a feeling of security.
| fastasucan wrote:
| The file sizes of medium format cameras is gigantic.
| lazycouchpotato wrote:
| Back when phones had micro SD card slots, I would download my
| entire music library from music streaming services for
| offline listening. I also tend to take an excessive number of
| photos and videos in the best quality possible with my phone,
| and I'd offload them to the micro SD card to avoid filling up
| my internal storage.
|
| 4K60p video takes up a lot of space..
| meristohm wrote:
| Disappointing? We have magic at our fingertips and it's not
| good enough yet? What are some cost of faster progress? Why are
| you disappointed?
| dmw_ng wrote:
| You so much as blink at these cards and they mysteriously stop
| booting, my 4K-capable A7R IV tops out at 100 Mbit/sec write
| rate for video, that's almost 24 hours worth on a 1TB card.
|
| Given the technical limitations of these devices, already
| storing that much footage on a card that is so slow to backup
| and with such limited rewrite lifetime seems insane. I love the
| idea of 2TB in such a tiny package, but the reality of who
| would actually buy these in large numbers and for what does not
| quite seem to line up with the tech.
| cmiller1 wrote:
| That's a whole 25 Johnny Mnemonics! (Or 6 of him when he
| quadruples his capacity which is life threateningly dangerous.)
| redundantly wrote:
| This is the best analogy in this thread by far.
| Avshalom wrote:
| Does any more knowledgeable person know if this is something that
| will require hardware support or software support or should it
| just plug and play in any old microsd slot?
| londons_explore wrote:
| The device itself will work in any old slot.
|
| Unfortunately the protocols that run on top, and the
| filesystems that are typically stored on them, both have
| maximum size limits.
|
| Generally, laptops/desktops will have no trouble. Your 2002
| camera on the other hand probably won't work with it...
| simbolit wrote:
| * There is microSD from 1999, max capacity is 2GB.
|
| * Then there is the 2006 update microSDHC, max capacity was
| 32GB.
|
| * And since 2009 we use microSDXC, max capacity is 2TB.
|
| * In 2019, the next update came out, microSDUC, max capacity is
| 128TB. As far as I know there are no actual products yet.
|
| You need a reader of the same type of your card or higher.
| Otherwise, it might not work at all, or you can only read the
| first x gb of your larger card.
|
| I am not knowledgeable, but I know how to use Wikipedia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#microSD
| Avshalom wrote:
| The thing is that for instance my Moto-G
| https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-moto-g-
| power-5g/p?sk... says it's supports up to 1TB, which is...
| none of those standards. So is this a situation where they're
| using 1TB because that's what currently exists as-of time of
| that website being written or is this a situation where no
| one actually bothers to implement the whole standard?
|
| That's why I was asking.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| If you don't mind shopping a bit off-brand, like SanDian and
| Sansumg, they're already available, e.g.
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006108748036.html
|
| (caution: read the one-star reviews)
| cyanydeez wrote:
| corporate spies rejoice?
|
| whose filling up terabytes at this size?
| recursive wrote:
| Smaller is better. Having a terabyte of data isn't all that
| unusual.
| CrypticShift wrote:
| What about speed? Is the adoption of SD Express slow compared to
| previous standards? I never see any computer (or smartphone)
| specs advertising "microSD Express" speeds, and it is already 4
| years old.
|
| The coming standard claims "up to 2GB/s possible." [1], and at
| this "speed" (of adoption, that is), this is not coming anytime
| soon.
|
| [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2124706/sd-
| express-9-1-new-s...
| _joel wrote:
| Says it in the artcice
|
| "The upcoming 2TB card, dubbed the 'EXCERIA PLUS G2' is said to
| have read speeds of up to 100 MB a second and write speeds of
| up to 90 MB a second. This 2TB size now hits the upper storage
| capacity of the defined SDXC standard."
|
| Not sure about IOPS but if you're streaming media or large game
| assets, sure that's fine.
| tpolzer wrote:
| SD Express is basically dead as far as I can tell.
|
| SD card users who care about speed have UHS-II equipment, but
| SD Express and UHS-II use mutually incompatible high speed
| signalling on the same pins (so cards and readers are only
| supporting one of the two - I guess technically this could be
| fixable with special purpose chips, but at large cost).
|
| Users who care about speed but not about SD card compatibility
| are already using CFExpress, which is supported by most modern
| professional cameras and has much better hardware availability
| than SD Express.
| pulse7 wrote:
| Imagine storing whole internet text from November/December 2023
| on 5 such microSD cards (CommonCrawl.org WET files for this crawl
| are 9.30 TiB)...
| CosmicShadow wrote:
| If only they'd let you put any SD card in a new phone, but nah,
| how about an extra $500 for like 256gb
| crtasm wrote:
| You can if you buy the right phone, I believe?
| Riseed wrote:
| Every SD-accepting phone I've had has had a cap on the
| capacity card it would accept. Not sure whether that's the
| norm or if I didn't buy the right phones.
| hiddencost wrote:
| That's enough to store chat GPT.
|
| As you can imagine, infosec people are stressed.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Are microSD cards the densest we can store information digital
| information?
|
| As in bytes/mm3 or bytes/gramm.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I would be happy just getting a micro SD UHS-II card with decent
| storage. All this storage space and it takes forever to transfer
| anything to it on UHS-I
| amelius wrote:
| Just don't get them from Amazon.
| divbzero wrote:
| From the photo, the 2TB microSD card appears to be UHS Speed
| Class 3 (U3) and Video Speed Class 30 (V30) which correspond to a
| minimum of 30 MB/s transfer speed [1]. This is good but still
| pales in comparison with external SSDs with >1,000 MB/s transfer
| speeds [2] and internal SSDs with >7,000 MB/s transfer speeds
| [3].
|
| [1]: https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/personal-storage/memory-
| car...
|
| [2]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-external-hard-
| driv...
|
| [3]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssds,3891.html
| Sakos wrote:
| I'm more concerned about the possible write endurance and long-
| term durability of the data. I've had more than one 512GB SD
| card fail recently despite not owning them for long.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| Wow! Now I can have an 8TB iPod!
| LASR wrote:
| Or a 2TB action camera. Not having to carry around multiple of
| these tiny things when going on vacation is a big QoL
| improvement.
|
| I've lost a few 256GB ones over the years. Only once with
| footage on it. But it was a whole day's worth of my toddler's
| first time in Disneyland. We were all very sad.
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