[HN Gopher] WD launches 4TB SD card
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WD launches 4TB SD card
Author : DeathArrow
Score : 61 points
Date : 2024-04-15 07:17 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techradar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techradar.com)
| donatj wrote:
| I will never not be astounded by the rate storage has increased
| in my lifetime. My first PC had a whopping 20 megabyte hard disk
| that occupied not one but TWO 5.25" drive bays and appeared
| something like the following
|
| https://www.priceblaze.com/st4121-Seagate-Storage-Hard-Drive...
| blueboo wrote:
| Agreed, it's truly mind boggling. My moment: coming home from a
| computer show with a spectacular deal -- $80 for an 80Mb drive
| to be installed in our Compaq 286 suitcase unit. (Imagine
| having 100mb!)
| shiroiushi wrote:
| I'm not that astounded at all. Hard drive sizes have barely
| changed in 10 years.
|
| Sure, flash storage keeps increasing, and 4TB on an SD card is
| pretty amazing, but it's not a hard drive, and SD cards aren't
| really that reliable, nor can they be used as long-term offline
| storage.
|
| Good ol' spinning rust HDs are the only thing that make any
| sense for archiving data right now, unless you have enough data
| to make LTO tapes economical (and here you have to worry about
| the tapes being readable with newer generations of drives, so
| you still have to cycle the data to newer tapes). (Re)writable
| optical discs were supposed to serve this purpose, but they
| utterly failed at it.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Hard drive sizes have barely changed in 10 years.
|
| I mean, they kinda have. From what I can find online, the
| largest capacity 3.5" drive you could buy in 2014 was 12TB.
|
| Now in 2024, the largest drive seems to be this 30TB Seagate
| - not quite a 3x increase, but close:
|
| https://petapixel.com/2024/01/18/seagates-new-30tb-hard-
| driv...
|
| What hasn't really moved is the price - I feel like even few
| years ago a PS100 could get me a 4TB drive, and the same is
| true today, the capacity vs cost ratio hasn't really followed
| the same curve as it did with SSDs.
| Leo_Verto wrote:
| That's because there's a floor to HDD prices regardless of
| size.
|
| If you want maximum storage per unit of currency spent,
| you'll be looking at 16-20TB drives which go for 15-16EUR
| per TB in my area.
|
| By comparison, 4TB drives tend to go for 20EUR+ per TB.
|
| But I agree that SSDs have moved much more rapidly and am
| looking forward to them finally surpassing HDDs on the
| price front too.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| > and SD cards aren't really that reliable, nor can they be
| used as long-term offline storage.
|
| It would be very nice if there was storage that was more
| durable & reliable than current tech. As opposed to just
| bigger & cheaper.
|
| Eg. that glass-based storage Microsoft is working on. If that
| makes it to market, even a few dozen GB per media, write-
| once, would be _very_ tempting.
|
| I don't need ever-increasing # of TBs. I need [whatever I
| have stored] to not disappear randomly. Hell, in this aspect
| even floppies in early 80s out-did current day flash storage.
|
| Yeah I know good backup procedures protect against data loss.
| But that doesn't make random-failing-storage-without-warning
| any less pita.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Somehow similar, started with 50MB. I remember when 1GB became
| the norm, when 10GB became affordable (and seemed infinite)..
| and 100GB .. 500 .. 1000.
|
| Very strange feeling.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > My first PC had a whopping 20 megabyte hard disk that
| occupied not one but TWO 5.25" drive bays
|
| My first HDD was for a Commodore Amiga 500 and it was sold with
| its enclosure, so it was quite big too. I remember it did cost
| (in Europe) the equivalent of about $1000:
|
| https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/36474/Reference-40MB...
| tapirl wrote:
| Year 1997, Seagate 4.3G, $200
| kogepathic wrote:
| Going to be a hard pass from me.
|
| Western Digital has had several high profile data loss issues
| across multiple product lines: Western Digital SN850 [1], SanDisk
| Extreme [2].
|
| Western Digital's response has been very PR and not at all
| helpful toward the people who have lost data due to the faults in
| their products.
|
| Storage products have one job: reliably store your data. WD has
| shown lately that you roll the dice if your choose their
| products.
|
| [1] https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-wd-black-
| sn850-sudde...
|
| [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/sandisk-extreme-
| ssds...
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Name a storage brand without such a reputation?
|
| There's a reason the usual advice is "Backup", not "Choose a
| good vendor of storage products".
| rasz wrote:
| Hitachi. Was too high quality to survive in lemon market.
| vel0city wrote:
| Hitachi (HGST) was originally IBM's hard drive divison as
| ksec said, known for their Deathstar drives.
| benlivengood wrote:
| HGST (now owned by WD) never seemed to acquire a bad
| reputation. Always top of the charts in Backblaze's drive
| statistics. Longest warranties. I was sad when they got
| bought. Their factory still seems to produce better drives
| than WD in general, as of a couple years ago.
| ksec wrote:
| HGST itself came from IBM hard disk and the early days of
| HGST HDD were far from perfect.
|
| Although Since then they have managed at least 15 years of
| decent reputation.
| rasz wrote:
| IBM drives were almost perfect :) I still dont know what
| the problem with Deskstar GXP was, were those firs IBM
| drives with Hoya glass platters? After fixing this one
| problem they became the best drives on the market under
| Hitachi.
| zxspectrum1982 wrote:
| I'm waiting for years for external 2.5" disks to go beyond 5 TB
| :-(
| filcuk wrote:
| There are 16TB 2.5" SSDs now, unless it must be mechanical.
| zxspectrum1982 wrote:
| What vendor? All I can find is 3.5" :-(
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| What does that go for, price of a used car?
| kotaKat wrote:
| Dell sells a VisionTek 16TB for... $3800.
|
| https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/visiontek-16tb-class-
| qlc-7mm...
|
| (Rural problems: I tried to find a used car under $3800 on
| Craigslist here and there's less than 5 vehicles total 'by
| owner' and none of them drive on their own power. Maybe
| this is a good deal?)
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Only a factor of 20 higher than the equivalent 16tb
| spinning rust. Not as bad as I expected to be honest.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| If it were PCIe it would be a screaming deal, but it's
| sata. That would take a hot minute to fill at a max 500
| megs/sec.
| radicality wrote:
| There are even ~62TB 2.5" ssds. I think there's one from
| Solidigm/Intel.
| metadat wrote:
| Caveat: Only available if you have a budget on the order of
| $100-300k USD.
| radicality wrote:
| Seems like it's around $8k. Which is obviously a lot, but
| not that bad when looking at $/GB cost. (61.4TB for $8k).
|
| https://www.cdw.com/product/solidigm-d5-p5336-61.44-tb-
| solid...
| mmh0000 wrote:
| What are you waiting for?
|
| Buy this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OJ3UJ2S
|
| Buy this, and stick this in that:
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089C3TZL9
| fzzzy wrote:
| That usb a to usb a cable is beyond cursed.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Okay. That's pretty funny!
|
| I didn't even notice, I just picked the first 2.5"
| enclosure Amazon showed me.
| TeaDude wrote:
| If only USB was peer to peer like FireWire. Then again,
| there'd probably be some trade-off to that.
| jiehong wrote:
| USB 4, being thunderbolt, actually allows this I think
| belthesar wrote:
| Thunderbolt is capable of doing this, but USB has had
| support for peer to peer and alternative client support
| for quite a while. USB OTG (On-The-Go), which allows a
| USB client device to also act as a host, has been around
| since the 2.0 spec. This is what lets USB devices like
| phones and tablets also connect to card readers,
| keyboards, and other USB devices.
|
| What Thunderbolt can do however that is quite magical, is
| operate as a point to point network interface. Driver
| support can be a bit dodgy, but it's totally feasible to
| build a 3 node compute cluster with point to point
| cluster node networking over Thunderbolt at 20 Gb/s.
| yread wrote:
| Get an a dual nvme enclosure and stick in two nvme 8TB drives.
| Or get two such enclosures and 4x 4TB drives (they are 4 times
| cheaper)
| papichulo2023 wrote:
| Sadly new retro handhelds dont support this format.
| ratsmack wrote:
| SanDisk is still SanDisk and I don't consider them to be Western
| Digital. Their products have always been dodgy and I still have
| heartburn over some of their thumb drives where it was impossible
| to remove the shovel-ware installed on them. It will continue to
| be nothing other than Samsung products for me in the foreseeable
| future.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| UHS-1? Have fun getting your videos off of this
| zenexer wrote:
| This article makes several claims that are trivial to disprove:
|
| > The 4TB capacity doubles that of the largest microSD cards,
| earning it the title for the world's largest removable memory
| card.
|
| > CFexpress, known for its superior speed. Announced last year,
| the latest generation, CFexpress 4.0, supports up to four PCIe
| 4.0 lanes and 2GB/s per lane. Neither of those card formats can
| come close to offering 4TB of storage, however.
|
| CFexpress cards are physically larger than SD cards and have no
| trouble squeezing in 4 TB. They're uncommon, but they do already
| exist:
| https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1711327-REG/red_digit...
|
| CFexpress is mostly just overpriced PCIe. You can make your own 4
| TB CFexpress card with a small adapter and a 4 TB M.2 SSD that
| supports PCIe. It stands to reason that if there are 4 TB M.2
| PCIe SSDs that are about the size of a CFexpress card, then there
| are also 4 TB CFexpress cards.
|
| Does anyone have a better source?
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