
SanDisk 1-terabyte microSD card is now available - skilled
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/sandisk-1-tb-microsd-card,news-30079.html
======
narrator
I don't know how I remember this random crap, but way back in 1998 there was
some guy on the LKML who said that a company was going to come out with a 90gb
drive made from reverse engineered UFO technology that would be as big as as
poker chip. Everyone though he was a kook of course. Interesting to think
we've exceeeded what would have been considered technology of extraterrestrial
origin 20 years ago when it comes to data storage.

[https://lkml.org/lkml/1998/3/10/213](https://lkml.org/lkml/1998/3/10/213)

~~~
maxxxxx
One thing the aliens are messing with us is that they only reveal technology
to us that’s within a few decades of us developing it ourselves. They never
show the real advanced stuff they have.

~~~
pilsetnieks
It's maybe not the most common sci-fi trope but quite a few works touch on
this, like Star Trek or Banks' Culture - there is little point to technology
transfer that would be "indistinguishable from magic." If the recipients don't
understand the underlying principles, cannot create or use the tooling to
create or fix these technologies or lack some intermediate technology, they
will be dependent on the provider or back to square one when the gifted tech
fails. That's why it's better to reveal the technology or science one step at
a time.

You can only stand on the shoulders of giants by stepping on the shoulders of
successively taller people.

~~~
chongli
_" indistinguishable from magic."_

I think that trope only works for people who are inclined toward superstition.
If an alien were to demonstrate teleportation or replication or something else
equally far fetched, I would look at it as advanced technology, not magic.

I'm skeptical of magic in general, though.

~~~
toyg
The point of the quote is that you wouldn’t be able to grasp the basic
principles it operates on, and as such it would be functionally equivalent to
something as unexplainable as magic. It doesn’t matter what the nature of the
object actually is or what you consider it to be; what matters is that you
would not have any basis to elaborate a judgement.

------
jolmg
Am I the only one that fantasizes going back in time and bragging about such
things like having a consumer-affordable 1TB removable storage device the size
of a thumbnail in my personal and cheap super-powerful computer that's
comfortably in my pocket? How much would people in the past pay to even glance
at or _gasp_ touch such a marvelous thing?

~~~
jerf
I've often pondered getting stuck back in the 1960s or something with my cell
phone, and the astonishing uselessness it would have. It would be feasible at
the time to isolate the battery and directly power the rest of the device,
but... then what? No internet, no wireless, no mechanism for input or
output... it wouldn't be _quite_ useless, but it's not all that _useful_.

Now, send me back with my _laptop_ and it's a completely different story. I've
got enough development stuff on that to make serious dough. It would be really
weird... probably the fastest communication mechanisms we'd have are using the
speaker for modem-based communication, and using the webcam to scan in
incoming data somehow, since nothing in that era can even say "hello" to any
port I currently have, but we'd be able to get somewhere.

~~~
pilsetnieks
RS-232 was introduced in 1960, so you're just a USB dongle away from
communicating with many devices.

~~~
jerf
In my hypothetical, I was surprised by my sudden time displacement. If I'm
_prepared_ , well, like I said, I'd be taking my laptop and conventional
computers, not my cell phone per se. Also my cell phone backed up by computers
is more useful anyhow. With care and preparation I've got all sorts of
options, even going back farther than the 1960s; push comes to shove I can
bring solar cells and my own printing press or something, etc.

------
madez
Given my experience with microSD cards, I wonder how reliable that device is.
Is it even possible to write the full 1 terabyte successfully with a good
chance?

~~~
jdietrich
Sandisk Extreme cards are very reliable within their (relatively limited)
write endurance. If you buy a Sandisk Extreme card from Amazon, it probably
isn't a Sandisk Extreme card.

~~~
metalliqaz
What do you mean by "probably"? Are you saying that nearly all Sandisk Extreme
cards on Amazon are counterfeit? Just 50%? Either way it's an amazing claim
and I'd like to read the supporting material.

~~~
jdietrich
In a recent lawsuit, Apple claimed that 90% of the Apple-branded Lightning
cables they bought on Amazon were counterfeit. Amazon clearly have a grave
counterfeit problem. I don't know the exact percentage of fake Sandisk cards,
but I'd rather not play the lottery with my data. Adorama and B&H have
trustworthy supply chains and fair prices.

[https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/20/apple-lawsuit-amazon-
cha...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/20/apple-lawsuit-amazon-chargers-
fake/)

~~~
pilsetnieks
Since then Amazon has become an Apple Authorized Reseller so maybe there's
more incentive to crack down on Apple products, at least.

------
DebtDeflation
I cut my teeth on data warehousing in the mid 1990's and I remember when a 1TB
database was considered a really big deal. As in, it required very expensive
hardware and software an a ton of custom engineering. Now we have thumbnail
sized microSD cards that size.

~~~
andrewstuart2
Which means you can now run a ~1TB database (poorly) on a $35 raspberry pi by
adding a $450 card. Adjusted for 1990 inflation, that $500 becomes $298,
though obviously it's not a very practical setup for somebody who would
actually _need_ a 1TB database.

~~~
colejohnson66
I get you’re joking, but I wouldn’t trust a RPi anywhere near this card
because of all the card corruption the RPi has done.

~~~
atemerev
That’s strange, never experienced any issues. Do you use proper power supply?

~~~
colejohnson66
It’s arguably a very common problem. Just google “raspberry pi corruption”

------
toyg
MicroSDs are an infosmuggler dream. You could probably store all financial and
product information from _an entire medium-size business_ in one of those bad
boys. Pop it into your wallet in a fake coin, and you can take your flight
home without ever risking online surveillance. Once you’re on friendly soil,
you tip a not-really-bellboy or not-really-barman, and that’s it.

Not that you couldn’t do it before - a lot of interesting info is in small
Excel spreadsheets anyway - but now you don’t even have to worry about
choosing what to take, just dump it all and let the buyer figure out what they
want.

~~~
asdff
Maybe if you are stealing government secrets, but for most companies with a
little social engineering you can probably walk out of the front door with an
entire corporate issued laptop and they wouldn't figure out for months, if at
all.

------
valleyjo
This is incredible. MicroSD is so small! What is the theoretical limit of this
storage medium? There must be a point where we can’t go any smaller?

~~~
jbay808
I suppose you're asking about the theoretical limit of MicroSD rather than the
theoretical limit in general, but there's never a bad time to read Feynman's
essay, "There's plenty of room at the bottom"!

[https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf](https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf)

------
gubby
What’s the bit error rate on a card like this? Does anyone know how long 1TB
of data would actually last, with zero bit flips, in a drawer? Presumably the
primary market is JPG/MPG capture, where a few flipped bits don’t matter.

~~~
nostalgk
Anecdotal, but I have never found SD cards to be a resilient form of storage.
I frequently back up any important data from SD cards, which is a nightmare
considering the sluggish read and write speeds, because I have encountered
many instances of corrupted data.

My use case is generally portable gaming and older digital cameras, YMMV. Main
brand I used was SanDisk, however.

~~~
monocasa
All of the major brands are crap if you really care that much about the data
on the card. I've seen major brands fail even in RO.

You want an "industrial" SD card if you have a hard need of recovering the
data.

~~~
mikepurvis
Isn't it usually a RAID-1 config of 2-3 cards in any situation that actually
matters? Thinking of high end cameras, boot drives for VM hosts, etc:

[http://www.running-system.com/microsd-card-raid-1-vmware-
esx...](http://www.running-system.com/microsd-card-raid-1-vmware-esxi-boot-
device/)

[https://www.howtogeek.com/392378/what%E2%80%99s-the-big-
deal...](https://www.howtogeek.com/392378/what%E2%80%99s-the-big-deal-about-
dual-storage-card-slots-for-cameras/)

~~~
monocasa
I've seen controller bugs that'll take out all 3 cards if given the same
access pattern.

~~~
TickleSteve
All FLASH devices have an erase limit before the sector becomes non-eraseable,
likely it was not a bad controller but bad choice of filesystem or bad
application behaviour that was causing excessive wear in a small location.

~~~
monocasa
With the right access pattern we could hit it at 80kb/sec distributed writes
for six hours on an SD card with a wear leveling FTL, which shouldn't be
possible. We confirmed with the vendor that it was a controller bug where the
FTL was losing track of a virt to physical sector mapping.

Also Flash isn't an acronym and shouldn't be capitalized like that.

------
Mizza
A bummer about the new Macbooks not having SD card slots, besides the
inconvenience for camera/audio device users, is that the SD card slot offered
an extremely convenient way to add extra storage space for not a lot of money.

~~~
781
Apple designers hate holes and buttons. They are fighting really hard to
remove as many as possible. No way they put a huge slot on the side for an SD
card.

The perfect notebook in the eyes of an Apple designer would be a solid slab of
aluminium with no holes, no screen and no buttons. Perfection itself.

~~~
megous
Well, it's comming:

[https://www.wired.com/story/lenovo-foldable-display-
laptop/](https://www.wired.com/story/lenovo-foldable-display-laptop/)

------
GordonS
Interesting that it seems write speeds haven't improved much - 90MB/s doesn't
rival most spinning HDDs.

~~~
andrewstuart2
You do have to sacrifice a _little_ to fit a terabyte and all the right
controllers onto something the size of a thumbnail.

~~~
devoply
Yeah in terms of reliability it's a lot. This form factor needs some sort of
revolution to bring up its reliability to the same level as hard drives.

~~~
TickleSteve
industrial spec cards have bad block management and wear levelling, commercial
cards do not (typically), hence their poor reputation.

~~~
monocasa
Pretty much all cards have wear leveling and bad block management. The
commercial cards just have such shitty, bottom of the barrel Flash that they
simply wouldn't work most of the time without those in place. ie. they're not
features put in place for us users, or to differentiate their product line,
but instead so they can hit the yields they're looking for.

------
canada_dry
For us old folks... it's the equivalent of roughly 1 million of these 25 year
old storage devices:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Floppy_d...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Floppy_disk_300_dpi.jpg)

~~~
LeonidasXIV
Is that the save icon?

~~~
leshokunin
I know it’s intended as a joke, but you’re right. It’s really nothing more
than the save icon nowadays. We used to build them! :)

------
bartread
I'm getting a 403 for this (and for every other URL I try on tomsguide.com).
Is anyone else seeing this? Wondering if it's blanket blocking European users,
which is a notion I wonder about only because I've seen it before, and it
always seems quite rude to do so without so much as a message as to why.

~~~
LeonidasXIV
Also in Europe, I am not getting a 403. Nor any "please agree to our 7000
cookies to track you" message. It is… mostly content, surprisingly.

~~~
bartread
Thanks - appreciate it!

------
hamandchris
The other day I was removing a MicroSD card and the spring caused it to be
shot across the room, where I still haven't found it. I've also snapped them
in half on multiple occasions. So no, I do not wish to be anywhere near a $450
MicroSD card.

------
imglorp
The relevant XKCD from January 2013 addressed the bandwidth of a station wagon
full of tapes. It then shifted into microSD cards, whose density works out to
160 terabytes per kilogram. But those seem to have been 64Gb cards at the time
(see label on milk jug). [https://what-if.xkcd.com/31](https://what-
if.xkcd.com/31)

If you upgrade to 1Tb cards, that's about 2.5 petabytes/kg.

~~~
teraflop
I think you mean 2500 TB/kg, not PB/kg.

~~~
imglorp
Yeah I did. Fixed.

------
wcchandler
I’m wondering how many of these can be crammed into a 1U box. Might be an
alternative for cold on-site storage. Managing tapes gets old and annoying
quick.

~~~
sp332
At these physical sizes, you could build a robotic MicroSD card library in 1U.
Like a tiny version of a robotic tape library.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMn7YpF8r8&t=192](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMn7YpF8r8&t=192)

~~~
jlarocco
An entire room of tapes and a robot for a max capacity of 15.4 Tb, according
to this:
[https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm_tape_library_dataserver](https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm_tape_library_dataserver)

Upgrading to modern 20 Tb tapes would put it at 378 Pb.

------
Tepix
Mindboggling.

I bought a 512MB Samsung MicroSD when eBay was flooded with them (after
Christmas) after they got bundled with Samsung S9 phones. Paid less than $100.
It's still rather empty.

On the other hand, if you record 3D 360° video with a Vuze camera at 200MBit/s
it's full after less than 6 hours.

~~~
unwind
Did you mean GB?

$100 seems like a high ceiling for 0.5 GB in 2019.

~~~
Tepix
Indeed :-) it was 512GB

------
akeck
I've been looking forward to this, because it just about fits my digital media
collection. I've been hacking together an HTML/JS media center on my Rasp Pi
Zero.

------
madez
> Actual user storage less.

[https://www.sandisk.com/home/memory-cards/microsd-
cards/extr...](https://www.sandisk.com/home/memory-cards/microsd-
cards/extremepro-microsd)

~~~
colejohnson66
Same with any SD card. Some of it is provisioned for spare sectors. Also, it’s
1 TB, not 1 TiB, so actual capacity is about 930 GiB

~~~
madez
I wonder what happened if car companies tried to pull off that stunt.

"Now with seven seats.

Actual user storage less."

~~~
Hamuko
Well, the Porsche 911 is marketed as a four-seater. Seating four people in a
Porsche 911 is however quite hard.

~~~
crististm
A 911 salesman was presenting it as "emergency seat". As if you need to carry
an unexpected passenger onto the next club.

