
1TB microSD cards - jbegley
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/2/25/18239433/1tb-microsd-card-sandisk-micron-price-release
======
afandian
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
Just an observation: 1mm pitch is awful.

~~~
mark-r
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.

~~~
novaleaf
a follow up thought experiment:

how long to walk that distance, VS how long to read the image from the SD
card......

answer:

walking the perimeter (aprox 2 miles): aprox 30min

reading 1tb (assuming sustained speed of 20mb/sec): 14.5hrs

next: consider WRITE speed...

~~~
tandr
> Of the two cards, Western Digital is claiming a performance advantage by
> citing up to 160MB/s read speed

so, 1h 44 minutes, which is not that bad

~~~
novaleaf
That is assuredly their best-case-scenario "burst" speed.

The sd cards I have always list some performance like "up to 80mb/sec" but
never seem to get close in reality.

------
nicoburns
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...](https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/286390-sd-association-announces-
microsd-express-with-pcie-nvme-support) which aims to solve this issue.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
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!

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

~~~
Phlogi
How do you know that rsync with throttling options is faster than the thermal
throttling (designed by the manufacturer)?

~~~
akeck
I don't, but it seemed to work. YMMV.

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

~~~
cptskippy
Yes but why?

[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10-ports-Micro-SD-TF-
Memory-...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/10-ports-Micro-SD-TF-Memory-Card-
to-SATA-SSD-Adapter-with-RAID-Quad-2/32555370970.html)

~~~
reaperducer
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.

~~~
ihowlatthemoon
Just in case you thought it might be a good idea to order that aliexpress
thing, it's terrible.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3frnBoqqI_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3frnBoqqI_Q)

~~~
jdietrich
There's nothing wrong with the adapter per se, it's just that MicroSD cards
have terrible random I/O performance.

~~~
beatgammit
I was thinking it would be cool as a small NAS with a mirror. I want to put my
movies and photos on it, and having a huge mirror is very useful for that type
of workload. I could drive it with a cheap ARM device, which should allow me
to stream a 4k video over the network, provided my network is the bottleneck.

So yeah, I'm very much interested in this device.

~~~
rhinoceraptor
Why not just use an actual 2.5" SSD instead of a bunch of SD cards in a
terrible quality adapter?

At least with the SSD, you only have one microcontroller doing god-knows-what
to hide the horrific reality of flash storage, vs 10 SD card microcontrollers
and one on the adapter board, which are all probably even worse.

------
LAMike
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_fatal
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
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.

~~~
logfromblammo
I call them "wikiwalks".

And I call an excessively tangential session a "wikiwalkabout", after the
Australian walkabout tradition introduced to Americans by "Crocodile Dundee",
or, more recently--the Locke character from "Lost". And boy, did that show
have a letdown denoument. But I did like the colossus foot in the later
episodes, because it reminded me of "Ozymandias", by P.B. Shelley. And did you
know that he wrote that as his shot in a poetry duel with another poet--Horace
Smith? (I guess he won, right?) Anyway, they picked that as a topic to honor a
new museum exhibit of the Younger Memnon statue of Rameses II. Those British
museum-goers were just mad for importing cultural artifacts from distant lands
and never sending them back. Like the Elgin Marbles, from Greece. And when I
think about Britain and Greece, I can't help thinking about their palace
guards--Greece with their poofy-footed Evzones and Britain with their
Beefeaters. And one of those Beefeaters is the Ravenmaster of the Tower of
London--literally in charge of the welfare of the tower ravens. One of whom is
apparently named Merlina, and is allowed additional latitude in how far she
may fly, because she always comes back. And speaking of ravens and 19th-
century poets, boy was Edgar Allen Poe a gothy li'l guy. He had a lot of
inspirational company, though. Including Mary Shelley, wife of the
aforementioned P.B., who won a 3-way ghost story duel between herself, her
husband, and Lord Byron, who only managed to invent the vampire romance genre.
So between the two of them and ol' Rameses II, we're almost all primed to
scare the crap out of Laurel and Hardy with Universal Pictures monster movie
staples: Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, and the Mummy. But we still need the
Wolfman....

And hopefully you see how it works now. Before wikis existed, there was
"Connections", by James Burke.

~~~
magduf
>the Locke character from "Lost". And boy, did that show have a letdown
denoument.

Yep, that show was a poster-child for the phenomenon called "jumping the
shark".

------
int_19h
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.

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

~~~
znpy
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.

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

~~~
treis
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
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.

~~~
mseidl
With my 5d3 raw video I get 24 minutes of 1080p on 128gb. But I have to use a
really fast cf card, because the sd cards aren't fast enough. It writes at
around 100MB/sec for 14bit raw.

------
CharlesColeman
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.

~~~
chrisseaton
> 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?

~~~
CharlesColeman
> 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#](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.

~~~
chrisseaton
But reporting them not because their product is impossible, but simply because
you think they’re selling it too cheaply?

Seems abusive. I could report my competitors for selling cheaper than I do and
hope they get banned.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> But reporting them not because their product is impossible, but simply
> because you think they’re selling it too cheaply?

I'm talking about stuff like a supposed 1TB generic MicroSD card going for
$50, when a legit item would sell for ten times that. Here are some examples:

[https://www.amazon.com/1024GB-Micro-Memory-Adapter-
Camera/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/1024GB-Micro-Memory-Adapter-
Camera/dp/B07MTB5Q7M/)

[https://www.amazon.com/FidgetKute-Micro-Memory-
Storage-1024G...](https://www.amazon.com/FidgetKute-Micro-Memory-
Storage-1024GB/dp/B07LBN966B/)

[https://www.amazon.com/Generica-256GB-Micro-Memory-
Adapter/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Generica-256GB-Micro-Memory-
Adapter/dp/B07MPX97Z1/)

[https://www.amazon.com/Generica-400GB-Micro-Memory-
Adapter/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Generica-400GB-Micro-Memory-
Adapter/dp/B07MLQ8Z76/)

There's a 99-100% chance these are fake, and I don't have to buy one to tell.

It took two minutes for me to find them, by the way. A company as rich as
Amazon should easily be able to pay someone to search for fakes like that full
time, and even purchase cards to verify their fakeness.

> Seems abusive. I could report my competitors for selling cheaper than I do
> and hope they get banned.

Offering these things for sale is abusive, reporting them as fake is a public
service.

~~~
chrisseaton
I can see what you're getting at, but I hope you're not one of these people
reporting it as a scam by posting reviews. I think it may actually be against
Amazon's terms and conditions to 'review' a product you have not purchased.

What they say is

> [you are] able to review any product on Amazon.co.uk regardless of where you
> purchased that product

Which implies you must have purchased it somewhere.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> I can see what you're getting at, but I hope you're not one of these people
> reporting it as a scam by posting reviews. I think it may actually be
> against Amazon's terms and conditions to 'review' a product you have not
> purchased.

I don't post reviews like that, _but I totally approve of people who do_. I'm
not going to fret over the precise meaning of Amazon's terms and conditions if
doing so means that innocent people will be more likely to be suckered by
scammers.

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

------
Causality1
$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.

------
joering2
$450 for 1TB. Who else other than spies moving large volumes of data in as
tiny item as possible, is going to buy them?

~~~
Ultramanoid
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.

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

~~~
zeristor
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

~~~
penagwin
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....

~~~
zeristor
HAM radio can do this but I like the idea of a wireless postal service hitch
hiking on vehicles doing their rounds.

Reuter’s got its start by using carrier pigeons to bridge the gap between two
telegram networks.

------
agumonkey
Introducing the AVID-ITy line of products

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

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

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

~~~
penagwin
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
> 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-...](https://askubuntu.com/questions/7002/how-to-set-up-multiple-
hard-drives-as-one-volume)

