
SanDisk releases 128GB microSD card - davidbarker
http://www.sandisk.com/about-sandisk/press-room/press-releases/2014/sandisk-introduces-worlds-highest-capacity-microsdxc-memory-card-at-128gb/
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dchuk
I've always thought that if time traveler was possible, and someone came to
the present day from the 1950s, that a microSD card would be one of the best
ways to blow their mind. I still feel a bit of awe when I'm holding a
fingernail sized piece of plastic that can contain all of Wikipedia with room
to spare.

~~~
scrabble
Forget the '50's. It would have blown my mind as a kid. If you told me there
were more than 100 movies on something the size of a fingernail. And that they
were higher quality than on my VHS tapes.

Without proof I never would have believed someone who even tried to tell me
that.

~~~
chavesn
Yep -- a person in the 50s may not have even had enough context to be as blown
away by this as someone who knew about hard drives.

My earliest memory of a hard drive capacity -- about 21 years ago -- is 130 MB
(although that most certainly wasn't the upper limit). So you could have told
me "This card is 1/2000th the size and has 1000 times the capacity."

2,000,000 times the data density! That's doubled almost 21 times!

~~~
protomyth
I remember buying, with my father, a 5mb Corvus hard drive. It was amazingly
huge compared to the ~70kbyte floppy drive. I was in awe of how many documents
it could hold.

Seeing this is just amazing.

~~~
georgemcbay
Yeah my first harddrive was a 5 megabyte drive running off the side expansion
port of an Amiga 500 -- I was pretty sure there was no way I'd ever fill that
drive up when I first got it.

~~~
kstenerud
That was an A590. It came with a 20mb XT drive that made an annoying squeaking
noise whenever it did a seek operation, but also had a SCSI connector which I
eventually hooked a Quantum 100mb drive to.

~~~
georgemcbay
Mine wasn't an A590, I was too poor to afford that at the time. I had some
knock-off third-party unit I bought at the "local" (not really local, but
closest one to where I lived) Amiga store (Memory Location in Wellesley, MA).

Worked pretty well, as far as I can remember.

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userbinator
Note how they very carefully avoid saying anything about write endurance or
data retention... SanDisk had 4-bit MLC NAND almost 5 years ago so maybe
they've improved their process, but if the retention and endurance
characteristics of current 3-bit MLC is any indication, I'll pass on this ---
it's almost certainly going to be 3-bit MLC, if not 4-bit.

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krazydad
They are a few months late from meeting Moore's law. Their 64GB microSD card
came out on Sep 18th, 2011.

[http://www.slashgear.com/sandisk-releases-64gb-
class-6-micro...](http://www.slashgear.com/sandisk-releases-64gb-
class-6-microsd-card-16180538/)

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dwd
Amazing piece of engineering, but I'll be holding out for the 128Gb version of
their Cruser Fit as it protrudes less that a standard SD card adapter on my
2011 Air.

Haven't had much luck with microSD cards: I once bricked a 32Gb card after
knocking the SD adapter again a chain arm on a train and had a failing 4Gb
card get so hot it melt the provided USB adapter.

~~~
mkeblx
That's why you have to go with a microSD card adapter that doesn't protrude at
all. [http://theniftyminidrive.com/](http://theniftyminidrive.com/)

~~~
johnchristopher
I have been playing with RPi's for some months now and I'd be anxious to use
an SD card (be it micro or standard size) for reliable additional storage
space or backup.

Are SD cards reliable enough for normal usage (excluding RPi's brutal power-
off which are often prone to corruption) ?

~~~
e12e
You might want to give nilfs2 a try, it should be rather well suited to sdcard
storage:

[http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=16289](http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=16289)

Note that nilfs doesn't do checksumming -- for that you'd have to look at
btrfs or zfs. I'm not sure how btrfs is in terms of ram usage, but generally
zfs needs _lots_ of ram -- and if you want to get the guarantees it provides
for data, you need ecc ram.

~~~
johnchristopher
Impressive numbers. I'll give it a shot in a few hours on a spare pi and see
how it performs. Thank you.

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shubhamjain
Somewhere I read that cost of manufacturing a 4GB card and a 64GB card are
more or less the same. Is it true? Why then is there a colossal difference
between their prices?

~~~
WalterBright
It's possible that the 4Gb cards are 64Gb cards where 93% of it doesn't work.

~~~
batiudrami
Or does work and is just disabled. I don't know about high end cards but it's
hard to believe Sandisk would have a completely separate manufacturing process
for 2GB and 4GB cards when they're both sold at less than $10 each.

~~~
jonmrodriguez
I doubt they would willingly downgrade a working 64GB to a 4GB (and lose all
the profit they could have made). That's just not a sane business practice in
the flash industry.

Keep in mind, even the major brands are re-branding flash they buy from other
manufacturers. So e.g. maybe Sandisk manufactures the high-end 64GB cards
themselves using an advanced process, but they purchase the 4GB cards from
some shitty manufacturer using a decade-old process.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> I doubt they would willingly downgrade a working 64GB to a 4GB (and lose all
> the profit they could have made). That's just not a sane business practice
> in the flash industry.

It doesn't work like that. The model your parent comment is discussing goes
like this:

1\. Sandisk decides how much to charge for 64GB cards.

2\. That price creates a certain level of demand for 64GB cards.

3\. Sandisk manufactures many, many more 64GB cards than it can sell at the
price it established in step (1).

4\. Sandisk downgrades the surplus cards to lower capacity so it can still
sell them without eating into 64GB card profits.

What you appear to be missing is that if you have extra 64GB cards, you can't
necessarily sell them without lowering the price of 64GB cards across the
board, leaving you having sold more cards for less money. So that "profit they
could have made" that you refer to is illusory.

~~~
rasz_pl
It doesnt work like that either. Sandisk has a chip FAB. They can make
whatever capacity chips they like. If by a freak accident they make more than
they can sell (LOL, wont happen, flash market is constantly under supplied)
they can just sell it to third parties (Kingston buys from them among many
others).

NO ONE disables good flash memory without reason.

~~~
e12e
> Sandisk has a chip FAB. They can make whatever capacity chips they like.

But if production costs are (even almost) the same for a 4GB card and 64GB
card, why would you ever produce a 4GB card? A 64GB card can be sold as 1
through 64GB -- rather than collect dust as a 64GB card if there is higher
demand for cheaper cards.

Now, I'm not _certain_ that prices are similar, but it seems reasonable that
_if_ you already have quality control and precision enough to make 64 GB
cards, it would be cheaper to just make one type of card, than different
types.

~~~
rasz_pl
Yes, that sounds a lot smarter than cutting it to size.

right?

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jonknee
That's a nice boost for GoPro right before its IPO. Now their cameras get even
more recording time.

~~~
l0stb0y
Save for the battery that is.

~~~
jonknee
Depending on the application you can run plugged in. This would be great for
long time lapses and the like.

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null_ptr
microSD cards are a pain to handle though, unless you have tweezers for hands.
CF cards all the way!

~~~
r00fus
With a 128GB card, you might not have to do much handling. Just put it in and
you have as much memory as the biggest iPad.

I heard that KitKat isn't too friendly towards app usage of external media.
With that and the lack of card slots for newer smartphones, what the biggest
usage today of such media?

~~~
bluedino
Perfect for MacBook Airs with 64/128GB SSD's, since the 13" model has an SD
card slot

~~~
dwd
The SD adapter sits out way too far to not accidentally knock the card if you
leave it in permanently.

I switched to using these:
[http://www.sandisk.com.au/products/usb/drives/cruzer-
fit/](http://www.sandisk.com.au/products/usb/drives/cruzer-fit/) and hopefully
a 128Gb version is not far away.

~~~
bluedino
That's where the Nifty Minidrive comes in. You can use a MicroSD card in the
adapter to fit in a SD card slot flush.

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fit2rule
I recently got a Cumulus drive for my Oric-1/Atmos collection. The Oric-1 is
an ancient 8-bit computer from the 80's with 48k RAM (64k if you're tricky..)
.. and now with the Cumulus .. it has an 8-gigabyte storage system.

Yes, a 48k machine: with 8gigs of storage. WTF, amiright? :P its hell fun
having such a system, crammed with everything .. and still trying to figure
out what to do with it. 8-bit Wikipedia dump on the horizon!

~~~
userbinator
Many of the cheap MP3/MP4 players have an 8-bit CPU (Z80, 8051, or similar
vintage) with a few hundred K of (banked) RAM and several G of flash, so it's
not that weird of a configuration.

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greggman
So why is my 1GIG ssd drive not the size of 8 of these microSD cards? In fact
I could easily fit 16 of these cards in USB stick. Someone MAKE IT SO! :D

~~~
wtallis
I think it's mainly a matter of pin count - SATA SSDs want to be able to
access the NAND devices independently in order to stripe accesses. That's how
they're able to offer such high sequential speeds. So a typical SSD will
include 4-8 packages containing only a few NAND dies each, rather than one or
two with 8 dies each.

~~~
sparky
We also aren't _that_ far off with 1TB mSATA (about 1x2 inches) drives
available today. 2.5" drives are obviously much bigger than 8 microSD cards
because the form factor was designed for spinning platters.

~~~
sahaskatta
There already is a 1TB mSATA [http://www.anandtech.com/show/7594/samsung-
ssd-840-evo-msata...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/7594/samsung-ssd-840-evo-
msata-120gb-250gb-500gb-1tb-review)

~~~
wtallis
But that sacrifices a lot, by using TLC (since 128Gb MLC isn't available yet),
and by stacking stacking 16 dies per package, and by having less spare area
than most drives. The end result is significantly lower performance and
longevity than other mSATA drives, and it's currently got a 25% premium over
the 2.5" counterpart.

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ipsin
128GB / (15mm × 11mm × 1mm) ~= 800GB per cubic centimeter.

Granted, that doesn't include any volume for the equipment needed to address
or power all that memory, but it's pretty an impressive information density.

Nothing compared to the upper bounds on what can be stored in that volume, but
the technology has come far in 50 years.

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martin-adams
I've always wondered why is it we never see something like a 96GB SD card, but
always double? When you're working at that size, it would seem logical to me
to go from 64GB to 96GB, than to 128GB. Anyone know the answer? I suspect it's
to do with some addressing mechanism.

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cik
Upon reading this, I immediately went to Bestbuy and Amazon (both .com and
.ca, just for kicks) only to _not_ find the product that "﻿is available
worldwide". Sadness.

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cordite
That's as much as I have on my retina.

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supercoder
Damn, stores 125 apps. I've got 126 :/

