
Western Digital Demos SD Card with PCIe X1 Interface, 880 MB/s Read Speed - rbanffy
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12487/western-digital-displays-sd-card-with-pcie-interface?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
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jrk
Is there a security story for this interface? Internal NVMe devices are
generally trusted and not passed around, but plugging untrusted things
directly into the PCIe bus, with coherent access to memory, is a potentially
huge security hole. This was an issue with early Thunderbolt.

And this isn't very hypothetical: aside from passing cards around, counterfeit
SD cards are extremely common on Amazon.

~~~
the8472
IOMMUs can protect the RAM if configured to do so by the OS, udevd rules could
let you opt-in to to the kernel using the devices - you wouldn't want your
network connections hijacked through some plugged-in and auto-detected network
device!

But I don't know what the PCIe security model is wrt. to accessing other
devices, such as the HDDs.

~~~
monocasa
> But I don't know what the PCIe security model is wrt. to accessing other
> devices, such as the HDDs.

Should also be protected by the MMU for the most part. You might be able to
forge interrupts from other devices though. PCI-E message signaled interrupts
are just another memory write to a special part of address space, that
unfortunately isn't separated by device at page granularity AFAIR.

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combatentropy
Ideally one day videomakers will join the audio world in always just recording
uncompressed. No longer would you have to think about whether you used the
right codec for your editor. It's taking a long time to get cheap because the
bandwidth of video is so many times more than other uses. Most people already
are way overserved by the standards already in place.

For what it's worth the CompactFlash Association recently ratified CFexpress
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFexpress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFexpress))
which uses NVMe and two lanes of PCIe 3.0, for 1.97 GB/sec. If my calculations
are correct, that's enough for 10-bit 4K RAW at 178 frames per second.

~~~
ksec
Or wouldn't it be better if the compression is lossless.

Lossless, fast Codec that is Open Source and Patents Free. We have FLAC for
Audio. ( I dont know why I dont like the name FLAC though ), hopefully we will
have something similar for Video.

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bwang29
This would be great for DSLRs if integrated especially those who are shooting
wildlife at high speed. Contrary to my own previous belief, I thought I would
need a smaller hard drive in terms of storage space when I have a larger or
faster SD card, but the opposite is true. The faster and bigger the SD card is
the more photos I ended up shooting with more duplicates and the more of a
need for a home NAS or bigger hard drive.. I think the issue is I never
considered SD card as permanent storage media and I would always create a copy
of it somewhere else.

~~~
gascan
What you need is more aggressive culling. Eventually more storage space
becomes a black hole for a photographer. Your photos go in- and never come
out, because the _sheer quantity_ is oppressive. Who wants to spend a Sunday
flipping through a thousand tiny variants of the same picture?

If you are a talented professional who takes terabytes of unique & engaging
photos, disregard- but otherwise, as another photographer, let me suggest you
focus on culling instead of storage.

(Photo Mechanic was a godsend for culling; it's fast as blazes even on weak
hardware, and cheaper than a new processor or more DRAM)

~~~
durandal1
Yes, cull aggressively. Even talented amateur photogs that I know does not not
have more than 10% keeper rate, at max, and that probably include a bunch of
meh stuff too. No reason to keep the other 90% with half-nailed focus or
unflattering facial expressions. For many years I kept mostly everything
thinking that I one day might go back and re-evaluate a photo. That day has so
far never happened in 16 years of shooting digital.

~~~
vvanders
Yup, if I'm hitting 5/100 I'm having a pretty good day.

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FullyFunctional
This is huge! I have no affiliation, but I'm really excited about this.
Looking through the comments, I don't think everyone appreciates the
implications:

\- It would mean a sane standard for SDcards; none of the ever-evolving,
always-limited, SDcard protocol

\- NVMe drivers are already there in any modern OS

\- NVMe is a pretty fantastically wonderful protocol compared to _all_ other
mainstream storage protocols (SCSI, ATA, FC, etc). It has low overhead and
supports ridiculous amounts of parallelism.

\- This would open up uses of SDcards that aren't really possible today
(basically allow for the SDcard to be a general SSD, faster than most (all?)
existing SATA SSD).

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drewg123
What about IOPS? Assuming IOPS are decent, you could probably replace a SATA
SSD with this. This seems like it is in the "middle" ground between a full
blown PCIe Gen3 x4 NVME drive and a cheap SATA SSD.

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LeifCarrotson
A SATA SSD consumes 1 to 5 watts during heavy write activity. That's hardly
worth mentioning for a 2.5" drive in a desktop enclosure, but it's a big
problem for an SD card with no way to get rid of the heat!

~~~
21
Phone LEDs which put out 1W in a much smaller package somehow survive.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
A 1W LED is soldered to big heatsinking planes on the PCB it's mounted to,
which is itself designed to sink heat away into the phone body. An SD card is
wrapped in plastic, slides into a plastic slot, and touches the phone with
only a few small pins.

Plus an LED behind a lens and cover on a phone or inside a flashlight is
perfectly fine to run at 60C, but eject an SD card at 60C into your hand and
you'll be throwing it across the room.

~~~
wtallis
> but eject an SD card at 60C into your hand and you'll be throwing it across
> the room.

Probably not, given the very low heat capacity of an SD card's plastic casing.
But I can say from experience that ejecting a 2.5" SATA drive with a metal
case that's well over 60°C will cause you to drop it quickly. It's a good
thing SSDs can handle falls without trouble.

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shmerl
They should start using F2FS, instead of patent encumbered exFAT and Co.

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phkahler
>> The company is not disclosing the type of memory or the controller that
power the SD PCIe card, but it is clear that we are dealing with a custom
solution.

Just itching to know if it's got a RISC-V core in there.

~~~
wtallis
Nope. Their RISC-V stuff is still at least a year away.

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voltagex_
Hey, this might be good to replace the silly SATA DOM [1] that SuperMicro
uses.

1:
[https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/SATADOM.cfm](https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/SATADOM.cfm)

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kylehotchkiss
Too bad there isn't a single good USB-C SD card reader.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Are things still that seriously screwed up in the USB-C ecosystem? I was
hoping they would have figured things about by now.

~~~
MisterTea
Up until USB 2.0 and to a degree, 3.0, USB was pretty straight forward in the
fact that EVERY USB device plugged in worked.

Now you have USB C with a laundry list of supported features and protocols
which may or may not be present on your device and most consumers are
completely clueless. Does that USB C port on your device support Displayport?
Does it do Thunderbolt? Can it be used for charging? What does it do exactly?
Too many technical features in a consumer plug.

~~~
doughj3
> most consumers are completely clueless

In my experience even many techies are clueless, myself included. I recently
purchased a Lenovo* Thunderbolt laptop dock for my new Lenovo laptop that has
a USB-C port, but quickly found out that this laptop does not support
Thunderbolt: the dock plugs-in fine, but doesn't actually work. Apparently
there is a separate "USB-C dock" in addition to their Thunderbolt dock, but I
wasn't aware this was something I had to take into consideration.

I'm also left wondering what would happen if I took the USB-C charger for the
laptop and plugged it into the USB-C port on my phone, or vice versa. How
"universal" is USB-C anymore?

* I'm not a fan of Lenovo in general but that's what's available through work.

~~~
kbenson
That's one of the reasons I bought the specific dock offered by Dell for my
XPS 15. The laptop and dock support thunderbolt, but it's carried across
USB-C. Getting this all right and knowing it will work as expected was enough
for me to pay an extra $30-$40 to make sure I got a well tested docking
system.

The article I just read to make sure I had my facts straight before posting[1]
said it best I think. USB-C is a connector, which support many protocols
(including USB 3.0/3.1 and Thunderbolt 3).

In other words, it's the equivalent to the Ethernet in your network, over
which you run a protocol like TCP/IP, or IPX/SPX (not that I think anyone
actually runs this much anymore). It's confusing because for USB 1.0 and USB
2.0 the protocol and the connectors were fairly closely linked (although they
did downgrade as needed).

1: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-a-
Thund...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-a-
Thunderbolt-3-vs-USB-C-cable)

~~~
monocasa
And yet, I plug an Ethernet cable into a switch manufactured 20 years ago, and
it works great, albeit at slower speeds.

~~~
kbenson
Twenty years from now plug a new USB-C cable into something manufactured
twenty years ago and it may work too. You know what might not work too great
now over Ethernet even if the connector works? An IPX/SPX device, since
there's nothing to connect to on the other end. Your Ethernet network will be
functioning perfectly, but you'll find yourself having trouble getting
internet access because your router/firewall/etc are all running IP.

~~~
monocasa
> and it may work too

It _may_ work. It doesn't even now.

And IPX/SPX work just fine. I was actually playing a DOS game over multiplayer
the other night.

~~~
kbenson
Multiplayer on the same LAN (or with translation software to TCP/IP), right?
Meaning you connected two IPX/SPX devices over it and they worked together.
That's expected. But you wouldn't expect to plug in an IPX/SPX device and DHCP
an address and use the internet (which would be possible with a IPX/SPX aware
NAT firewall), just as you shouldn't expect to plug a laptop that supports
Thunderbolt into a bock that support USB-3.1 over a USB-C cable and expect it
to work The medium works in both devices, but there's a protocol mismatch.

~~~
monocasa
USB-C's situation is so bad that you have to know which of the identical ports
have certain features. Your bridging argument is just a red herring.

I can plug two devices together locally over Ethernet and expect them to work.
I can't expect that of USB-C. Do you not see the difference?

~~~
leetcrew
it's definitely a pain to have a single connector that may or may not support
several different transport technologies and/or power delivery. on the other
hand, it's way less bad than having to carry around a different cable for each
of those _and_ having to cram all those different ports on the laptop.

my guess is that, in a few years, a standard set of the most useful features
will stabilize and it will be cheapest to just offer that all the time. in the
meantime we just have to deal with the growing pains and read benson leung
reviews so we don't burn our houses down.

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minikites
This could be a great addition for laptops that keep SD card slots.

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TickleSteve
I wonder if an expresscard adaptor could be made for these, after all it also
is pcie internally...

This would be a way to give old laptops a real boost.

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debt
Let's say I wanted to watch a large video from this SD card, wouldn't the
transfer from SD card to display be slowed down by the bus between the board
to the display?

Similarly, if I wanted to transfer the same video directly from the SD card
through the bus, then through a network interface over a network to another
computer, wouldn't the write speed be slowed be all those components in the
middle?

I don't understand the write speed at 880 MB/s if it'll inevitably be slowed
by many other slower components.

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mschuster91
> I don't understand the write speed at 880 MB/s if it'll inevitably be slowed
> by many other slower components.

This is very useful for high-resolution cameras, and even more so for high
frame rate video shooting. No need for compression, just dump raw frames on
the card.

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londons_explore
Western Digital moves pins around and gets a press release out of it...

