
Western Digital unveiled its SanDisk 1TB SDXC card prototype - jonbaer
https://www.sandisk.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2016/western-digital-demonstrates-prototype-of-the-worlds-first-1terabyte-SDXC-card
======
kabdib
Its performance is going to be glacial. Example: I have a 1.2 TB Fusion I/O
flash drive on my workstation; it gets about 2 GByte / second sustained, and
it has heat sinks and extra power connectors for a _reason_. Extrapolate down
to a dinky piece of plastic that has about the same amount of storage; trade-
offs were made.

And you should look really, really hard at retention when it is not powered
(do the bits leak away, past recovery by ECC, when it's been on the shelf for
six months?) Also look at reliability (transaction-nature) when it experiences
unplanned ejects or power loss.

~~~
Someone1234
> And you should look really, really hard at retention when it is not powered
> (do the bits leak away, past recovery by ECC, when it's been on the shelf
> for six months?)

Aside from the components physically degrading (or environmental factors like
radiation), I've never heard, read, or experienced this issue. Why do you
believe this SD card would be susceptible to data loss after as little as six
months?

~~~
jrockway
Flash is actually super lossy (especially non-SLC technology), it only appears
to durably store your data because of error correction and redundancy.

This is something I never realized until I worked on an embedded system where
every bit error showed up as a log message. It made me think, "how can
computers work at all"? The answer is math and abstraction layers that work a
little bit better than the average web framework.

~~~
TickleSteve
wear-levelling and bad-block management are not magic.

The failure modes of FLASH are well-known, they dont necessarily need
abstraction layers and they do work very well and reliably.

~~~
lallysingh
I think when someone on HN refers to a specific piece of tech as magic,
they're not saying that it's literally magical.

------
gruez
Serious question: why is this considered innovative? 256 GB _micro_ sd cards
are widely available[1], and are less than a quarter of the size of sd cards
(by area). Surely they can take a 256GB micro sd card's die, copy paste it 4
times, and end up with a 1 TB SD card?

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01G7L03OS](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01G7L03OS)

~~~
feelix
You generally can't just stick separate chunks of flash memory together to
make one big one, because the controller is the limiting factor. Having a chip
being able to manage large amounts of flash memory (having to have its own
memory for the allocation tables, wear leveling, and so forth) is where it
gets tricky.

~~~
creshal
But we've had 1+ TB flash controllers in SSDs for several years, too.

~~~
feelix
Yes, and they're disproportionately more expensive (ie more than twice the
price of 2 500GB's) because of the aforementioned issues. It's also the
bottleneck in having say 5TB SSD's that are just 20 smaller ones stuck
together, because you could cram them into a 3.5 inch enclosure.

~~~
Dylan16807
3.5 inch SSDs are expensive because they are primarily used in very expensive
servers, and they aim for maximum performance.

If your main concern is capacity, you can easily use multiple controllers. In
the laziest case just put a cheap raid controller in front.

------
throwaway7767
FTA: > The 1TB card is certain to be prohibitively expensive, and at such a
large capacity, read and write speeds are going to be comparatively slow

Why would a larger card be slower? Wouldn't it be faster since it can write
more flash cells in parallel? Larger SSDs are usually a bit faster due to
this.

~~~
fencepost
Another poster referred to this, but the most obvious reason for slow speed is
intentional throttling due to thermal concerns.

It might actually have to be simply capped at an "always-safe" write speed due
to limitations on the circuitry - is there room in an SD card format for
adequate thermal sensors and the logic to limit write speed as the card heats
up?

~~~
T0T0R0
Oh god, we're talking about overclocking SD cards? I can't wait to see
experimental results not only in general, but also in edge case scenarios like
when encountering counterfeit hardware.

~~~
fencepost
Discussion doesn't seem to be really widespread, but particularly with the M.2
/ PCIe SSDs you actually do get some thermal throttling. Here's a review of
the Samsung SM951 where in just over 2 minutes of sequential write testing the
card reached a throttle temperature of 82C and throughput dropped from
1500MB/s to 70MB/s ([http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-sm951-512gb-m-2-pcie-
ssd...](http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-sm951-512gb-m-2-pcie-ssd-
review_161689/3)). I'd call that a noticeable dropoff in speed. Yes, I realize
that article is talking about SSDs not SD cards. The relevant difference here
is that the SSD is substantially larger with likely better heat dissipation.

Of course, the maximum bus speed of SD cards right now (including the UHS-II
hardware change to add additional contacts) is only ~300MB/s, with a more
practical top speed of ~150MB/s to allow both reading and writing. Maximum
power consumption of UHS-II SDXC cards is 2.88W, which is actually fairly
significant when you consider the volume of the cards - it's not a lot of
power, but it's also not a lot of thermal mass.

------
pmontra
Every single SD card I plugged into my laptop was slow, even the cat 10 ones.
They also tend to fail faster than the HDDs (per hour of usage) so I'm not
sure that I want to put all my eggs into a 1 TB SD basket. However 1 TB is
plenty of recording time: it should be OK if you can back it up regularly.

By the way, my laptop has a 1TB Samsung EVO 850 now, plus the original 750 GB
HDD and its 32 GB SSD cache, which I keep shut down. They contain the OS (SSD)
and data (HDD) prior to the upgrade. I should format and reuse them. The HDD
could be handy for seldom used files and given the amount of RAM (16 GB)
wasn't that slow. Or I just buy another TB SSD, handy for working with docker
containers, VMs and the like, and leaving overprovisioned space on the SSD.

~~~
frou_dh
> Every single SD card I plugged into my laptop was slow, even the cat 10
> ones.

Could be that the interfacing chip in the computer is low-end and bottlenecks
them. That has been my experience with some ThinkPads.

------
fao_
My laptop has 1.5tb of space. You don't know my life!

~~~
creshal
2TB notebook HDDs and SSDs are available, step up your game.

------
overcast
I'm looking forward to the stories of people actually filling these things,
and then losing/corrupting them. I think that is waaaaay too large for the
size/speed of SD.

~~~
gmazza
Designed-for use-case for an SD card is a buffer where a photo/video camera
will save footage sequentially, then you copy everything to your PC/laptop and
reformat the card.

When used as a generic storage with a complex write/delete/overwrite pattern,
most card would start corrupting data fairly quickly.

~~~
overcast
I understand its use case. Now imagine you're on location shooting, and you're
fumbling around with tiny SD cards. It wouldn't be the first time I've dropped
one. Even compact flash I try not to put TOO much work on one before I switch
them over.

To say that every consumer is going to use it only as a temporary medium, I
think is overly optimistic.

~~~
eropple
I get what you're saying, and it is a concern, but there is a decent argument
(to me, anyway) that with 1TB you probably won't be taking the card out to be
fumbling with it in the first place. Even with on-location shooting, "I filled
up a 1TB card, I need to archive it" is probably a good reason for a lunch
break.

~~~
overcast
No one in their right mind would fill a 1TB card before swapping. That's an
insane amount of potential lost. I could see it as a secondary backup disk in
DSLR about it.

~~~
DanBC
Nobody in their right mind would have thousands of photos with no backup, but
most people never backup anything.

~~~
overcast
So what's your argument here, that you agree with me?

~~~
vidarh
He is saying that people _will_ fill a 1TB card before swapping exactly the
same way that people often leave thousands of photos floating around without
backup.

------
voltagex_
Has anyone got any info on the long term reliability of SD cards? Could they
be used for archival for 10+ years? What about 100?

~~~
wmf
SSDs are only rated for one year of retention with power off; I would expect
SD cards to be worse. [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-
data-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-
retention)

In theory flash can be use for archival but it would have to be refreshed
periodically.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
FWIW, I found 4 old SD cards (16MB - 256MB, various manufacturers) in my attic
last week that definitely haven't been used in 5 or more years, and the photos
on them all copied over to my PC just fine. I'm guessing the much lower
density of the smaller capacity cards helps a lot in this regard.

------
gmazza
I wonder how well would it perform when used in place of laptop's system disk
(i.e. with tons of small files and very random read/write access patterns).

~~~
mkj
Abysmally

~~~
throwaway7767
Unfortunately, this has been my experience with all SD cards I've tried. Even
ones sold as high-performance are just annoyingly slow to use as a root FS.

They also seem to be extremely unreliable when used with even a modest write
load, often failing within a year.

~~~
eropple
As a root FS, agreed. As an expansion, I have had really good luck with the
256GB microSD card in a low-profile SD adapter on my MBP. When I'm doing
screencasts or whatever, I happily dump my recordings out to it and, as silly
as it is, it's one of my favorite pieces of tech right now.

------
pkaye
This brings back my memories (maybe 12 years ago) developing the 1GB
CompactFlash card firmware at a previous job. That amount of capacity felt
unbelievably huge at that time. Infact the first cards I worked on had only
4MB capacity!

~~~
vidarh
> (maybe 12 years ago)

I've observed in the past that storage capacity per drive/media seems to grow
at around roughly three magnitudes per decade. I'm looking forward to my 1PB
SD card equivalent in the late 2020's.

~~~
ulucs
Mainly tounge-in-cheek, but still

[https://xkcd.com/605/](https://xkcd.com/605/)

~~~
vidarh
Heh, though in this case we have a _few_ more data points. But of course it'll
break down at some point.

------
rikkus
My personal laptop has a 256GB SSD as OS/apps drive. I treat this as
expendable.

I have replaced the DVD drive with a 1TB SSHD. This is my 'storage' drive.
There's a directory with stuff I need to keep, which is all on Dropbox and
backed up to CrashPlan. The rest is just 'cache' (e.g. music files I can
easily replace).

Looking at newer laptops, there's no DVD drive any more, so I'm waiting for
1TB SD cards (at a reasonable price) so I can have my 'storage' drive. This is
great news for me, though I may have to wait some time for prices to be
reasonable.

------
jbverschoor
That's nice and all, but I've had to trow away too many SD cards. Was happy to
pay Apple the extra cash for a 512GB ssd.

------
dharma1
What's the write speed on these things? Need much faster than current SD card
write speed, for 4K Raw and faster FPS video

------
tunichtgut
"SanDisk's 1TB SD card has more storage than your laptop".

It does not. Just saying.

------
peterburkimsher
I think that this is the first storage device to use the 10nm silicon process.
The same dies will be used to make 512GB microSD cards. Perhaps someone from
SanDisk can confirm?

~~~
mrb
AFAIK there are zero sources reporting SanDisk uses 10nm for this SD card.

------
a3n
> SanDisk's 1TB SD card has more storage than your laptop

If you take the HDD out of your laptop, the HDD has more storage than your
laptop. If you put it back in and use it, then it doesn't have more storage
than your laptop.

If you put a 1TB SD card into your laptop and use it, then it doesn't have
more storage than your laptop.

------
andrewclunn
With portable storage like that, I really could use a computer sans the
internal disk.

~~~
agumonkey
With on the fly encrypted rolling core OS fetched from the network.

------
everyone
Title is not going to be right very often.

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Ezhik
But it doesn't..

[https://i.imgur.com/XlcJYf2.png](https://i.imgur.com/XlcJYf2.png)

~~~
jacquesm
Actually, it does. 1TB > 250G in that particular case.

This is one of the reasons I opted for a slower but much larger drive in my
day-to-day work laptop.

~~~
Ezhik
That 1TB drive is actually inside of my laptop, so I have >1TB in total.

~~~
jacquesm
Hard to tell from an image that labels it 'external'.

~~~
Ezhik
Whoops, didn't notice that in the screenshot.

It makes more sense in person, trust me :v

------
pstrateman
No it doesn't.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
Er, my laptop actually has a 1TB SSD. Am I missing something?

------
dang
Url changed from
[http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/9/20/12986234/bi...](http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/9/20/12986234/biggest-
sd-card-1-terabyte-sandisk), which points to this.

None of the tech website articles on the story seem to add any info over the
press release, so we might as well link to that.

This topic excited a lot of interest earlier today and set off HN's flamewar
detector (more like an overheated discussion detector). That was too bad, so
we've rolled back the clock on the original post and merged in the comments
that were posted to a duplicate thread.

------
flukus
16GB Should be enough for anybody - Google Nexus Team.

~~~
bitmapbrother
Except that the Nexus 6P came in 32/64/128 GB configurations and the Nexus 5P
came in 16/32 GB configurations.

~~~
flukus
It took them until late 2013, and they still don't allow SD cards do they?

They also don't allow their apps to be moved to SD, which is especially
aggravating for the crappy apps you can't uninstall on phones with small built
in drives.

~~~
randomacct44
AFAIK Android 6.0 and up lets you 'Format SD as internal storage' and from
then on it's well, internal storage. I remember messing around with it on my
Nexus Player awhile ago. In that particular case though, it did NOT handle
unexpected power-downs at all well. I suspect it was a bug with remounting the
encrypted filesystem on the card when booted back up next (where a Linux box
would normally run fsck on it and then remount). I ended up doing some digging
and filing a bug but never really getting motivated enough to stick with it.

FYI at least Samsung seem to be realizing their mistake as their latest models
have the microSD card slot again after having abandoned it for some time, so
it does seem like it's back.

I also have to concur with what others have said here - I've done my fair
share of Raspberry Pi and ODROID-XU4 system image tinkering and come to the
conclusion that microSD cards suck big time as a general purpose read/write
storage device. I wouldn't feel comfortable having my phone's internal storage
running off one actually.

Now if phones came with eMMC slots.... :)

~~~
flukus
Thanks, I'll give it a try. Data loss isn't really a concern because I mainly
want it for stuff I don't want and stuff I can easily replace (audio books,
google music cache, etc).

