cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/39437325
Why would someone wanting to store huge amounts of data to put it on a storage device that is the most fragile/short lived?
I don’t think microSD has the write speed for that, might be more useful for HD surveillance cameras
Uncompressed 4k stream @ 30fps and 24bpp would be 5.7 GB/s. The top regular SD card speed, UHS-III, maxes at 0.6 GB/s. SD Express, where a PCIe lane is added, goes to 3.9 GB/s.
So, yeah, going to need at least some compression. Good news is that just a little compression can go a long way.
Yeah pictures and videos is all I can think of. I am no photophile but I assume some small digital camera benefits from storage of the micro variety. Has me thinking of the 2015 movie Victoria, 140m straight, one shot, no cuts, and actually a good movie, pretty amazing stuff.
Games, the easiest way to expand the storage on a Steam Deck is a micro sd card.
SD card is limited to 100MB/s iirc.
It may be simplest, but it’s far from ideal.
Given some reviews I’ve seen, it’s more than good enough for games. Loading times may be a bit longer, but not that bad. HDDs are in that range, and plenty of people use HDDs for gaming.
Why would anyone need a 24TB HDD?
Because in the time we have gone from 4GB SD cards to 4TB cards, movies have gone from being 700MB to 70Gb, and games from coming on a few cds or dvds to requiring a mountain of them - Baldurs Gate 1 came on 5 CDs, BG3 would require around 200 of them.
That 4TB card has only space for 26 games, if they are as large as BG3.
The original Baldur’s Gate came on a single CD and had full install size of under 600MB. It was also possible to do a partial install and to load files off the CD at runtime.
My GoPro can record 4k@30fps. A 20-25min video is 5+gb. The newer GoPros will do 8k@60fps i believe, maybe only 30fps. That will take up a lot more space.
The cards have to be the higher speed cards to be able to record those resolutions, but if I were a person that recorded a lot of stuff, having a card that large would be nice for a day long session.
I bought a 1TB SD card for my go pro/drone the other day. In theory it’s good for 16 hours of recording non stop.
I also have both a 512gb and a 256gb sd card for my dash cam, I’d really like to get a compatible 1TB card, but 4TB would be even nicer. Maybe I’d be able to go a month without offloading the card.
They’re awesome for modding iPods, though my music library’s probably less than 1 gb.
Flash modding iPods is a cool use case for larger-capacity SD cards. However, the limiting factors seem to be the database file for the songs on the device and the RAM available.
At a certain point you get diminishing returns on the card capacity as you couldn’t fill up the card with songs and have them all be indexed without the iPod crashing. In these situations, one can be fine staying at 128 or 256 GB.
All I want is higher resiliency SD cards. It must be a technology limitation with being unable to fit a good controller in there or something because I would gladly sacrifice speed and capacity for something reliable in a lot of my applications.
What SD cards are you buying, and where are you using them?
I’ve been using a 256gb Sandisk high endurance SD card in my dashcam since 2021 (when I lost the first 2 I’d bought in 2018) and it’s still perfectly content writing a 4k + 1080p video for about 16 hours straight every single day. It wasn’t until last year I got a 512gb Samsung Pro Plus drive to split the load/act as a backup.
ah finally, i can buy a micro sd card for 500 dollars, the same price as a gazillion terabyte harddrive, and get less reliability out of it.
yeah, but you can carry it with you at all times if your phone takes an SD card.
although, can they use one that large, or is there some restriction?
this is true, my phone supports up to 400GB but it’s a bit older. Anything over about 512GB and you’re gonna run into issues writing and reading data reliably/fast enough. I’ve yet to find a way to transfer more than like 5Gb of files reliably to my android lmao.
It’s just a shit platform with shit software implementations, there’s not really much you can do about it.
I paid $100 for a massive 1TB hard drive when they first came out years ago. Thought a TB was essentially unlimited and wasn’t sure if it could ever be used.
What a crazy advancement to get to 8TB the size of your pinky nail.
I paid like $150 for a 1GB hard drive on my Toshiba Tecra 510CDT back in the 90s. The guys at the computer store weren’t sure if it would even work.
Our first family PC had a 1,3 gigabyte drive. That had Win ‘95 on it, productivity apps, bunch of games, etc. This was a time when you could actually still run games off CD-ROM’s without needing installs.
These days, my phone has over 200 times the memory. It’s still amazing to me.
Same thing with SD cards. When I started with digital photography, a 32 MB card was big. My current camera takes images that are too large to fit on it! Early cameras even had floppy disk storage, if you can imagine…
I think our first family PC had 40MB of storage, and we loaded optical discs into a caddy before inserting them. That was in the late 80s.
It gets even wilder when you tell younger people that PC’s didn’t even come with storage drives in the early days. One of the earliest I used had to have software loaded through cassette tape. That was certainly a bit annoying, as it took quite a while and was error prone.
These days I somewhat collect old hardware. I love things like my Macintosh Plus where you need to juggle disks in order to load software in the memory so you can use it. Nowadays a single text e-mail outweighs the entire OS for a system like that.
1TB may have seemed unlimited back then, but now with 8TB, if an uncompressed Blu-Ray is around 50GB, that can fit 160 Blu-Ray movies. Now, 160 movies may seem like a lot, and it is, but think of how many movies there have been overall over time. Then, consider that we’re only talking about movies and then there are other things like TV shows, music, games, etc.
You can never have enough storage.
You’re only getting 4 TB the size of your pinky nail. 8TB is the size of your thumbnail. Most people can’t be arsed to read the article, but you couldn’t even read the headline?
Sigh…
A couple of years ago there were discussions on how stupid 20+tb harddrives were, mainly because they are so slow that the time it takes for files to transfer to a spinning disk was too long.
Let’s say you have a good 20tb drive and it can transfer files at 200MB/s. To fill that drive, it’ll take 1 day and 8 hours of continuous transfer. If it’s failing, and you’re trying to get as much off of it you’re screwed.
Now let’s think about that micro SD card. It’s 4tb, and let’s be gracious and give it a v90 speed class. That’s 90MB/s. Looking at a calculation for the time it takes to fill it up, we’re sitting at about 14h and 14 minutes. Worst part is that SD cards don’t have SMART, meaning you don’t know when they’ll die.
From my experience, even good SD cards die in my raspberry pi running pihole, and the cards runs idle almost all the time.
Also there’s this thing that the higher capacity a storage device gets, the more valueable the data stored on it becomes, not directly because it’s high capacity, but because it’s more trusted by the user.
Guys, gals and anyone in between, please get a proper storage solution, something that won’t fail spontaneously. If you need that kind of capacity, go for a Nas with spare drives, or at least get an ssd.
/end rant
Not all use-cases require a high speed:capacity ratio.
I mean, I have an 18TB USB hard drive, which sustains transfer at about 50MB/sec in practice. It is nearly full, and its level of performance has never been a show-stopping problem.
It’s hard to imagine a use case where a NAS would be a viable alternative to an SD card.
I’ve had a usage tier for storage that looks like this
Temporary storage
- SD cards - unreliable storage you use temporarily to store pictures and videos before inevitably moving them to a more reliable and permanent solution.
- USB drives (hdd ssd etc) - used for when you you want to move files faster or more conveniently than over a Lan.
Permanent storage
- Nas, internal drives, tape drives, etc - for when you want to store a lot of data with configurations that allow you to use redundancy.
The issue with super high capacity SD cards for me is that they’re still fragile and prone to failure. When you allow someone to store that much data, it’ll be used as a more permanent medium, and since it has a lot of storage capacity you end up with a bigger data loss when it dies. Imo having 30 128gb SD cards would be better because if one dies or breaks, you lose 128gb and not 4tb.
Tldr I think 4tb micro sd cards are stupid.
This is obviously not for large scale storage. But for stuff like cameras, which uses ever larger files for raw images
I totally get that… Here’s the thing though, at least in Norway a 1tb micro sd card costs 2200kr (~$203). If we extrapolate the price for a 4tb one, that’ll be 8800kr(~$813). If you or a company has the kind of money to spend almost a grand on a storage device, doesn’t that mean that the footage/photos are pretty valuable? If you had the kind of money/were going to record super valuable footage, wouldn’t you work hard to use cameras/recording systems that were capable of recording to redundant drives?
What I don’t get is what market section this product would even fit in. It’s too expensive for regular consumers, and also has terrible value. It’s not good enough for professional settings because it has no drive monitoring, nor does it have redundancy. It isn’t fast enough for the kind of footage that would require that kind of space(unless you’re recording a month long realtime video).
Also imagine how horrible the transfer speeds would be for individual photos when the os has to initiate a file transfer. If we say each photo is 20mb, that’s almost 200k photos. Yikes…
The raspberry pi is about the worst case scenario for SD cards. It may be idle, but an operating system is still making constant reads and writes, which absolutely eat through an SD card
There is a thing called Log2Ram that can help with it for Pis. I run it in my PiHoles
Let’s say you have a good 20tb drive and it can transfer files at 200MB/s. To fill that drive, it’ll take 1 day and 8 hours of continuous transfer. If it’s failing, and you’re trying to get as much off of it you’re screwed.
this is kind of why we have RAID, but arguably, you should literally just not be using RAID as a backup. Failing drives should be prepped for in advance, rather than dealt with in real time at the 20+TB scale.
The primary advantage to such dense HDDs is price, and power efficiency.
Also there’s this thing that the higher capacity a storage device gets, the more valueable the data stored on it becomes, not directly because it’s high capacity, but because it’s more trusted by the user.
also im not sure i agree with the phrasing here, the drive does become “more important” but that’s because it stores more data, there is literally more for you to lose in the event it gets destroyed. You should trust nothing ever, yourself included.
I mean, it’s where I keep all of my important tax documents in pdf and my old family videos. It’s plugged in this here chromebook. Haven’t needed to take it out since I got the thing during a sale for $160. The chromebook that is. I don’t remember what 16Gb cost back then.
Worst part is that SD cards don’t have SMART, meaning you don’t know when they’ll die.
I mean, SMART doesn’t help much with knowing about HDDs’ death either. It’s more often they don’t show up at all, so you can’t even check SMART.
It’s not about the death. It’s about if it’s going to die. I’ve seen smart errors weeks before a hdd died which gave me time to back that data up.
