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?
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.
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.
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.
