cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/39437325

93 points
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Why would someone wanting to store huge amounts of data to put it on a storage device that is the most fragile/short lived?

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102 points

short term storage of uncompressed high resolution data

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17 points

I don’t think microSD has the write speed for that, might be more useful for HD surveillance cameras

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36 points

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.

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7 points

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.

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40 points

Games, the easiest way to expand the storage on a Steam Deck is a micro sd card.

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7 points

SD card is limited to 100MB/s iirc.

It may be simplest, but it’s far from ideal.

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20 points

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.

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3 points

I have an SD card with windows installed so I can run windows games without dual booting. It takes a while to startup, but is fine once it gets going.

Certainly not ideal, but that’s a whole OS and it’s decent.

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31 points
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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.

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-2 points

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.

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3 points

Last I remember, Baldurs Gate was on 6 separate discs, but I haven’t installed it from those in probably 20 years.

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27 points

Steam deck

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5 points

Right, the 1Tb of internal storage and the 1Tb SD card is still really cramped if you play a lot of games

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9 points

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.

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2 points

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.

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1 point

It’s really a convenience thing. I have a 256 in my GP, and that lasts me a couple of days worth of snowboarding sessions, or longer with miscellaneous recordings. Upload my stuff and clear it. EzPz.

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9 points

Video Cameras

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7 points

Sneakernet. There’s places that don’t have access to get l good Internet and relatively inexpensive storage like this allows them to buy and trade media and consume it on inexpensive devices like a cellphone.

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5 points

Good for straight off the camera

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4 points

People doing production on their MacBooks might be a target per the small form factor.

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4 points

They’re awesome for modding iPods, though my music library’s probably less than 1 gb.

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2 points

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.

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2 points

Unmodded low-end steam deck.

Security camera run time.

DSLR for events.

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44 points

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.

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4 points

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.

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2 points

I mean, it exists, but it’s experimental and extremely expensive

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43 points

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.

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21 points

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?

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5 points

I think most phones have a 1tb cap … But nowadays most phones don’t have SD card slots so I don’t know where that has gone

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3 points

I’d say it depends on the phone.

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1 point

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.

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37 points

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.

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15 points

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.

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6 points

Tecra was the high end model line and “CDT” in that model name means it had an active matrix LCD. You were already living the life of mobile luxury over most folks. Adding that 1GB HDD was rubbing it in our faces at that point. :)

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4 points

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…

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1 point

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.

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1 point

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.

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4 points
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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.

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1 point

The only things that I can fill it up with are video games and video recordings. Hoarding downloaded files can also build up over time.

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-1 points

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?

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3 points

More like big toe nail for the 8 TB.

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2 points

Yall have big digits

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34 points
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I am slightly confused why they use UHS-I instead of UHS-II (or even UHS-III) for such a big capacity. Seems like people needing so much capacity probably write a lot of data in a short time. UHS-II is 3 times quicker.

Then again maybe they are aiming for devices that can’t even run UHS-II

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60 points

Could be a trade-off issue. They can get capacity or speed but not both yet.

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6 points

Or it’s cost-prohibitive ATM. As in, they could get both, but you’d pay a ton for it.

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23 points

I can imagine this being useful for cases where you write a lot of data over a longer time period. Think CCTV (with low-medium resolution). You can keep a sizeable archive locally and never have to swap cards

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11 points

Oh yeah cctv could be a good option indeed.

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6 points

I assume larger capacity means longer endurance, too, since you’re not constantly rewriting the same cells.

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8 points

It’s SanDisk, I expect the opposite - that every cell increases the volatility and chance of catastrophic failure.

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