HN Explorer

Micro SD capacities are crazy

9 points by Ecco ↗ HN
MicroSD cards with a capacity of 1 TB are readily available. Their dimensions are 15mm x 11mm x 1mm.

If we built 3.5” hard drives with as much information density, a single standard 3.5” drive (5.75in x 4in x 2cm) would hold close to 2 000 TB!

Isn’t that insane? (The price wouldn’t be too shabby too, at close to $100k per drive)

9 comments

[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 37.2 ms ] thread
h2odragon
Truly amazing, yes. Someday soon our ability to create storage media will outstrip our ability to record pornography to it.

And yet there's still lots of people who never back up anything.

Ecco
Very good point. I’m fully guilty of not backing things up enough (to some extent). The main reason that’s holding me back is not the price of storage itself, but the combination of either it’s cheap but pretty annoying to manage (e.g buying raw disks and handling backup myself), or it’s convenient but expensive (e.g. Google Photos or iCloud, for personal photos). I’ve yet to find a convenient DIY alternative.
simonblack
it’s cheap but pretty annoying to manage (e.g buying raw disks and handling backup myself)

Back-ups are easy. It's just a matter of a script and scheduling to back all your stuff up at least daily, in the wee hours of the morning.

More 'out of sight, out of mind' is the periodic checking of those backups to make sure you can restore from them. Which is why I do raw file backups of directories: no compression, no weird filesystems. Any single file is just as accessible off the backup disks as the original file on it's "original" disk.

Ecco
Which makes me wonder: why don’t we find higher capacity SSDs? Is it purely a matter of price, with consumers not willing to pay for more capacity than a few TB?
xen2xen1
Reliability. You don't want to try using SD cards for main storage for long, they just don't work for long enough to really be a serious option. There's a reason Android stopped using SD card slots, besides making them lose money.
schwartzworld
That doesn't make sense. They stopped offering expandable auxillary storage because it sometimes fails? Nobody forced you to put a card in your phone, but there were a lot of benefits.

I'd be willing to bet there's research that shows that phones without expandable storage get replaced more often. I've definitely heard people say a variation on "my phone is full, I need a new one"

gtirloni
Imagine trying to get all data out of a 1PB SSD through a SATA or NVME interface (e.g. for byte scrubbing).

Capacities have been growing a lot forever now but our ability to interface with these large buckets haven't.

Ecco
A friend told me that 2.5” drives might be more common nowadays. With the same density they would still hold 400 TB worth of data!