SanDisk introduces the first 8TB SD and 4TB microSD cards - Liliputing

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

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.

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.

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 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

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

This is the kind of discussion i'm here for. Thanks everyone! I didn't know SD and micro SD cards where this unreliable but i always use them for short term stuff or content that is backed up somewhere else so i think i'm good.

and both are described as SDUC UHS-I cards that are “built for tomorrow’s smartphones, gaming devices, drones, cameras, and laptops.”

Gaming devices: ✅️
Drones: ✅️
Cameras: ✅️
Smartphones: ❌️

Basically every current flagship phone, and you know that's what they mean, has done away with expandable memory....

SDUC supports up to one hundred and twenty eight Terabytes O.o

Who in the world requires so much Storage on a tiny SD card?!

Def means my next phone I'm buying I make sure has a micro SD slot...

I love emulation on my phone as a hobby and his is hitting the sweet spot where by the time I need to upgrade again in a few years everything up through PS2 generation should be full speed even on mid tier phones that typically still offer micro SD

And 8 tb of micro SD is enough space to carry literally entire romsets for every system I like besides PS2/GameCube which is fine.

Just need to set them up in a raid configuration for redundancy.

Didn't we only just start getting 2TB microSD?

At this size you could carry your backup with you all the time or store it in your car encrypted.

I feel like this is a product looking for a market. Why would anyone ever trust that much data to something so fragile and easy to lose?

Awesome,

but I wonder if we'll ever get better read and write counts on SD cards. It feels like the size is getting larger than the amount of possible writes to the device, making it kind of moot.

The mockup image is kinda misleading (article admits its crappy lol).

afaik there aren't any current microSD cards 1TB+ that have a u3 or even u1 speed because the increase in storage size comes at the cost of speed.

The development is definitely cool, but the physical size of a microSD is probably very challenging to design around without sacrificing something.

Wasn't sandisk particularly unreliable or am I mistaken with the brand? I remember some problem with SDs failing prematurely

When I started my career I used to have to manage tape backups for the company I worked for using LTO tapes that stored a huge 100 GB lol

Huh. I can see drones, action cameras and spy cameras being able to store lots of super high quality footage with this. Like, so much footage it lasts longer than the battery.

It's niche, but I can see the use case.

What would anybody even use 4 TB SD card for? Storing a shit-ton of pirated movies that you can watch on your phone? Aside from that I have no idea. 256 gigs is probably more than enough for anything a normal user would do on a phone.