Western Digital unveiled its SanDisk 1TB SDXC card prototype

[kabdib]

Its performance is going to be glacial. Example: I have a 1.2 TB Fusion I/O flash drive on my workstation; it gets about 2 GByte / second sustained, and it has heat sinks and extra power connectors for a reason. Extrapolate down to a dinky piece of plastic that has about the same amount of storage; trade-offs were made.

And you should look really, really hard at retention when it is not powered (do the bits leak away, past recovery by ECC, when it's been on the shelf for six months?) Also look at reliability (transaction-nature) when it experiences unplanned ejects or power loss.

[Someone1234]

> And you should look really, really hard at retention when it is not powered (do the bits leak away, past recovery by ECC, when it's been on the shelf for six months?)

Aside from the components physically degrading (or environmental factors like radiation), I've never heard, read, or experienced this issue. Why do you believe this SD card would be susceptible to data loss after as little as six months?

[gambiting]

SDXC U3 cards can easily write at 90MB/s, which is obviously nowhere near 2GB/s of a fusion drive, but it's definitely good enough for recording 4K video and taking large pictures - which is what this card is going to be used for. No one expects it to replace your SSD.

[cft]

How did you test 2GB/sec? I have a Fusionio ioDrive2 1.2 TB card in a 32 core Xeon E5 server with 1600Mhz RAM and I get only 850MB/sec:

    # for i in {1..4} ; do ( time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=/fusionio1/ddtest.$i bs=1M count=4000 oflag=direct" ) ; done
    4000+0 records in
    4000+0 records out
    4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 4.90524 s, 855 MB/s

    real    0m4.908s
    user    0m0.006s
    sys     0m0.785s
    4000+0 records in
    4000+0 records out
    4194304000 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 5.05399 s, 830 MB/s

Server has 128GB RAM and the card is in a PCIe 3.0 slot. Also FusionIO has 20PByte write endurance, which sandisk card obviously doesn't need.

[prawn]

Speed is obviously one. I have a large microSD card that I have permanently in the SD card slot of my MBP with a BaseQi caddy. I wouldn't use it to read-write work data, but it works well as a (mostly) read-only store for MP3s.

[qyv]

USB3 'plug & stay' drives seem like a better option for expanding laptop storage than SD cards these days.

[gruez]

Serious question: why is this considered innovative? 256 GB micro sd cards are widely available[1], and are less than a quarter of the size of sd cards (by area). Surely they can take a 256GB micro sd card's die, copy paste it 4 times, and end up with a 1 TB SD card?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01G7L03OS

[jomohke]

I think it's being treated as noteworthy due to reaching a milestone. It doesn't feel very long ago that we hit 1GB.

Edit: after a quick Google search: "Jan 29, 2004 - Sandisk ships world's first production 1GB SD card"

[feelix]

You generally can't just stick separate chunks of flash memory together to make one big one, because the controller is the limiting factor. Having a chip being able to manage large amounts of flash memory (having to have its own memory for the allocation tables, wear leveling, and so forth) is where it gets tricky.

[jl6]

Innovation doesn't mean breakthrough.

Also, innovation isn't just having the idea. Innovation is actually doing it.

[cptskippy]

Well I think the main problem is going to be the power draw. An SD Card has like a 100ma power envelope. The only way to overcome this is to shrink your parts down so that their power consumption comes under that.

Flash reads are power cheap but flash writes are power expensive.

[throwaway7767]

FTA: > The 1TB card is certain to be prohibitively expensive, and at such a large capacity, read and write speeds are going to be comparatively slow

Why would a larger card be slower? Wouldn't it be faster since it can write more flash cells in parallel? Larger SSDs are usually a bit faster due to this.

[fencepost]

Another poster referred to this, but the most obvious reason for slow speed is intentional throttling due to thermal concerns.

It might actually have to be simply capped at an "always-safe" write speed due to limitations on the circuitry - is there room in an SD card format for adequate thermal sensors and the logic to limit write speed as the card heats up?

[vidarh]

My guess is that they mean relative to capacity. If the card is simply the same speed at a card 1/4 the capacity, that means you can read out only 1/4 as large part of the unit per unit of time.

Apart from the thermal throttling suggested elsewhere, there's also the bus speed, as well as the controller on the card. It's possible they could speed it up, but it's just as likely that they've just added 4x the same flash with a controller with the same read/write performance.

SD cards != SSDs. The applications they are used in tends to be more limited by capacity than speed, and they evolve accordingly.

[alex_hitchins]

I know some DSLR's have dual SD's in them, could we see an era of SD RAID? Weather thats all on one card or three separate cards striped with parity?

I'd also think the camera could act as a decent heatsink to disperse hear generated from the SD IC.

[jshevek]

I didn't take the quoted text as a suggestion that the drive would be slower in any absolute terms. 'Comparatively' can be an ambiguous term - compared to what?

[pmontra]

Every single SD card I plugged into my laptop was slow, even the cat 10 ones. They also tend to fail faster than the HDDs (per hour of usage) so I'm not sure that I want to put all my eggs into a 1 TB SD basket. However 1 TB is plenty of recording time: it should be OK if you can back it up regularly.

By the way, my laptop has a 1TB Samsung EVO 850 now, plus the original 750 GB HDD and its 32 GB SSD cache, which I keep shut down. They contain the OS (SSD) and data (HDD) prior to the upgrade. I should format and reuse them. The HDD could be handy for seldom used files and given the amount of RAM (16 GB) wasn't that slow. Or I just buy another TB SSD, handy for working with docker containers, VMs and the like, and leaving overprovisioned space on the SSD.

[frou_dh]

> Every single SD card I plugged into my laptop was slow, even the cat 10 ones.

Could be that the interfacing chip in the computer is low-end and bottlenecks them. That has been my experience with some ThinkPads.

[cloudjacker]

Eggs in the basket? How do you guys use sd cards?

I never keep anything on them for long, I can imagine folks that only have a tablet might neglect moving photos off their cameras

[fao_]

My laptop has 1.5tb of space. You don't know my life!

[creshal]

2TB notebook HDDs and SSDs are available, step up your game.

[overcast]

I'm looking forward to the stories of people actually filling these things, and then losing/corrupting them. I think that is waaaaay too large for the size/speed of SD.

[gmazza]

Designed-for use-case for an SD card is a buffer where a photo/video camera will save footage sequentially, then you copy everything to your PC/laptop and reformat the card.

When used as a generic storage with a complex write/delete/overwrite pattern, most card would start corrupting data fairly quickly.

[throwaway7767]

I'm excited about this to upgrade my old hard-drive iPod. Replacing the hard drive with an SD card should increase battery life considerably, and this is more than 8x larger than the hard drive it came with.

If it dies, I lose no data since it's just a copy of my music library. And the speed doesn't matter since I only need to sync things once and from there it's just incremental additions.

The reason I consider this is that there don't seem to be any decent music players with large capacity, as everyone moved their music playing to their phones.

[imaginenore]

That's why many professional (and some prosumer) cameras have dual slots and allow you to write to both.

[rocky1138]

With HD video capture and other such uses, sure. But what about when we're capturing 8K video in a few years?

[voltagex_]

Has anyone got any info on the long term reliability of SD cards? Could they be used for archival for 10+ years? What about 100?

[gmazza]

I wonder how well would it perform when used in place of laptop's system disk (i.e. with tons of small files and very random read/write access patterns).

[agumonkey]

What's the seek time ? I use tiny usb keys as live image source, even as stateful system half the time, and it's a bit touchy. When the cache gets full, the kernel will get stuck in very long syncing mode, so much systemd starts to complain. On non recent (say 2013) usb keys, it will even trigger kernel error messages and lockups.

[mkj]

Abysmally

[pkaye]

This brings back my memories (maybe 12 years ago) developing the 1GB CompactFlash card firmware at a previous job. That amount of capacity felt unbelievably huge at that time. Infact the first cards I worked on had only 4MB capacity!

[vidarh]

> (maybe 12 years ago)

I've observed in the past that storage capacity per drive/media seems to grow at around roughly three magnitudes per decade. I'm looking forward to my 1PB SD card equivalent in the late 2020's.

[rikkus]

My personal laptop has a 256GB SSD as OS/apps drive. I treat this as expendable.

I have replaced the DVD drive with a 1TB SSHD. This is my 'storage' drive. There's a directory with stuff I need to keep, which is all on Dropbox and backed up to CrashPlan. The rest is just 'cache' (e.g. music files I can easily replace).

Looking at newer laptops, there's no DVD drive any more, so I'm waiting for 1TB SD cards (at a reasonable price) so I can have my 'storage' drive. This is great news for me, though I may have to wait some time for prices to be reasonable.

[jbverschoor]

That's nice and all, but I've had to trow away too many SD cards. Was happy to pay Apple the extra cash for a 512GB ssd.

[dharma1]

What's the write speed on these things? Need much faster than current SD card write speed, for 4K Raw and faster FPS video

[tunichtgut]

"SanDisk's 1TB SD card has more storage than your laptop".

It does not. Just saying.

[peterburkimsher]

I think that this is the first storage device to use the 10nm silicon process. The same dies will be used to make 512GB microSD cards. Perhaps someone from SanDisk can confirm?

[andrewclunn]

With portable storage like that, I really could use a computer sans the internal disk.

[agumonkey]

With on the fly encrypted rolling core OS fetched from the network.

[a3n]

> SanDisk's 1TB SD card has more storage than your laptop

If you take the HDD out of your laptop, the HDD has more storage than your laptop. If you put it back in and use it, then it doesn't have more storage than your laptop.

If you put a 1TB SD card into your laptop and use it, then it doesn't have more storage than your laptop.

[everyone]

Title is not going to be right very often.

[Ezhik]

But it doesn't..

https://i.imgur.com/XlcJYf2.png

[jacquesm]

Actually, it does. 1TB > 250G in that particular case.

This is one of the reasons I opted for a slower but much larger drive in my day-to-day work laptop.

[Jedd]

Not really.

One of the nice things about the Inspiron 3800 (and doubtless a few other models) is physical capacity for both a 2.5" SSD and an mSATA ... so you really can wander around with 2TB internal non-spinning disk.

(Good for bragging rights, but an expensive option.)

[pstrateman]

No it doesn't.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Er, my laptop actually has a 1TB SSD. Am I missing something?