• @[email protected]
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • HEXN3T
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    1311 months ago

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

  • Sparky
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    4111 months ago

    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

    • @[email protected]
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      1011 months ago

      The raspberry pi is about the worst case scenario for SD cards. It may be idle, but an operating system is still making constant reads and writes, which absolutely eat through an SD card

        • @[email protected]
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          611 months ago

          I’ve started just booting them from USB. I have Home Assistant running on a pi with an ssd in an external enclosure and it’s been completely issue free.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 months ago

      Not all use-cases require a high speed:capacity ratio.

      I mean, I have an 18TB USB hard drive, which sustains transfer at about 50MB/sec in practice. It is nearly full, and its level of performance has never been a show-stopping problem.

      It’s hard to imagine a use case where a NAS would be a viable alternative to an SD card.

      • Sparky
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        1511 months ago

        I’ve had a usage tier for storage that looks like this

        Temporary storage

        • SD cards - unreliable storage you use temporarily to store pictures and videos before inevitably moving them to a more reliable and permanent solution.
        • USB drives (hdd ssd etc) - used for when you you want to move files faster or more conveniently than over a Lan.

        Permanent storage

        • Nas, internal drives, tape drives, etc - for when you want to store a lot of data with configurations that allow you to use redundancy.

        The issue with super high capacity SD cards for me is that they’re still fragile and prone to failure. When you allow someone to store that much data, it’ll be used as a more permanent medium, and since it has a lot of storage capacity you end up with a bigger data loss when it dies. Imo having 30 128gb SD cards would be better because if one dies or breaks, you lose 128gb and not 4tb.

        Tldr I think 4tb micro sd cards are stupid.

      • Simple Jack
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        311 months ago

        I mean, it’s where I keep all of my important tax documents in pdf and my old family videos. It’s plugged in this here chromebook. Haven’t needed to take it out since I got the thing during a sale for $160. The chromebook that is. I don’t remember what 16Gb cost back then.

    • @[email protected]
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      1511 months ago

      This is obviously not for large scale storage. But for stuff like cameras, which uses ever larger files for raw images

      • Sparky
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        1111 months ago

        I totally get that… Here’s the thing though, at least in Norway a 1tb micro sd card costs 2200kr (~$203). If we extrapolate the price for a 4tb one, that’ll be 8800kr(~$813). If you or a company has the kind of money to spend almost a grand on a storage device, doesn’t that mean that the footage/photos are pretty valuable? If you had the kind of money/were going to record super valuable footage, wouldn’t you work hard to use cameras/recording systems that were capable of recording to redundant drives?

        What I don’t get is what market section this product would even fit in. It’s too expensive for regular consumers, and also has terrible value. It’s not good enough for professional settings because it has no drive monitoring, nor does it have redundancy. It isn’t fast enough for the kind of footage that would require that kind of space(unless you’re recording a month long realtime video).

        Also imagine how horrible the transfer speeds would be for individual photos when the os has to initiate a file transfer. If we say each photo is 20mb, that’s almost 200k photos. Yikes…

        • KillingTimeItself
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          211 months ago

          yeah no absolutely just use a proper CCTV setup at that point, it’s cheaper and way more reliable and maintainable.

    • @[email protected]
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      111 months ago

      Where do USB “thumb drives” land here? Unreliable as long term storage like SD’s?

    • KillingTimeItself
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      411 months ago

      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.

      this is kind of why we have RAID, but arguably, you should literally just not be using RAID as a backup. Failing drives should be prepped for in advance, rather than dealt with in real time at the 20+TB scale.

      The primary advantage to such dense HDDs is price, and power efficiency.

      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.

      also im not sure i agree with the phrasing here, the drive does become “more important” but that’s because it stores more data, there is literally more for you to lose in the event it gets destroyed. You should trust nothing ever, yourself included.

    • @[email protected]
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      911 months ago

      And after you spend 14 hours filling it with data, it falls out of your shirt pocket when you lean over to tie your shoe, gets caught by a gust of wind, and is gone forever.

    • @[email protected]
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      311 months ago

      Worst part is that SD cards don’t have SMART, meaning you don’t know when they’ll die.

      I mean, SMART doesn’t help much with knowing about HDDs’ death either. It’s more often they don’t show up at all, so you can’t even check SMART.

      • Sparky
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        511 months ago

        It’s not about the death. It’s about if it’s going to die. I’ve seen smart errors weeks before a hdd died which gave me time to back that data up.

        • @[email protected]
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          211 months ago

          I see what you mean. It helps predict that, but not always. This is still a lottery, and the absence of SMART only makes it a little bit more of a lottery.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 months ago

    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…

    • WIZARD POPE💫
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      2511 months ago

      Which is utter bullshit. Especially since a lot of lower end phones have the option for dual sim or one sim and sd. There is literally no reason for flagships to not have that and make file transfering easier.

      • @[email protected]
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        1111 months ago

        There is. Money. They force you to use their spyware malware cloud storages and steal all your data. gg ez for Google/Samsung

      • @[email protected]
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        711 months ago

        But then how will they upcharge you for additional storage or push you to their monthly cloud storage solution?

      • @[email protected]
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        811 months ago

        Or a headphone jack, yes, a large number of people have wireless earbuds…but the audio quality off them isn’t amazing, and goddammit I wanna plug my really nice headphones in, or connect to a stereo without needing to use a Bluetooth dongle or…or…fuck…idk…just stupid. The big players saw apple cutting all that away(barring expandable memory, they never had that as far as I know) and said fuck what people want, apple can dictate what their customers want, and we want to too! And then getting a device with enough on-board storage is hundreds of extra capitalism tokens. It’s a fuckin mess…

        • WIZARD POPE💫
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          411 months ago

          It’s sad that because most people dont care about these things we dont get to enjoy them either.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 months ago

      Honestly, you can’t really compare the modern phone memory vs sd card memory anymore.

      For pure storage ya, it doesn’t really matter. For using it for anything more than that, it’s honestly too slow.

      UFS 4.0 Sequential Read Speed: Up to 4,200 MB/s Sequential Write Speed: Up to 2,800 MB/s Latency: Very low, making it ideal for high-speed data transfer and multitasking in mobile devices. Usage: Commonly used in high-end smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices where speed and efficiency are critical.

      SDUC UHS-I Sequential Read Speed: Up to 104 MB/s Sequential Write Speed: Typically around 70-90 MB/s, though the maximum theoretical speed can go up to 104 MB/s. Latency: Higher compared to UFS 4.0, which can impact performance in tasks requiring quick access to data. Usage: Used primarily in SD cards, which are common in cameras, drones, and other devices requiring expandable storage.

      • @[email protected]
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        311 months ago

        Sure, on-board is stupid fast. I don’t need stupid fast to hold my photos and videos for work, or my 100+gb of music for on the go that I change up semi-regularly. What I use my sd for is pure storage, and I now don’t want to further upgrade to a new phone as I either have to pay through the nose for storage, or sacrifice some device power and build quality to be able to have expandable memory. You cannot with a straight face tell me phones don’t need expandable memory, because they really do. I can’t even count how many time my wife has had poor/no reception and was trying to show me a photo from years ago, but her iPhone couldn’t grab a high quality image from the cloud. On a road trip, her Spotify sometimes doesn’t work due to no signal/roaming. I currently don’t have that problem. Most of the music I am listening to frequently is on my sd card, I have backups of ROMs for if I wanna play an SNES or DS game or whatever, I have the important photos from the last decade. It’s all just there because I can slap a 512gb sd into my phone.

        • @[email protected]
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          211 months ago

          I’m def not defending the big phone companies. There could be creative ways to mitigate pure storage vs fast storage, similarly to computer DRAM vs NVME 4.0.

          I think another point I want to add is that you’re an outlier. Out of all my friends with iPhones and Android phones, they are not ripping roms and downloading their music from CDs.

          Normies are kinda dumb and don’t fully utilize their phones.

          These phones are geared towards those normies. Modern phone makers don’t consider you as part of their demographic.

          • @[email protected]
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            111 months ago

            Modern phone makers don’t consider you as part of their demographic.

            Ouch…fair, but ouch…

    • @[email protected]
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      711 months ago

      I still have an S9 with notification LED and expandable storage. I recently upgraded the SD card to 512gb.

      I live in fear of this phone dying, and me having to get something disappointing to replace it.

      • @[email protected]
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        111 months ago

        LG V60 is newer and has an SD slot. That was my last phone and I miss it so much. Next contenders are Motorola G Stylus or bite the bullet and get an Xperia 1 V or VI

      • @[email protected]
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        11 months ago

        performs secret S9 handshake

        Mine’s in a drawer with the battery removed. If I need a backup phone it’s always there. I upgraded about a year and a half ago to the S20FE as it was the most recent with expandable memory. I don’t hate it, but it’s certainly no where near as good for it’s time as the S9 was. My major gripe? The ringtone is so quiet that I often can’t hear it from my pocket in a silent room. Which is absolutely ridiculous as the speaker’s decently loud. The only way to make notification volume louder is to put a custom ROM on it. I’m perfectly happy to do that, just need to hold off until November when warranty ends, just in case something happens that isn’t my fault.

        Edit: goddamn I miss the notification LED…

  • @[email protected]
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    3711 months ago

    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.

    • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️
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      111 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      411 months ago

      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…

      • @[email protected]
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        111 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          111 months ago

          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.

    • @[email protected]
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      511 months ago

      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?

    • @[email protected]
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      1511 months ago

      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.

      • partial_accumen
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        611 months ago

        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. :)

  • @[email protected]
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    811 months ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    211 months ago

    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

  • dindonmasker
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    3111 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 months ago

      They aren’t that unreliable FWIW. Obviously, it should not be your only copy of media, but I have microSD cards that are still readable with data intact even 10, 11, or more years later.

      If you buy quality microSD cards, expect them to last a long time.

      • JustARegularNerd
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        1811 months ago

        I feel it’s worth mentioning the application of them also factors into their longevity.

        Good quality SD card holding some documents and random files? Yeah probably 10+ years. Good quality SD card being used in a dashcam, constant writes? I’m replacing my good SD card after about ~2 years of service because its showing signs of failure.

  • @[email protected]
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    4411 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      411 months ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    1211 months ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      211 months ago

      They’re slow as all hell, which is more pronounced the larger these are in capacity.
      You’re best of getting a tiny m.2 enclosure for something like that.

  • macniel
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    2611 months ago

    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?!

    • Zier
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      1511 months ago

      I want all my music on my phone, not just a pithy 80,000 songs.

      • Troy
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        211 months ago

        As a bandcamp flac lover, I concur. I’ve spent so much supporting small artists it’s actually insane. I make two copies after I download an album: one to giant memory stick which I can plug into entertainment systems and such, one to the microsd in my phone. I currently have 1TB microsd in my phone for this reason, but I can see it possibly running out one day :D

      • macniel
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        11 months ago

        That’s a lot of games/applications then, is the card reader fast enough though?

        • @[email protected]
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          411 months ago

          I’ve been using a 1tb sd card with mine and my steam library. Not any noticeable difference in speed between the internal ssd and micro sd.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 months ago

          I use mine exclusively for emulation and ROMs, entire libraries of every single game released for older systems. The SD card I have for that runs them fine without issue. Potentially with newer/bigger games you might come across issues, that I haven’t really done at all.

      • @[email protected]
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        511 months ago

        Luckily there is a m.2 slot in the deck 😉

        And in general as well, does it make more sense to use m.2 Type-2230 SSD instead of SD cards, these days. Way faster and way more robust.

        • @[email protected]
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          211 months ago

          As someone who did swap theor steam deck’s M.2, I really wish it were a 2280 instead since those drives can hold much more. The largest 2230 I could find was only 2 TB.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 months ago

          Not really super feasible for the average user to crack apart the plastic casing and reformat the new m.2 slot (since there is only one) with a new SteamOS partition.

          I think you’ll find 95% of all steam deck users will prefer popping in a microsd than ripping apart their deck and formatting/transferring in a new internal drive.

            • @[email protected]
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              411 months ago

              For you and me no it’s not too hard at all. But you and I aren’t the average consumer. The average consumer buys it and uses it like a console. To the average consumer, this is impossible. Very few people are going to open it up and conduct what they would consider computer surgery.

    • @[email protected]
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      711 months ago

      We say that about every tech capacity. No way anyone could ever use more than 1.44mb, oh man 2mb ram will be all I ever need etc.

    • Klopstock
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      411 months ago

      using less space for your storage is always better

    • @[email protected]
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      711 months ago

      Look, some people may have a porn collection that they need to backup and store “about their person” and this is the ideal way to do that.

      Don’t be kink shaming.

      • Zier
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        111 months ago

        By ‘some people’, you mean ‘all of us’. :)

  • @[email protected]
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    611 months ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 months ago

    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

      • @[email protected]
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        611 months ago

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

    • Nikita
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      2311 months ago

      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

      • @[email protected]
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        611 months ago

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

        • Uninvited Guest
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          911 months ago

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