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Data Storage Hardware

SanDisk's 1TB SD Card Aims To Solve Your Storage Problems (zdnet.com) 98

Posted by msmash from the enough-storage dept.
SanDisk has a new SD card which caught our attention today: a prototype card with a storage of 1TB of memory. The company says that 1TB card is necessary as we increasingly move to the world where more and more content in 4K and 8K become available. ZDNet adds: A few years ago it was inconceivable that anyone would want a 1TB storage card for their camera, but with the rise of 4K and 8K capture, as well as 360-degree video and VR, high-end professionals need all the storage they can get their hands on.
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SanDisk's 1TB SD Card Aims To Solve Your Storage Problems More

SanDisk's 1TB SD Card Aims To Solve Your Storage Problems

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  • Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! (Score:4, Funny)

    by eggstasy ( 458692 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @10:21AM (#52923887) Journal

    Old meme is old! XD

  • You know the saying (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @10:28AM (#52923949)

    Data will grow to fill the available storage space. My first HD had about 20 Megs of storage and was HUGE for its time, big enough to store everything, and then some. The 150 I had a while afterwards was "all you could ever need", and in the late 1990s the first Gigabyte HDs were sure to solve our storage problems.

    Guess what: None of them did. Not for long, at least. Data will grow.

  • What device can use 1Tb? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All of our phones and digital cameras have a maximum SD card limit, most 64Gb.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by NatasRevol ( 731260 )

      Uh, any computer with an SD slot, or USB to SD reader?

      It's not like there aren't already 128 & 256 GB SDs out there...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PRMan ( 959735 )
      Any SDXC device?

      • False. Many cameras only support cards up to a given size for some stupid reason, even if they support SD_C and SD_C supports a higher capacity.

        I also have encountered cameras that only support SD cards up to 2 GB (even though 4 GB and 8 GB cards exist and work elsewhere), yet support SDHC up to 32 GB.

        • p>I also have encountered cameras that only support SD cards up to 2 GB (even though 4 GB and 8 GB cards exist and work elsewhere), yet support SDHC up to 32 GB.

          The original SD standard only covers capacities up to 2GB. 4GB SD cards are using 64kiB clusters on FAT16B as a out-of-spec hack.

          8GB cards based on the SD standard aren't possible AFAIK, can you provide a link to such a card?

        • Saying something shouldn't have a size limit because it supports SD_C is nonsense. The whole point of the _ is that the limitations of the format and the way the standard was to interact with it dictated the ultimate size limit. SDHC places an upper limit of 32GB, SDXC has an upper limit of 2TB, so there's no reason to believe any device currently listed as being compatible with 64GB cards can't also read the 2TB versions because the actual card data is the same.

          That can not be said for SDHC. The introducti

    • Re:What device can use 1Tb? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Blaskowicz ( 634489 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @10:49AM (#52924103)

      Many phones have a posted maximum limit of 128GB or 200GB or 256GB, because there weren't any bigger SD card to test with.
      They may be expected to support up to the theoretical max of 2TB. The other common "hard" limit is 32GB.

      In fact, on socket 1366 motherboards (i7-920 and up) you have an official limit of 24GB RAM, but they can take up to 48GB RAM unofficially. Because 8GB sticks failed to not work, and Intel and motherboard manufacturers quietly decided to not update the docs.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        Similarly, my board is specced even now to have a maximum capacity of 16GB (4x4), but in the list of supported memory configurations which still gets updated every few months (kudos to Asus for doing this for a 6 year old mobo), there are a fair number of 4x8 configurations shown. When I upgraded from 8 to 16, I did so by adding a single 8. This means at least one of the sticks will carry over when I eventually max it out at 32. (I see no need to replace a CPU-mobo combo that runs with the mid-tier Core i5

        • Difference is pureley logical (Score:5, Informative)

          by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @02:50PM (#52926283) Homepage

          My general impression is that SDHC support implies SDXC support, even if it doesn't say so on the tin.

          Yup, unlike the plain old SD card format (which was limited to 1GB due to a small number of addressable blocks. Up to 4GB by using larger block), the protocol hasn't changed at all between SDHC and SDXC. The difference is purely software:
          SDHC are formatted with FAT32, whereas the SDXC standard mandates the use of exFAT. Which Microsoft has patented the shit out of.

          Any slot can access both SDHC and SDXC cards without any distinction.
          The limitation is at the *OS level*, and depends on whether the OS maker has paid the necessary patent tax to be able to access the logical content of the card: An SDXC slot is simply an SDHC slot on a device whose OS has a driver for exFAT in addition to FAT32, etc.

          You can use a SDXC card in any device advertised as SDHC-only only simply by :
          - installing an exFAT driver (e.g.: install FUSE-exFAT on Sailfish OS)
          - or reformatting the card with something that the OS supports out of the box. Some Android devices and photocamera will automatically give you the possibility to reformat the card. Other device (like Nintendo's New 3DS) will require you to manually reformat the card using a separate device before plugging in.

          The size will have absolutely NO influence. (Again, that's unlike plain SD card, which use an older protocol that can only reference a smaller number of blocsk)

          They often come up well short of the rated speed of the SD media, but they still work.

          And that has nothing to do with SDHC/SDXC format or the size.
          That's basically similar to all the various UDMA mode available on older IDE (parallel ATA), 16bit PC-Card and Compact Flash cards.
          There are several different speed protocols available for SD cards.
          On your device, the SDXC card fall back to older and slower speeds (Class-10, class-6, etc.), whereas the SDXC could have supported a faster one (UHS-1, UHS-3) had the reader had it too.

          At least that's the theory, when writing on a plain empty card.

          In practice, as there are already data on the card, it is limited mostly by the read-erase-write cycles and various wear-levelling tricks.
          (So it's mostly due to an interaction between the file system used by the OS and the firmware running on the SD card.
          - With Log-Structured and Copy-on-Write filesystems like UDF, F2FS, BTRFS, ZFS being better than classical FAT32.
          - And SD cards capable to handle many allocation units in RAM at the same time performing better)

      • The other common "hard" limit is 32GB.

        That one is a software limitation.

        "SDHC" cards go up to 32GB
        "SDXC" start from 64GB

        There's no pinout nor SPI difference between the 2.
        The only difference is a logical one.

        SDHC cards come pre-formatted with FAT32.
        SDXC cards come pre-formatted with exFAT, and Microsoft has patented the shit out of it.
        So unless the company has paid money to Microsoft, they can't use exFAT and can only advertise "up to 32GB SDHC cards".

        But nothing prevents you to buy a 128GB SDXC and :
        - either install a FUSE-exFAT driver on your

    • All of our phones and digital cameras have a maximum SD card limit, most 64Gb.

      SD is limited to 2 GB, SDHC to 32 GB, and SDXC to 2 TB. Aren't standards great?

      • Except 4 GB and 8 GB SD cards were made (and they worked if the device wasn't retarded), and today most devices supporting SDXC won't support a 2 TB card. Typical upper limits are 64 GB, 128 GB, 200 GB, and 256 GB. A while back I was looking at a 200 GB card (before the 256 GB cards came out) but realized the intended device would only support 128. And yes, reviews confirmed that it wasn't just official support, it was actual support.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      All of our phones and digital cameras have a maximum SD card limit, most 64Gb.

      There are two known limits to SD cards.

      First is the standard old SD card - FAT16 formatted, up to 2GB. Then there's SDHC, FAT32 formatted, up to 32GB.

      For larger cards, there's SDXC, which uses exFAT and has a 2TB limit. 128GB cards are common today, and if you can take 64GB, you can take this card as your device is SDXC compatible.

      Some SD cards were 4GB using the SD method, which was a very creative way of interpreting the standar

      • You can format these things however you want. 4 GB SD cards were common before SDHC took off. I've even seen 8 GB cards, but I don't know how they worked internally. Probably arranged as 2 4 GB cards.

      • Why don't they just format these cards to NTFS/HPFS/ext4 or whichever default file system there is of the systems using them?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by steveg ( 55825 )

      My phone has a 128G card in it right now. My boss got a phone earlier this year that had a 200G card in it.

  • 1 PB card coming soon. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    And you will fillit with porn.

  • I actually use SD cards with a proper USB reader as a USB Stick because when the cards become too small to be useful, they get re-purposed for something else instead of going into the trash. Also you are slightly less likely to destroy the data on it if you manage to break the USB reader unlike a USB Stick which I've seen folks snap off which requires some decent soldering skills to fix. A 1TB card would be pretty cool.

    On the downside thou what's this crazy 1TB SD card going to cost? I can't imagine it's

  • Read/write speed? (Score:3)

    by dfm3 ( 830843 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @10:39AM (#52924023) Journal
    Maybe I missed this, but do they give any indication of whether speeds will be on par with the other cards in their Extreme Pro [sandisk.com] line? Having dabbled quite a bit in digital photography, I've been in situations where even 90 MB/s is enough of a bottleneck that the camera can't store images as fast as it can capture them. In sports or wildlife photography, shooting 4-5 images a second in raw format, with file sizes being in the 20-30 MB range, fast write speeds are critical. I ended up ditching all of my older, slower SD cards because having to wait 2-3 seconds for each image to save (once the camera's buffer was full) is painful.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Would you be in the market even if it did? At 20-30MB per photo 500GB is 20,000 photos which seems rather extreme in one session. Even for recording video this seems like major overkill, at UHD/60fps @ 150 Mbps which is the most bandwidth hungry I've seen to date is 70GB/hour which should be enough to record a whole concert and then some. And most pro cameras come with dual SD slots and continuous recording so all you need to do is swap cards every once in a while to film 24x7, assuming you can't take a min

  • Call me when this is in micro sd form. What handheld devices use SD cards? Palm OS and Windows Mobile? Photographers will see this as a god send.

    • God seems to send mostly tsunami and higher property taxes.

      And filling my 64gb card with photos is already more than I can do, or want to do -- that's a lot of risk in one tiny bit of "eventually it will fail" technology.

      But perhaps those who use their cameras for video will appreciate this, particularly when 4k is used. That crap uses memory like no still photo process EVAR.

  • ... What one's storage problems are.

    For example if ones storage problems are that they have difficulty affording to buy all of the storage they need, the I think it is unlikely that this card would solve that problem.

  • ...but with the rise of 4K and 8K capture, as well as 360-degree video and VR, high-end professionals need all the storage they can get their hands on.

    At least we know that there is an upper bound. I seem to recall some computer guy a few years ago saying that 640K should be enough for anyone. So, once we hit that, we're good!

  • With my Olympus DSLR I shoot entirely in RAW, using 16G SD cards. Three of these held an entire recent cross-country hike.

    Just running a quick calculation, a 1T card would hold just about every picture I have ever shot and kept. But other than as a tertiary backup there is no circumstance in which I would actually want to do that, even for a single trip.

    • Reread the summary, please, and think about how much 4K and 8K video you shot during that cross-country hike.

      I remember when I could fit days of photos on a 256 megabyte card -- at a couple of hundred kilobytes per photo. Increasing resolution, raw capture, HDR, high-frame-rate video -- there are lots of reasons to want even more than a terabyte. There are quite a few things that I'd love to shoot in 4K at 1000fps or faster. The sensor and readout/storage technology to support that is too expensive right no

    • But it does mean that you can store your entire collection on a second (or third) SD card, which fits in the smallest of bank safe boxes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shinobi ( 19308 )

      I've been considering buying a Lightfield camera. This card would be a good start for such a camera, assuming it has at least 100MiB/s transfer rate.

  • Does this mean I can have a 2 TB M.2 2242 SSD now? (Effectively one of these on each side of the board.)

  • You keep using that word... (Score:3)

    by Maritz ( 1829006 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @11:28AM (#52924431)

    A few years ago it was inconceivable that anyone would want a 1TB storage card

    Nope. Lemme just say now, I can conceive of a 1 PB storage card. Hell, gimme 1 EB. That'll keep you busy a while til you get to the next 'inconceivable'.

  • Not if you're a dumb ass Apple customer it won't.
    It needed to be said.

    • Actually, you can find microSD card readers that plug into the Lightning port of the iPhone. So you could in theory use a 1TB card with them on an iPhone.

      And never the less, these cards target video/photo hardware.
      So it will get plugged in the camera itself (which certainly has a SD card port), and very likely has p-2-p Wifi connection to directly upload the pictures and videos to smartphones and laptops.

      So, for the specific use case for which this hardware was developped, Apple hardware isn't at a disadvan

  • With more and more smartphone manufacturers removing the SD card slot and making their batteries non-removable in the attempt to mimic Apple's iPhone, we are going to be at their mercy for storage space.

  • Link to the actual press release [sandisk.com] instead of the ZDnet whoring link.

  • From cheap, to high end SanDisk cards, I have had 100% failure rate within 2 years. My dad has bought some SanDisk cards and I think 1 made it to 3 years. The only other card that I've had die so quickly was the 1 Duracell SD card I bought.

  • I'm sure the MPAA would like to know where SanDisk's customers are getting all this 4K and 8K content that needs to be stored on a portable device.

  • For the Write Only model!

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