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Data Storage Hardware Technology

128TB SD Cards Are Coming (theverge.com) 175

Posted by BeauHD from the brace-yourselves dept.
A new card specification has been announced by the SD Association that should let you store your entire media collection on one SD card. Technically speaking, the new card specification should increase maximum storage on SD cards to 128 terabytes with faster transfer speeds of 985 megabytes per second. The Verge reports: Right now the maximum storage space on an SD card is 2TB, and that limit was promised as far back as 2009, but still hasn't been reached. In 2016, SanDisk unveiled a prototype 1 terabyte SD card that would make it the biggest in the world, but it's still not available to purchase. At the time, SanDisk said that the advancement was necessary to match ever-increasing data-heavy formats like 4K video and VR. However, creating SD cards with massive amounts of storage is cost-prohibitive. SanDisk's 512GB SD card used to cost $800, and though it's dropped in price, is still priced around $300.
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128TB SD Cards Are Coming More

128TB SD Cards Are Coming

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  • Coming or not? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by manu0601 ( 2221348 ) on Thursday June 28, 2018 @05:56PM (#56862246)
    If I read the summary correctly, we are far from having even a dozen terrabyte on a SD. Title is badly chosen.
    • Correct. The standard allows for those specs, but no product with anything close to those specs exists.

      Lots of other stuff is coming too!

      • So true, 128TB cards could be ten years away, how dare anybody plan for it now.

        • The 2TB limit was done nearly 10 years ago, still no one has made a 2TB card.

          • Good thing somebody was on the ball. The market is full of 512gb memory cards right now, how far away do you think 2TB is?

            • 2TB is probably 5-8 years away.
            • But has anybody ever needed more than that in one's phone or tablet or camera? Also, even in Android 6 and beyond, even if one formats an SD card as internal memory, there are still certain apps - particularly system apps, that will insist on being on the physical internal storage, and won't touch the SD card. Storage companies are far better off selling Apple, Samsung, et al high density NOR flash ranging from 64GB to 512GB, thereby eliminating any storage issues for devices

              • But has anybody ever needed more than that in one's phone or tablet or camera?

                Yes.

              • By the way, that "physical internal storage" you speak of is typically just a SD card with BGA instead of pins.

              • Re:Storage issues (Score:5, Insightful)

                by edwdig ( 47888 ) on Thursday June 28, 2018 @11:06PM (#56863418)

                Think pro-photographers in multi-hour photo sessions with high res cameras.

                Think people recording 4K video.

                Think gamers on a Nintendo Switch that prefer downloading their games.

                As storage options get larger, people find ways to use the extra space.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by N1AK ( 864906 )
                  I record 4K video and I can't see any of those examples you come up with justifying the need for more than 2TB of data on a single SD card. Obviously that doesn't mean that uses for that amount of data won't come along though. Having said that, one of the biggest issue with SD for video recording and photography isn't storage (A 2TB card could hold 60-100k raw images) but IO. This standard looks like it could be useful in the near future for use cases where the write speeds of U3, V60, and V90 cards are pro

                  • Re: (Score:1)

                    by K10W ( 1705114 )

                    I record 4K video and I can't see any of those examples you come up with justifying the need for more than 2TB of data on a single SD card. Obviously that doesn't mean that uses for that amount of data won't come along though. Having said that, one of the biggest issue with SD for video recording and photography isn't storage (A 2TB card could hold 60-100k raw images) but IO. This standard looks like it could be useful in the near future for use cases where the write speeds of U3, V60, and V90 cards are problematic. Having said that the 128TB limit does seem rather pointless (but I suppose there's no harm). I doubt we'll see 10TB+ cards before 2030 which means it may have been better to wait to create a standard nearer to when it is useful. An obvious issue would be that even at the 985 megabyte transfer speed isn't going to be viable even at 16TB (where it would take 4.5 hours to fully read/write) let alone 128TB.

                    Consumer type 4K wont need that extra space, pro implimentation tends to several times the size of equivalent files from a consumer unit. Compare your average consumer device "4k" to higher settings UHD from a pro device such as prores 4444xq 12bit and you'll find it will chew through space much faster. Industry oft need raw UHD for post processing reasons but they wont ever be recording to SD so you're right, the only folks who'd possibly use it wont need any such size and the ones who would use the size a

                • Measly 4K video? 8K cameras and displays already exist. So far they all have to record to external recorders because SD cards aren't big or fast enough, but this standard will make it possible once the technology to make those larger cards is ready

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by K10W ( 1705114 )

                  Think pro-photographers in multi-hour photo sessions with high res cameras.

                  Think people recording 4K video.

                  Those pros will be using CFast setup or tethering to external storage not a solo SD card setup for that. Plus for multi hour sessions not just pros but serious hobbyists/amateurs like myself wont put all eggs in one basket and use several cards plus tether (or use external storage made for hooking up to cam). Pro cameras tend to be multi card and SD storage is not the primary choice in those and if present is the backup slot, most pros I know who'd use one storage source on extended shoot (eg. not your aver

            • The market is full of 512gb memory cards right now, how far away do you think 2TB is?

              From whom ?
              From asian noname companies on ebay and aliexpress, that sell you a card that will fail horrifically after a couple of weeks of use (or doesn't even actually contain the advertised amount of flash [digirati.com.br] and will corrupt its own data).

              From reputable brands that feature all type of wear levelling including passive, uses ECC to recover from corruption, etc ?
              Some of the most reputable brands haven't even moved to the 512 GB bandwagon yet.

              As density increase (and thus feature size miniaturizes) and as techn

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by jabuzz ( 182671 )

                A quick check on amazon.co.uk shows that I can get from Amazon themselves 512GB SD cards from SanDisk, Kingston and PNY.

                You can also get from SanDisk a 400GB microSD card, and Integral do a 512GB microSD, though I am not sure the uplift in price from 400GB is worth it.

                Can't see anything from Samsung on a quick Google, but 512GB is a thing, though I guess demand is quite limited.

                I have 32GB onboard on my phone and a 128GB card for all my audiobooks and photos/videos. Nice to see the price for higher capaciti

                • ECC (Score:2)

                  by DrYak ( 748999 )

                  A quick check on amazon.co.uk shows that I can get from Amazon themselves 512GB SD cards from SanDisk, Kingston and PNY.

                  A more thorough check would have made you notice that none of these (nor Samsung) does feature ECC recovery on their *consumer* cards.
                  If you read the fine print, it's even worse. Even the "endurance" and "action cam" range of consumer product aren't actually recommended for continuous writing (you voided your warranty by putting into a continuously writing device a card that was exactly marketed for that ?!?)

                  You would need to go to the (much more expensive) *industrial* range of card to actually find ECC an

                • If it's possible to make 400GB and 512GB microSD cards, it should be possible to make full size SD cards that are significantly larger. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason they don't exist (SanDisk demoed a 1GB SD card but hasn't put it into production) is that the current cards are too slow for most of the use cases that would actually need more capacity and be willing to pay for it, like professional videographers. If that's true we will see 1GB and perhaps even 2GB SD cards shortly after this standard

            • Full?
              If you take Sandisk for example, they have 512GB SD cards, but they're slow.
              They have a 95MB/s read speed Extreme Pro card that only supports UHS-I. They only guarantee sustained sequential writing of 30MB/s
              Their largest UHS-II card is 128GB

          • The 2TB limit was done nearly 10 years ago, still no one has made a 2TB card.

            Just wait until there is 2TB of porn.

        • So true, 128TB cards could be ten years away, how dare anybody plan for it now.

          Somehow you read from my post that we shouldn't plan for them? Amazing. I had no idea that is what I meant.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        8K will do its best to help with that.

    • "That's a Lot Of Pornography!"

    • With the advent of 64bit addressing we are at the dawn of a new age - computers with 16,777,216TB or RAM are coming!

    • mh ... "could" ... 1tb just released as a prototype so that should take about the time it took the 600mb cd to go to bluray size only and also ... "where did i leave that thing", i cant find it ? did the dog swallow it ? "did you vacuum the place, dear ?" that's a LOT of data in one small spot

  • Going to be a long while before we can get even close to the SD form factor holding 128 TB

  • Prices (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Thursday June 28, 2018 @06:01PM (#56862276)
    I would just like to see prices fall on SSDs to the same level as regular hard drives. SSDs are still kind of expensive.
    • My guess is that they probably won't anytime soon. Not necessarily because it's impossible, but simply because they're the premium hard drive product and will be priced in such a way. Perhaps once they have sufficient capacity to supplant spinning disks in even the entry level bargain PCs and notebooks, the price difference between the two will erode further, but I don't think there are enough companies manufacturing the NAND flash memory to really drive prices down through competition and the biggest playe [bit-tech.net]

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        It's called patents, artificial inflation of profit margins by corrupt corporations and governments, expect patent duration to be extended probably fifty years, corrupt government and the current one certainly is that, will deliver to the corporations regardless of the harm caused, psychopaths will be psychopaths.

        • I don't think any one company owns enough patents related to NAND to prevent anyone from making it if they wanted to. Typically, companies get together and create a patent pool that offers FRAND licensing terms so anyone can pay, and everyone pays the same price. A company which owns some of those patents might have an edge since they're paying themselves in part. The real cost savings will be on the production side so if you can make a better fabrication process with lower defects and better yields, you'll

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Actually it's due to increasing demand for flash memory. Phones, computers, smart devices like TVs and speakers, car infotainment systems, SD cards and more all use larger and larger amounts of flash memory.

          It's expensive and difficult to set up new factories to compete with the established ones making 3D NAND flash on cutting edge processes, so there isn't enough competition to offset the demand and keep prices falling.

          Same thing happened with RAM. Demand from phones in particular made the price go up a lo

      • There is a lot of competition in the SSD space, and prices are falling faster than HDD. But spinning magnetic media is still cheaper to produce per bit, but a factor of 7-8 or so now. That is a lot of gap close even in just the last year. Eventually, SSD will take so much market away from HDD that economies of scale will weaken. They already have, actually.

        It is possible that prices will eventually reach parity, but more likely they will just keep getting asymptotically closer for the next decade or two. Bu

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The holdouts are just ultra cheap laptops and desktops

          I mean, maybe, but I bought a cheap HP Stream 11 a year or two ago. 4 GB RAM, 64 GB MMC. Not fast. Not a big screen. Not a great laptop. But it was $200, and it's extremely lightweight. So... if even the $200 machines have given up spinning rust, how much place does it really still have for that use case? Spinning rust is for bulk storage, because it's still loads cheaper for big drives, but practically speaking, the entire market is booting off SSD's.

          • I mean, maybe, but I bought a cheap HP Stream 11 a year or two ago. 4 GB RAM, 64 GB MMC. Not fast. Not a big screen. Not a great laptop. But it was $200, and it's extremely lightweight. So... if even the $200 machines have given up spinning rust, how much place does it really still have for that use case?

            Couldn't be bothered to go on Amazon or Newegg and see what is actually being sold? OK, you blathered on about what you bought and you have plenty of company. But as of today, your basic cheap laptop has a 1TB spinning disk. Go cheap than that and you find Chromebooks, that's about it. A Chromebook is not normally considered a laptop.

            Everybody knows that hard disks will be disappearing from laptops sooner or later, but as of today it has not happened. By the way, it's a stretch to call an 11" machine a lapt

            • By the way, it's a stretch to call an 11" machine a laptop. Notebook at best.

              Except that an 11.6" laptop running Windows or X11/Linux is designed to work well offline, as opposed to a Chromebook that is intended to be tethered to Wi-Fi or used with a subscription to a cellular ISP. I'm waiting for general availability of Crostini, a forthcoming feature of Chrome OS to let it run GNU without first being put in self-destruct mode [slashdot.org], before buying my own Chromebook.

        • Re:Prices (Score:4, Informative)

          by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday June 28, 2018 @09:35PM (#56863202)
          It's important to differentiate between the companies that make and sell SSDs and the companies that manufacture the NAND flash memory that is used in SSDs. In the case of the first, there is significantly more competition, but there aren't as many companies that actually make the NAND and it's those that have been accused of price fixing and possibly other anti-competitive behavior.

          I also expect that part of the reason SSD prices are falling faster relative to HDD prices is that the bare minimum material cost for an HDD is more expensive. An SSD is just a cheap enclosure around a bunch of NAND flash chips on a board with connectors, an embedded processor, and a few other components that are relatively inexpensive and subject to price decreases as a result of Moore's law. The enclosure for the HDD is more sturdy and made of more expensive materials and other parts that have more of a fixed cost that holds stable.

          One advantage that SSDs have is that NAND manufacturers have been willing to move from SLC/MLC NAND as used in the initial SSDs to TLC and now even QLC NAND, which has greatly increased the storage capacity of SSDs and even allows for greater capacity than you can get in an HDD assuming you're willing to pay the obscene costs. This does come at the expense of longevity as you get fewer program-erase cycles when using more bits per cell. For most consumers this doesn't matter as they're unlikely to hit those limits and any SSD is going to be a major speed improvement over an HDD.

          I do agree that HDD will likely be relegated to backup and archival purposes. I don't have many computers left that aren't using an SSD for their main drive and I can't see myself using anything but an SSD as a primary in future builds.

          • I don't put in traditional SSD any more either, I don't know about you but it's been M.2 for me in everything except legacy upgrades. I suppose you can loosely call that SSD, but it isn't really, it is a block device but it is not SATA. Goodbye disk, it's no longer trying to act like one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I would just like to see prices fall on SSDs to the same level as regular hard drives. SSDs are still kind of expensive.

      Depends on whether your glass is half full or half empty, SSDs are way cheaper than HDDs a few decades ago. I'm thinking if we could magically make SSDs 10x cheaper, why not HDDs too? Then instead of 512GB SSDs and 4TB HDDs we could have 4TB SSDs and 32TB HDDs. I mean there's always a market for cheap bulk storage as long as there's significant savings. It's pretty much perfect for a video library with 99% sequential access, putting it on an SSD doesn't really add any value at all.

      • It's pretty much perfect for a video library with 99% sequential access, putting it on an SSD doesn't really add any value at all.

        Except for convenience to carry around. Many smaller laptops don't have enough internal space for both an NVMe SSD and a SATA HDD. So you'd need a SATA SSD and some sort of external enclosure for your HDD.

    • At any given point in time, SSDs are more desirable than HDDs on many axes except capacity. Why would you expect the market clearing price to be lower?

  • What nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday June 28, 2018 @06:04PM (#56862292) Homepage

    That's like saying with 64-bit computers we'd get 16 exabyte (that's 2^32 * 4GB) of RAM. Sure there's addressing space but it won't happen now and quite possibly never. It's probably good to keep the spec a bit in front of what's realistic though.

    • I was rather amused to read the RISC-V processor whitepaper, and apparently they've designed the processor to (optionally) support 128-bit memory address space. They figure it'll be necessary for supercomputers to support spaces that big by 2030 or something.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        It's not necessarily addressable space (there are less than 2e128 atoms in the Universe) but bus width. We already have 192 bit busses on GPU today.

        • If I read the spec correctly, they were indeed talking about address space, not bus width or SIMD.

          RISC-V is clever in some ways, but pretty bonkers in others.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Last I read, there were 10e80 atoms in the observable universe. 2e128 is 41 orders of magnitude smaller than that.

    • In 2004 there was a discussion here at ./ with the topic 12GB CompactFlash Cards Coming Soon [slashdot.org]. There somebody wrote [slashdot.org]: Really, I know there are a few niche applications for that much space in compact flash, but where's the real market for these? Aren't most pros still using film, making the ammount of people willing to spend that much money on a CF card even smaller? Discuss.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Got it three months ago and it's so big that my phone is like all getting confused and messing things up.

    • I've got a magic magnetick-repellant sticker that you can put on your phone, it will both keep the card confusion away and protect you from the evil mind-controlling microwaves. PM me and I'll send my new e-bay coordinates.

      I can also get you incredible rebates on Monster Cables.

      ---

      Seriously, for people being actually victim of the scam about which the above poster jokes : use F3Tools [digirati.com.br] to detect and file a complain and ask a refund with the online shop (ali express, ebay, etc.)

  • Older Dell laptops like the Latitudes can accept an SD card so that it doesn't stick out, but newer laptops, including Apples, they stick out about a 1/3 of the size of the card so they constantly get damaged and/or damage the slot. How about making damn cards that fit before changing standards to support cards that don't exist yet?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crow ( 16139 )

      This!

      Actually, all I want is a micro-SD slot. In my old laptop, I had a micros-SD adapter that I kept in the SD slot. My new laptop would leave it sticking out. Not good.

      I know space is at a premium in laptops, and my new Dell is every bit as sexy as an Apple laptop, but couldn't they spare a few more cubic millimeters?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Older Dell laptops like the Latitudes can accept an SD card so that it doesn't stick out, but newer laptops, including Apples, they stick out about a 1/3 of the size of the card so they constantly get damaged and/or damage the slot. How about making damn cards that fit before changing standards to support cards that don't exist yet?

      Because you're not suppose to use those slots for permanent extended storage. They're not usually on a good interface ( USB3 typically) or dreadfully slow.

      They're a convenience s

      • They're a convenience slot - you use it to take the card from your camera and copying the photos off it, then putting the card back on it.

        I don't see the "convenience" in the operating system holding some file open and thereby not letting the user unmount the card.

  • This will hold 6,740,000 still pix on my Olympus (Score:5, Funny)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Thursday June 28, 2018 @08:02PM (#56862862)

    If I shoot one picture a minute 365/24, it will take me just under thirteen years to fill up one of these cards. Now that's what I would call a photo trip.

    Unfortunately, I would then have to spend 39 years in Lightroom Classic editing this set of pictures. My wife will kill me, especially when she has to sit through the slideshow later.

    • There's an easy solution to this. Tell your wife that if she wants to see you some more then you need to upgrade to a Nikon D850. That way you will only have space for 1,280,000 still files, it will only take you 2.5 years to shoot, and you'll only be locked in the study with Lightroom for 7.5 years.

      Consider it the golden anniversary present for her, ... since you'll actually have time your golden anniversary this way. :)

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      My wife will kill me, especially when she has to sit through the slideshow later.

      Nah. You'll still only have four you want to keep.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I guess they are aimed at people shooting 8k video. Currently there are some proprietary formats for 8k cameras. Red make some that are SSD based but they only manage about 250MB/sec read speeds so take a while to transfer the footage to the editing machine.

      Linus Tech Tips did a video about it recently. You might think 250MB/sec is pretty fast but when you are shooting 8k video every single day it becomes a bit of a bottleneck. And also, it's expensive because it's Red's proprietary format.

      This is one of th

  • Assuming I did my math correctly, 128 TB at 985 Mb/second is 1.5 days to read the entire card (and I'm guessing writing would be slower). That seems awfully slow (or at least should be by the time 128 TB becomes reality).

  • M.2 NVMe SSD (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why not just go for M.2 2230 instead of SD-cards? SD-card is 24x32mm, so it is actually bigger. And M.2 SSDs can be gotten in reasonably large sizes while being much more reliable (number of writes) compared to an SD-card. SD-cards reach up to 3W and the maximum for the NVMe spec is 7W (while actual SSDs like WD Black are rated at 135 mW), so power consumption is probably not a big factor either (especially considering the SSD will finish 20 times faster and go to idle).

    • Why not just go for M.2 2230 instead of SD-cards? SD-card is 24x32mm, so it is actually bigger.

      Presumably because the M.2 family are designed for internal use and the SD card is designed for external use.

  • Redudancy (Score:3)

    by should_be_linear ( 779431 ) on Friday June 29, 2018 @02:08AM (#56863830)
    I would prefer it to be 5TB card with lots of redundancy using remaining 123TB, so that data would persist hundreds of years on average. I don't think my family will create more then 5TB of data in our entire lifetime anyway.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Even if you have that much redundant flash memory it does nothing to handle controller failure. The only way to get multiple redundant controllers is multiple cards.

      This is one reason why people use BluRay for archival storage. The storage media is separate from the reader electronics and you only need to preserve one. They are also immune to electrical problems like static damage and don't use undocumented, proprietary data formats.

  • Wonderful. Now make a 1 TB SSD affordable and cut the price fixing crap.
  • Yeah, in 20 years. 128TB will be the maximum addressable memory in the spec. By then, the world will be run by a single raspberry PI running MultiVac.
  • The original SD cards maxed out at 2 GB. Next, SDHC at 32 GB and later SDXC at 2 TB. The article talks about the next iteration called SDUC. Ah, the joys of mechanically compatible but ever so slightly different standards.

  • You remove said 128TB card from your computer. Being the butter-fingers that you are, you drop it on the floor. While trying to find it, you roll over it with your office chair thus breaking it in half.

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