15 Years After Announcing the 1GB SD Card, Lexar Unveils 1TB SD Card (theverge.com) 81
Lexar has just unveiled the first commercially available 1-terabyte SD card. "Lexar's Professional 633x line of SDHC and SDXC UHS-I cards [...] is now listed for sale in capacities from 16GB all the way up to the flagship 1TB," reports The Verge. "That card claims read speeds of up to 95MB/s and write speeds of 70MB/s, though it's only rated as V30/U3, which guarantees sustained write performance of 30MB/s." Unfortunately, you'll pay a premium price of $499.99 for the new 1TB SD card, which is more than the cost of two 512GB cards. Still, the convenience may be worth it.
Joey Lopez, Senior Marketing Manager of Lexar, said in a statement: "Almost fifteen years ago, Lexar announced a 1GB SD card. Today, we are excited to announce 1TB of storage capacity in the same convenient form factor. As consumers continue to demand greater storage for their cameras, the combination of high-speed performance with a 1TB option now offers a solution for content creators who shoot large volumes of high-resolution images and 4K video."
Joey Lopez, Senior Marketing Manager of Lexar, said in a statement: "Almost fifteen years ago, Lexar announced a 1GB SD card. Today, we are excited to announce 1TB of storage capacity in the same convenient form factor. As consumers continue to demand greater storage for their cameras, the combination of high-speed performance with a 1TB option now offers a solution for content creators who shoot large volumes of high-resolution images and 4K video."
400GB for 88 dollars, who cares about the premium? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sandisk has out 400GB for 88 dollars now, although I imagine they are much lower sustained write speeds.
But really, who cares about the price premium if you need these capacities in that formfactor?
We're talking about the equivalent of a 1TB 2.5"/3.5" hard disk (that costs ~50 dollars) in the formfactor of a THUMBNAIL, for only 10x the cost. That by itself is insanely impressive.
Given the scale out discussed for the next few years, we can only expect capacities to continue increasing as well. If they can ge
Available for years on E-bay and Amazon (Score:5, Funny)
What's the fuss. They have been selling 1TB cards on ebay and amazon for years now,.
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What's the fuss. They have been selling 1TB cards on ebay and amazon for years now,.
Some of them were probably real, too.
Lol, seriously though, bogus SD cards on Amazon and eBay are endemic; I only buy from a brand name manufacturer (e.g. Sandisk, Samsung, Kingston, etc) and I do a full R/W test on the card as soon as I get it.
If you buy a 256GB SD card for $4.99 on Amazon or eBay, you won't get a 256GB card. You'll get something that identifies itself as 256GB card but is really a 8 or 16GB card that's had the firmware fiddled with.
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Pretty much all M.2 SSDs from major brands are M.2 2280 , so slightly narrower than a SD card but over twice as long.
congrats to lexar (Score:1)
Whine all you want about the utility / cost of this. It's still cool as hell.
Moore's law confirmed (Score:4, Interesting)
Fifteen years, that is about 10 18 month doubling periods.
Ten doublings gets you about a 1000X increase, so Moore would have predicted an increase in density of 1000, and that what you can buy !
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Moore's law is not dead, it just never had anything to do with performance. Fortunately for Flash doubling of transistors literally means doubling the size of the card.
How long will you have to watch vacation pics... (Score:3)
I mean, the technology is great, but it should come with some mandatory training on how to delete all the crappy shots that no one wants to watch anyway
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How long will you have to watch vacation pics... [sic] ... at your friend's home after they returned with a full SD card?
I mean, the technology is great, but it should come with some mandatory training on how to delete all the crappy shots that no one wants to watch anyway ;-)
Pictures? 1 TB is enough to store over a week of 1080p video. You can watch the entire vacation!
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What's 1080p video? The camera I bought for $300 5 years ago does 4K.
Re:How long will you have to watch vacation pics.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, a high-res file (40-50 MP) is typically around 50MB compressed RAW. So ~20000 photos. If you say maybe 3 seconds between each in a slide show that's ~60000 seconds so ~17 hours. Though honestly if you're doing photos you can just offload those any time you take a little break. I expect this will be used for extremely long continuous video shoots, like if you're doing 400 Mbps all-I like some cameras offer now you'll get ~6 hours. But let's be honest, you're either going to flee or strangle them in the end so just bail immediately.
Re:How long will you have to watch vacation pics.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like the 256GiB and 512GiB cards changed usage patterns for those of us who snap a lot of photos, so will this card. Like you say, you can take long high-quality recordings, and still fit a lot of still images.
For example, a few years back, I filled up multiple 128GiB cards with photos and recordings of the 6 Hours of Spa weekend(and let me tell you, trying to take good photos of cars going 250km/h or more is not easy, hence a lot of 15-20 image sequences etc). Just needing 1 card for the weekend will be nice.
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6 Hours of Spa weekend
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The weekend is not just about the 6 hour race, but the support races, qualifying, open pitlane, meeting drivers and other fans etc
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But if you're only watching a photo for 3 seconds, you might as well use high def JPG instead of RAW, and fit 10 times as many pictures on there.
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... at your friend's home after they returned with a full SD card?
I mean, the technology is great, but it should come with some mandatory training on how to delete all the crappy shots that no one wants to watch anyway ;-)
SD cards have uses outside of home photography.
I've run fleets of vehicles with dashcams before. a 128GB card can hold about 20 hours of 1080p footage, given that these vehicles are in use 10-12 hours a day, we rely on drivers manually pressing a button to preserve footage of any incidents. It would be better if we could just keep up to a weeks worth of footage. Headless servers are another popular use, have ESXi, Linux binaries or whatever OS installed on a small SD card and keep your data/programs/VM's o
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... at your friend's home after they returned with a full SD card?
Not long. With cheaparse GoPros shooting 4K at 60FPS that 1TB barely gets you through a single battery charge.
More Amazing than Any Other PC Aspect (Score:3)
Then came 2.5" form factor, the various types of slash memory, etc. But SecureDigital... wow. One terabyte on an SD card?
Processor speed, ya, cool. But storage... wow!
Re:More Amazing than Any Other PC Aspect (Score:5, Interesting)
If I'd told my first boss that three decades later, we could store a terabyte on something the size of my pinky nail, he'd have laughed at me and accused me of making up the word "Terabyte."
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You must have a very large pinky (these are SD cards, not micro-SD), mr Hulk.
Anyhow, to put it in perspective, in my first job, we used punch cards. Up to 80 7-bit characters per card. A big box of 2000 cards could hold a little over 136 kB.
My first personal computer, I bought a 20 MB Winchester hard drive for, and didn't know what to do with all that space. I ran a BBS on it, but there was plenty of unused space.
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I bought a 20 MB Winchester hard drive for, and didn't know what to do with all that space.
For the youngsters here, that was before you could download basically unlimited amounts of porn, free, off the internet.
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Typically you had pirated games and occasionally other software like Norton Utilities.
[John]
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If I'd told my first boss that three decades later, we could store a terabyte on something the size of my pinky nail, he'd have laughed at me and accused me of making up the word "Terabyte."
I was with my dad at IBM in the 80s and they had like all the brochures so I remember reading about their biggest enterprise storage solution that could go up to 6 TB if you had a kazillion dollars and a football field for the racks. This was a time with 5 1/4" floppies and like 10 MB HDDs, so a gigabyte was comprehensible but a terabyte... it was like infinity plus one. Today I got a single HDD bigger than that, it's actually rather insane. Though I'd probably be more freaked about the Internet, I mean bac
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Then came 2.5" form factor, the various types of slash memory, etc. But SecureDigital... wow. One terabyte on an SD card?
More impressive to me are the 400GB and 500GB microSD cards out there.
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I stared out with an Atari 800 and then bought a cheap clone PC-XT. Then a PC-AT 286. Then a 386.
I remember paying ~$200 for a single fucking megabyte of RAM in (8 16-pin DIP chips) and at the time you couldn't do a single goddamn thing with that much RAM except make a big-ass ramdisk. And that was fucking useless too.
I think I paid about $400 for my first 20 megabyte hard drive. Megabyte, not gigabyte. At the time, the idea of owning a actual gigabyte of hard drive space was about the same as owning your o
Beats Moore's law nicely (Score:2)
By a full two to three years
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Lexar card are crap, I agree. The only SD Cards I've ever had fail on me is Lexar.
Petyabyte in 15 years (Score:3)
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Call me when we can do a single library-of-congress on one of these.
Floppy (Score:2)
Thirty years ago, we had 1.44MB floppies. This fifteen year to 1024-fold increase correspondence holds up.
is it crash proof? (Score:2)
So, add to the $500 cost of this device another $1,000 for your minimal backup system. Back up to a 2nd unit, then back that up to another. Keep them up-to-date. Keep one in a safe remote location. Reasonably safe if they are SanDisk brand. What? Oops!
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These things are basically transfer media. I use USB thumb drives to transfer things between my laptop and desktop and only clear the laptop once it’s successfully been copied.
Oddly enough, I’ve had several more expensive USB sticks (Kangaroo was the most recent) over the years but a couple of cheap Lexar 32G sticks have lasted for years of fairly regular use.
[John]
laptops (Score:2)
>"As consumers continue to demand greater storage for their cameras, the combination of high-speed performance with a 1TB option now offers a solution for content creators who shoot large volumes of high-resolution images and 4K video."
The better use case is for laptops, tablets, phones and such devices, not cameras. Photographs- a cheap 128GB SD card stores many, many hundreds of super-high quality photos, which you then unload onto a computer and wipe. Far more capacity than anyone would ever want to
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Oh, these cards will be used in cameras too.
Like I said in another post, a couple of years ago, I filled up multiple 128GiB cards with images and videos of the 6 Hours of Spa race weekend(recordings, still image sequences of the cars in motion to try and get that perfect shot, HDR shots of the cars when standing still etc). And, since you're limited in just how much you can bring in at many races, you can't exactly setup external HD's etc etc.
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I just don't see where it is any big deal with cameras to have 2 or 3 cards vs. a much more expensive single card. At least, not in my experience. Plus it is good to have the redundancy, in case of card failure. Some cameras even have dual slots and will write to both in mirror mode.
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No risk of missing track action(better to have tried to take the shot, and have a data failure, than to have stood there like an idiot, flipping cards, while the action happened), no fiddling with cards while in a crowd, no fiddling with cards while your fingers are frozen stiff etc.
But yeah, since your reference case was a wedding, your use case is different. Around a track, we can't exactly ask the drivers to hold up for a minute, just because we need to swap a card :p
I see a new online fad coming (Score:5, Interesting)
In Europe, "slow TV" is a thing. You see a travel show that consists of a ride on a canal boat or a back-country bus that unfolds in full, as though you were there, with nothing left out. Some programs of this type have run for days, like the 132-hour voyage of a Hurtigruten ferry along the entire coast of Norway. People generally do not sit and watch the whole thing, but use shows like this as life background.
With SD cards of this capacity, it becomes possible for anyone to record extended life events in real time. On social media, watch for selfies to be replaced by "My Entire Week at Disney World" and "My Job at the Amazon Warehouse."
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It's in 8K video now?
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I think the bottleneck will now be the overheating camera.
Sony cameras have a 5 minute limit on 4K video, and it can even be less than that if you're filming in high ambiant temperature (high being more than 21ÂC).
Perfect for "ambient" TVs (Score:2)
Couple those with "ambient" TVs (designed to look like paintings or part of the wall) and you can now have animated backgrounds in your home.
I don't think Disney or Amazon would sit happy, and will find ways to monetize that (or sue you into oblivion); but people recording treks to natural parks or outdoors could be a good source of 4k+ "slow" entertainment.
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I hardly think Disney would object to the free publicity, any more than kids taking selfies there now. Amazon might object on basis of workplace privacy, after which there will be a lively debate over who has the right to object to collecting personal data. .
SDXC UHS-I? (Score:2)