• randombullet@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

    I can’t fathom a good reason for 4TB SD cards.

    Most cameras have CF Express which is probably 5-8 times faster.

    Even UHS-III is 600MB/s while CF Express Type B is hitting 4GB/s.

    Even so, why would you risk 4TB of data on removable storage.

    CF Express is also running PCI-E. This article isn’t talking about SD Express.

    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Steam games. I want to have all my 50-100 GB games available without having to decide what to uninstall.

      Currently I have two 512gb SD cards for my Steam Deck.

      If it craps out, it’s okay.

      • B0rax@feddit.de
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        3 months ago

        We need a better storage solution than SD cards…

        Doesn’t the steam deck have an upgradeable nvme drive? That would be a much better solution.

          • B0rax@feddit.de
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            3 months ago

            I think you mean 30mm (that’s what the steam deck uses, 80mm is the standard).

            At about $80 per TB, it is more expensive than the 80mm ones, yes. But still comparable to SD cards an much faster and more reliable.

    • wagoner@infosec.pub
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      3 months ago

      My laptop has an SD card slot. So if this were reliable I could add a significant permanent storage capacity to my laptop.

      • randombullet@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        Valid point, but I think most built in SD card slots are on a laptop can read 100MB/s. Hopefully yours is perhaps USB 3.0 speeds.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          It’s good for offloading things that otherwise eat useful fast storage.

          For example, OneNote uses a cache and a backup folder. So whatever size your notebook is, it will consume 3x that storage space.

          I use the SD slot for the cache and backup folders (my backup folder is synced to a file server, so I don’t need it locally, and in 15 years of using OneNote, I’ve needed that backup one time).

          It’s also useful for temporary stuff that you don’t care about/is available elsewhere. I’ll pull large installers from my file server and put them on the SD, until l I get around to using them (laptop drive is 250, which is tight for me, and the SD was a quick, dirty solution since I have a bunch of micro SD’s from phones over the years).

    • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      I would happily use one for my music and movies to access them on the go. I already have copies elsewhere, so it would be no big loss if the card died.

    • Blastboom Strice@mander.xyz
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      3 months ago

      If you set it up properly (like using apps to sync folders) a big enough sd is like local “cloud” service.

      I was thinking about it recently, after my phone data were very close to being deleted (I managed to prevent it eventually), I was angry at how not having an sd slot caused me so many issues. If I had a 1tb sd I would just autosync app backups and files to my card and not worry ~at all about losing data from bootloops etc.

      • realitista@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Did they add it back? That’s good. But SD cards aren’t really replacements for primary disks. It’s silly that you can’t get your primary disk as big as an SD card.

    • LostXOR@fedia.io
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      3 months ago

      The article says 10MB/s minimum write speed, which would take 4.6 days to transfer 4TB, so… yeah. Even with the “max theoretical transfer rates” of 104MB/s (which is probably just read if anything) that’s still almost 11 hours.

      • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        It’s almost two for a 256GB, so that sounds about right. I wonder how big microSD will get?

  • XNX@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    Do people setup RAIDs with sd cards? There should be a super mini box for a sd card RAID

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        They’re not reliable individually, but they’d be perfectly reliable in RAID if replaced promptly.

        Although since SD cards degrade on read, I would want to have at least RAID 6. Reading all the data for a rebuild could result in another one dying.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Sound more like a fun project to implement than an actual decent product (compared with the alternatives).

    • You999@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      It wouldn’t be the best of ideas because the flash used for SD cards do not have the same kind of write endurance as other types of flash media.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Yea, those are specifically configured to only be accessed at boot time, all the cache writes, etc, go to another drive that tolerates regular reads/writes.

        And I think even VMware, etc, are moving away from SD and going to M2, for reliability.

    • B0rax@feddit.de
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      3 months ago

      Sure. Look on aliexpress for “SD Raid” and you will find some for ~$15

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      SD is a poor choice (though could be an interesting solution in certain cases, maybe).

      SSD and M2 can be used, if you get the right SSD, and ensure everything is setup properly.

      Even SSD doesn’t guarantee a lower power consumption than 2.5" spinning disk drives - it depends on the drives and usage patterns (mostly the drives).

      The self-hosting community discusses this quite a bit.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      It makes sense to go with NVMe drives instead for a RAID NAS as it’s the same memory technology (and what mostly determines the price in all of them is the amount of memory) so the price per GB isn’t any higher (probably a bit lower as size is less of a constraint), the size is still quite small (it’s surprising just how small NVMe SSD drives are compared with the older SSD 2.5 inch SATA ones) and NVMe is a much faster interface than SD so that things is going to be way faster.

      It think I saw some in AliExpress the other day, but for what I use my NAS, plain old HDs with no RAID for redundancy or speed are just fine.

  • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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    3 months ago

    Come on guys, I’ve had an 8TB microsd card since 2018…my files just start to act funny whenever it is fuller than 8GB ;)

    • B0rax@feddit.de
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      3 months ago

      To be honest, SD cards are usually not meant for extending storage anyway. They should only ever be used for temporary storage like taking pictures and later transferring them to some other storage medium.

    • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      The ones used for 4K recordings are not slow 100+MBps, I won’t say prone to failure as such, flash storage can only handle a finite number of writes but we can mitigate that by using wear leveling.

      • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 months ago

        That’s pretty slow for terabyte sized storage. And slow compared to the alternatives, too (600 MB/s or Gabs/s).

        Spinning hard disks are faster than this, too. Have been for decade(s).

        • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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          3 months ago

          I wish SD Cards also had some specifications for random access speed.

          I used to have a UHS-I SanDisk card which felt much faster than my current UHS-III Samsung card. It’s really evident when searching through the storage, waiting for photo thumbnails to cache, etc…

          I am not sure whether to go for a UHS-I SanDisk or UHS-III Samsung next. That SanDisk might not handle higher bitrate 4K.

        • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca
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          3 months ago

          Hehe, I think I haven’t caught up with the improvements, flash with 1GB/s transfer speed is ludicrously fast!

          • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de
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            3 months ago

            All SSD and NVMe are also “just flash”, and reach 5GB/s and more, often limited by the available interface bandwidth until very recently.

          • progandy@feddit.de
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            3 months ago

            Other formats can exceed that by caching & writing to multiple chips at once i guess.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            The NVMe SSDs are very fasy - up to 4GB/s even for a not especially fast drive - because NVMe is an interface that connects to the PCI bus and depending on the PCI version and number of lanes in the NVMe interface (in that interface there are two variations for SSDs, so they can use 2 or 4 PCI lanes, with 4 lanes having twice the bandwidth that 2 lanes have).

            The most recent version of NVMe SSDs which use PCIe version 4 can, when using 4 lanes, theoretically reach 8GB/s and there are already drives out there that get pretty close to it.

            However some drives of a similar size and connector are not NVMe but actually SATA (same protocol as the older SSDs) and that stuff is limited to about 500MB/s same as the fastest SSDs from a few years ago.

            I’ve recently got a mini PC and had to dive again into all this stuff (I’ve been doing the hardware update of my own desktop PCs for decades now and even building them from scratch but haven’t had to look into it for several years) and the tech has really advanced since the earlier SSD days which were not that long ago.

            • lud@lemm.ee
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              3 months ago

              Gen 4 isn’t even the fastest any more.

              One of the fastest Gen 5 NVME SSDs can do max Sequential read at 14 500 MB/s (theoretical of course, but not far of)

  • hark@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    That’s nice, but I’m more interested in prices coming back down. The manufacturers have been pumping up storage prices even though demand has gone down by artificially constricting supply.