Samsung Unveils 256GB MicroSD Card, Highest Capacity In Its Class (thenextweb.com)

Samsung recently unveiled its EVO Plus 256GB microSD card, capable of storing more than 12 hours of 4K video footage, 33 hours of full HD recording, 55,200 photos or 23,500 MP3s. While you most likely do not need such a large microSD card in your life, you'll probably want one. The card features Samsung's newest V-NAND technology, with read/write speeds of 95MB/s and 90MB/s, respectively. It will be available in June to over 50 countries at a price of $250, which includes a 10 year warranty. Personally, I have no need for such a high-capacity card at this time, but I marvel how far technology has progressed in the last few years, let alone months. SanDisk, for example, revealed a 200GB microSD card back in March, 2015, which was the highest capacity microSD card up until now.

Comments

200 GB in March.... 2015

[starless]

SanDisk, for example, revealed a 200GB microSD card back in March,

which implies this year, except it was 2015
https://www.sandisk.com/about/...

Re:is SD fading away though?

[slaker]

Apple has never offered an idevice with removable storage. It didn't abandon the concept. It has actively refused to participate in the first place.

Re:But does it work?

[wierd_w]

MicroSD is flash memory.

Flash memory has a write life limit, because of how it physically operates. (The gates that store the information degrade from having their states changed. Eventually, they degrade to the point where they are unreliable.)

Due to architectural restraints, flash memory is changed in 64kbyte blocks, on average. Most filesystems still believe the smallest writable unit is 512 bytes. This means that when you write lots of little files, and the card tries to be space efficient, the same block can be read-erase-written dozens of times on just a few filesystem writes. The choice of file system is very important here. This is one of the reasons why FAT performs so well on flash disks-- FAT has a very large cluster size (when used on "large" disks. ahem.), and can align natively with this block size in many cases. NTFS does not have a good block alignment with most flash systems, because the allocation unit sizes are not nice even multiples of the block size.

EXT CAN have the block size specified at file system creation time, but special care needs to be taken to assure inode size corresponds to the physical flash block size, which most people dont do when they reformat the media.

Poor alignment makes the device degrade much faster than it really should under ideal conditions, and drastically shortens device lifespan, even with advanced internal wear leveling. This is especially true if the system using the device as storage is treating it like a spinning disk, and not trimming writes and coordinating cache flushes with flash in mind.

Most likely, you have been destroying your media through improper data alignment in this fashion, and when it cant handle any more writes, it tells you so.

Re:$1/GB

[Kjella]

And yet another top of the line card comes out at $1/GB more or less. With even the smallest cards going for $10 a Best Buy due to shipping and storage prices... can we find some better way of doing this? How about a box of 10 SD cards like floppies at the signoff price for floppies at $10/box?

Best Buy? LOL. Ever hear of eBay, grandpa? Here's 10 32GB microSD cards for $29.99 with free shipping, that works out to $3/card and less than $0.1/GB.