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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.

24 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. No, and no by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Funny

    While you most likely do not need such a large microSD card in your life

    Correct

    you'll probably want one.

    Incorrect.

    I'm not quite the gibbering moron you seem to imagine me to be...

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re: No, and no by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 3, Funny

      Those circumstances can't be predicted... But they do happen. Alien visitations, cops torturing someone, once in a millennia volcanic eruptions, you actually get laid, etc.

      We all know that three of these events are likely to occur in our lifetime.

      Now if you'll excuse me, I have porn video files to classify.

    2. Re: No, and no by chipschap · · Score: 2

      Just that it seems pretty expensive. If you need it you need it, but I'll stick with $10 cards for now.

  2. Crash Kit by darkain · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The reason I love having extremely large MicroSD cards is because my cell phone is essentially a mobile crash kit. I keep things like OS ISOs, drivers, and repair utilities on my phone, in case I ever walk into a place and need to repair a computer system or server. There is also a samba server on my phone in case I need to quickly distribute files to multiple machines at once over a network, instead of a single machine over USB.

    1. Re:Crash Kit by julian67 · · Score: 2

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      He didn't retire. He didn't die. He bought a smartphone and became a new kind of superhero.

  3. Re:is SD fading away though? by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 2

    but the era of SD supporting devices is fading away

    No it isn't. Not at all. The latest gen phones not supporting an SD card is a stupid marketing trick to get you to purchase a phone with larger internal capacity. This says absolutely nothing about anything else. Sane portable devices will still use an expandable memory slot for a long long time to come.

    --

    "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
  4. Re:is SD fading away though? by queequeg1 · · Score: 2

    Only the S6 omits it (it's back on the S7).

  5. 200 GB in March.... 2015 by starless · · Score: 3, Informative

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

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

  6. Re: I have no need for such a high-capacity card a by wbr1 · · Score: 2

    I have no need for a blow job from a horse at this time....

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
  7. Isn't 640k enough for anybody? by spaceyhackerlady · · Score: 3, Interesting

    While you most likely do not need such a large microSD card in your life...

    At one time I bought an iPad with 16 GB of storage, since the storage was infinite compared with my ability to come up with material to store on it. Then I discovered new applications like ForeFlight for flight planning. I now use a 128 GB iPad mini in the cockpit.

    When I bought my current Mac (admittedly, a few years ago) I figured that 4 GB of RAM and 250 GB of disc space was ample. I bought a GoPro camera earlier this year. Two hundred fifty gigs is now nothing.

    ...laura

  8. Re:SanDisk 256GB microSD by Barny · · Score: 2

    Note, those ultra cheap off-brand (or even sometimes good counterfeit brand name) ones are always fakes. They edit the thing so that it reports that it is the size they claim, but the moment your write more than the actual size (normally like 2-8GB), you get an error and it all goes to shite.

    --
    ...
    /me sighs
  9. $1/GB by The+New+Guy+2.0 · · Score: 2

    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?

    1. Re:$1/GB by Kjella · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    2. Re:$1/GB by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Here's 10 32GB microSD cards for $29.99 with free shipping, that works out to $3/card and less than $0.1/GB.

      You're assuming an awful lot there. That they will arrive at all, that they will provide the stated capacity, that they will work at all, that they will work longer than a couple of weeks... if it's not from a name brand with a decent warranty procedure and with at least a five year warranty, it's garbage not fit for ass-wiping (it's not soft and fluffy.)

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  10. Re:12 hours of lies by ClickOnThis · · Score: 2

    256 GB divided by 12 hours would correspond to a bandwidth of about 48.5 Mb/s. That's more than enough to support compressed 4K video.

    Consider that UMAX in Korea supports streaming of compressed 4K video at 60 fps progressive, using 32 Mb/s of bandwidth.

    --
    If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
  11. Re:is SD fading away though? by slaker · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    -- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
  12. Oh sure, I want one by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd like to have one in an abstract kind of way, but not enough to plunk down even near to that kind of money.

    I actually bought an Evo+ because benchmarks revealed that the Evo and Evo+ are some of the best cards at random I/O, and thus better for running your operating system from than for example a Sandisk Ultra. I bought a 32GB when I could have probably done fine with a 8GB, let alone a 16GB, because apparently the 32GB and larger cards have even better random-access performance. It's annoying that some SD cards should suffer extremely poor performance on random writes, but sure enough, switching out my Sandisk Ultra 32GB for the Evo+ 32GB significantly improved Android performance on my Pine A64+ 2GB.

    Sorry that reads like a fat block of ad copy, as if any advertisers were ever concerned with such trivial matters as random write performance; in fact, no SD card manufacturer of which I'm aware advertises any specs like that whatsoever. It's all just classes, and those only refer to sustained writes.

    So far I am getting nowhere near using up my 32GB card, and don't expect to be in any danger of doing so any time soon. I have a 32GB Sandisk Ultra in my phone just for data, and it's doing that job just fine too — and I've lots of free space.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  13. Useful for ultracheap win8 tablets by wierd_w · · Score: 4, Interesting

    These would be useful on ultra-cheap win8 tablets, like those Nextbook things at walmart.

    They come from the factory neutered with a tiny internal flash storage, typically under 20gb of useful capacity, but feature a microSD slot.

    What you do is format the card as NTFS, but dont provide a drive letter. Instead, you mount it as an NTFS junction at say C:\SDCard, then you create softlinks under there to individual folders in Program Files, and other important places.

    That way C:\Program files remains traversable by the windows update process (and wont break spectacularly) because it is still native to the system volume, but the installed program directories underneath are redirected elsewhere on a per-program basis. (So, eg, the internet explorer subfolder remains native, but the Office 2007 subfolder is a symlink to the sdcard volume, etc.)

    This is pretty easy to do with some freeware like symmover.

    Big honking storage would turn the cheap walmart toy into a somewhat useable low-power tablet.

    The storage would be even friendlier to use on a linux friendly tablet PC, as it could be mounted as /home.

    For people with Linux Deploy set up on their phones, Big honking SDcard storage would let them set up a much more useful linux chroot with much more installed in it.

    Big honking storage like this is really aimed at power users like that.

    The prior suggestion I saw of setting these up in a raid array isnt so hot though. While individually these cards boast an interesting read/write access time, the limiting factor for raid will be bus saturation. Typically, the bus that lots of these would be put on is USB. USB has a limited total bus bandwidth, which IIRC, is 12mbit for 1.1, 400mbit for 2.0, and USB 3.0 is 5gbit. Once you saturate the bus, additional devices in the stripe only add complexity without benefit. For USB 3.0, that works out to about 7 of these cards (assuming the 96MB/sec figure holds, which it probably doesnt.). After that, the USB bus itself is the bottleneck. More cards wont make it go any faster, and the cost would be prohibitive. About the only neat thing about such an array would be the very low power requirements.

    These cards are really best used in devices that SHOULD have had beefy internal storage, but dont, because of cheapness on the OEM's part.

    Things like the afore mentioned tablet PCs.

  14. Ad signature by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    256GB ... capable of storing more than 12 hours of 4K video footage, 33 hours of full HD recording, 55,200 photos or 23,500 MP3s

    This is where you see it's an ad and not a regular story ; who on slashdot needs to be explained what is 256GB?

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  15. Re:But does it work? by wierd_w · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  16. Re:is SD fading away though? by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 2

    The new LG G5 has replaceable battery and an SD card slot spec at 2 TERABYTE! I don't know HOW they know it will handle that much memory.

    They know because that is what the SDXC standard supports. I find it incredibly frustrating when manufacturers limit their specifications of the maximum memory card size as the largest card available at the time of release of a product. Then in a few years time, when larger cards become available, you can't be sure if they are supported or not. You just have to try it and see. It gets worse then they just say "SD slot" without specifying which SD standard it really is.

    The LG G5 explicitly says microSDXC, so we can look it up even if they hadn't said that it was 2TB.

  17. Re:Can i... by KiloByte · · Score: 2

    'Ere you go.

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  18. Re:Can i... by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 2

    Bearing in mind I can remember the first removable HD http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/rog... which weighed about 15kg this is a vast improvement.

    --

    Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.

  19. Are you kidding? It's my card and I want it now! by Metal+Cutter · · Score: 2

    You can't be living in the same universe as me. I have a 128 gig in my 1520 now and considered buying a 200 gig but the reviews were very negative toward the large capacity. But a major manufacturer producing a 256 gig will make me spend my money! I get those pesky notices from Win 10 now telling me I am near full on my 128 gig now. As a matter of fact, I will buy one for my Surface too.