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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.
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.
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.