128TB SD Cards Are Coming (theverge.com)

A new card specification has been announced by the SD Association that should let you store your entire media collection on one SD card. Technically speaking, the new card specification should increase maximum storage on SD cards to 128 terabytes with faster transfer speeds of 985 megabytes per second. The Verge reports: Right now the maximum storage space on an SD card is 2TB, and that limit was promised as far back as 2009, but still hasn't been reached. In 2016, SanDisk unveiled a prototype 1 terabyte SD card that would make it the biggest in the world, but it's still not available to purchase. At the time, SanDisk said that the advancement was necessary to match ever-increasing data-heavy formats like 4K video and VR. However, creating SD cards with massive amounts of storage is cost-prohibitive. SanDisk's 512GB SD card used to cost $800, and though it's dropped in price, is still priced around $300.

Comments

Coming or not?

[manu0601]

If I read the summary correctly, we are far from having even a dozen terrabyte on a SD. Title is badly chosen.

Re:Coming or not?

[Tough Love]

2 years at most.

Prices

[DaMattster]

I would just like to see prices fall on SSDs to the same level as regular hard drives. SSDs are still kind of expensive.

Re:Prices

[alvinrod]

It's important to differentiate between the companies that make and sell SSDs and the companies that manufacture the NAND flash memory that is used in SSDs. In the case of the first, there is significantly more competition, but there aren't as many companies that actually make the NAND and it's those that have been accused of price fixing and possibly other anti-competitive behavior.

I also expect that part of the reason SSD prices are falling faster relative to HDD prices is that the bare minimum material cost for an HDD is more expensive. An SSD is just a cheap enclosure around a bunch of NAND flash chips on a board with connectors, an embedded processor, and a few other components that are relatively inexpensive and subject to price decreases as a result of Moore's law. The enclosure for the HDD is more sturdy and made of more expensive materials and other parts that have more of a fixed cost that holds stable.

One advantage that SSDs have is that NAND manufacturers have been willing to move from SLC/MLC NAND as used in the initial SSDs to TLC and now even QLC NAND, which has greatly increased the storage capacity of SSDs and even allows for greater capacity than you can get in an HDD assuming you're willing to pay the obscene costs. This does come at the expense of longevity as you get fewer program-erase cycles when using more bits per cell. For most consumers this doesn't matter as they're unlikely to hit those limits and any SSD is going to be a major speed improvement over an HDD.

I do agree that HDD will likely be relegated to backup and archival purposes. I don't have many computers left that aren't using an SSD for their main drive and I can't see myself using anything but an SSD as a primary in future builds.

What nonsense

[Kjella]

That's like saying with 64-bit computers we'd get 16 exabyte (that's 2^32 * 4GB) of RAM. Sure there's addressing space but it won't happen now and quite possibly never. It's probably good to keep the spec a bit in front of what's realistic though.

This will hold 6,740,000 still pix on my Olympus

[Applehu Akbar]

If I shoot one picture a minute 365/24, it will take me just under thirteen years to fill up one of these cards. Now that's what I would call a photo trip.

Unfortunately, I would then have to spend 39 years in Lightroom Classic editing this set of pictures. My wife will kill me, especially when she has to sit through the slideshow later.

Re:Storage issues

[edwdig]

Think pro-photographers in multi-hour photo sessions with high res cameras.

Think people recording 4K video.

Think gamers on a Nintendo Switch that prefer downloading their games.

As storage options get larger, people find ways to use the extra space.