SanDisk's little microSD card sucks up 400GB WDC has the highest-capacity microSDXC card at 400GB – pumping up mobile device storage space – and has launched a natty little iPhone charger that backs up the phone’s data. The SanDisk Ultra Plus microSDXC UHS-I card comes in a range of capacities, from 16GB through 32, 64, 128, 200, and 256 to 400GB. The read speed is up to …
Ah can remember 't time when a lad would be proud to say 'ee held 80 Mb on a dustbin lid sized Winchester. In fact, kids o'today (1) probably don't even kno' what a fuckin' doostbin is. Bastads the lot of 'em.
Note 1: Kids o'today, ALA lazy, shithead, know nothing millennial tossers with a ghastly sense of entitlement.
"You're thinking too far down the miser scale. It's a Yorkshire accent."
Too far down? You mean Scotsmen are less miserly than tykes? I can agree on that one, after all it's a Lancashire maxim that a Yorkshireman is a Scot who has had the generosity kicked out of him.
5mb? Tha were lucky!
Back in t'day, I had a ZX Spectrum which loaded data from tape; a C15 would hold up to around 160kb of data, or approx. 80kb per side. A C90 was absolute luxury, though you really needed a counter on your tape player to figure out where each program was.
Fast-forwarding past the C64 and Amiga, my first PC was a 486 Viglen with (I think) a 50mb HDD. Oh, the joys of running doublestacker over this to try and increase the amount of space, as well as the hypnotic patterns of the defragger...
At some point, I acquired an 850mb 3.5" HDD; sadly, this exceeded the 540mb limit set by the BIOS in the PC. IIRC, there was a software patch, though some drives had a physical jumper you could set to fool the BIOS.
A while later, I worked for a large company which was clearing out vast swathes of obsolete tech. Among a few other things, I picked up a SCSI card and a mahoosive 2GB HDD - at 5.25 double-height, it was literally the size of two CD drives duct-taped together. I ended up with this huge bronze lump sat atop the PC case, as there was no way it'd fit inside!
In some ways, this makes me even more appreciate the fact that I can fit the sum of all human knowledge[*] onto my fingernail. However, I do also slightly miss the challenges of the old days, when PC technology was still a bit of a wild-west arena...
[*] Wikipedia is quoted as being around 160gb in size, though this is for text only. Still it'd leave a bit of room for some light reading!
5mb? Tha were lucky!
Luxury.
First computer I used was a Varian V70 which used paper tape. That had enough core (and I mean "core" as in ferrite ring memory) for each of the 8 users (each sat at an ASR33 teletype) nearly 4k of storage - happy days.
The next one was an IBM 360 which used punched cards, well it would if they weren't all nicked to use as roaches.
First real hard drive was a ST157a - 57M unformatted, about 44M formatted.
Now these however could be fun, 9 in RAID 5 to make a smaller than matchbox sized 3TB array with redundancies. about 100 of those could be crammed into a 1U rack, that's a lot of storage in a small space, probably glowing red-hot due to heat dissipation problems but that's part of the fun.
If you were thinking of the IBM 3330, they held about 100 MB each and weighed about 10 lb .
As I recall, unlike those fancy new SUVs where one kicks under the tailgate to open it, you had to actually MANUALLY open the disk drive cover when replacing the diskdrive.
So about 4000 of these big cakeboxes could probably replace one of these micro-SD.
Understandably, direct-access would be somewhat slow, depending on how motivated the computer operator was. From my experience, the female access mechanism was generally faster, unless her nail polish was drying.
On the other hand, the older 2311 and 2314 held 7MB and ~30 MB respectively, Sadly, they were permanently nailed into their ersatz washing machine. So unlike the 3330, there was no "low-speed" direct addressing, except on the same drive.
ICL 1904A where I worked had 4 tape decks, 128 kB of RAM, and a number of EDS 8 and EDS 60 ( 8 MB and 60 MB disks). For someone not wanting to search on Google, a disc pack was like a stack of vinyl LPs, in a "cake cover" as Mage described it.
After opening the drive and carefully lowering the pack vertically, screwing it onto the spindle, the lid was closed, the vacuum inside established and then the delicate arms could be seen sliding between the discs.
While I don't want to claim things were any better then, I think those of us who saw and used the older technology perhaps appreciate the massive changes over the past ~40 years just that little bit more than some of the younger generations.
Just found a photo... (for those who need one)
http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/gallery/ral/orig/r12600e.jpg
Oh boy, a hateful aging ageist. That hateful crap is supposed to be mouthed by the stupid young folks, not the seasoned. Shame on you. I'd say it's time for you to grow up, but you've clearly missed the boat. Way to spread a blind blanket of hate. Just what we need.
Havent' all very large cards been using exFAT for a while now (despite the name, a very different and more capable file system).
Yeah, that's because the camera, phone and memory-card makers were all too cowardly to go for something not-patent-encumbered like EXT4 (or some other open-sourced FS). All it takes is a simple installable-filesystem driver (even in MSWin) to make the system recognize ANYTHING formatted in it. Cowards the lot of them.
Why bother with hiding it on you?
Put the card in your phone with a FAT 64GB partition and a second one with a file system the phone does not understand. It would be practically invisible without rooting the phone or taking the card away. Chances are no one would bother unless you were arrested.
On a second thought, nowadays it would be much easier to upload the data across the border, using some form of steganography.
I bought a SanDisk 256GB Ultra CZ48 USB 3.0 Flash Drive (SDCZ48-256G-U46) drive that when being written to slowed down after the first couple of GB to about 1-2MB/sec, so a 20GB movie took hours to write to it. 400GB at an equally bad speed is worse than no storage at all.
Take chip, add or engineer hollow coin with an insert to prevent the microsSD from rattling and there is no way to detect it.
Someone could wander out with 400GB of data and change.
That said, at the READ speed it takes over an hour to read it, so writing must be even slower. You will need a bit of patience to fill that up :).
I'm not sure how good that would be, cost wise:
10x $249 for 4000 GB raw storage = $2490
+ $~45 for the adapter board, plus shipping = $2535
Or you could buy a pair of 2 TB Crucial MX300 SSDs for half that and raid 0 them either using an appropriate sata controller or software raid0, and still have money left over for a proper data backup device.
Performance wise, you'd probably hit the 3 Gbps ceiling that the sata spec that board uses before you'd run out of bandwidth on the cards for read speed.
Whilst I do like the fact that storage continues to increase.... the fact that the devices they go into seem stuck in the dark ages in comparison renders them next to useless in reality.
My phone (Wileyfox Storm) will actually take up to a 128gb card... but there's very few devices out there that will take anything above 32gb still.
Almost everything on the middle ranges down to budget end... doesn't take anything larger than 32GB... even my high end nextbase dashcam was supposedly only fit for 32gb, but thankfully takes a 64gb card ok... But it's not worth buying a high capacity mSD card and 'hoping' that it works.
128gb should be the minimum spec we are seeing these days across the board on all devices
Around the same time, after assisting a GP Surgery with their transfer of data from an IBM 286 (I think - the model escapes me right now) to their new multi-terminal Linux based system, provided by a drugs firm (in return for anonymous patient data), I ended up with
Dual floppy (5.25", 360 kB) drive IBM PC, with 192 kB RAM
+ mono Hercules (green) monitor
+ Tallgrass storage unit (12 MB hard drive + tape backup unit)
The initial PC system and software had cost them dearly... the Tallgrass Technology add-on was over 1000 GBP alone, and the unit was the same size as the desk model IBM PC. An initial 6 months "support" was provided by the Fareham based supplier, but they couldn't actually fix problems!
Patient data for ~ 8000 patients had been typed in by their young secretary (max 20 procedures/ problems per patient to limit storage requirement) and I provided them with support to fix the BASIC software written by a Hampshire GP (for example, none of his patients was over 100, so the array for a histogram had an out of bounds index when their patient data was used, crashing the software and giving them no output)
A response to ponga claiming they're "ancient" :)
My personal hard disks have included:
A 1 MB (equivalent) IBM 2315 disk pack for a university 1130, in 19:69.
A 25 MB drive (Cumana?) for an Amstrad PPC.
A 300MB full height (like a shoe box) drive for an early PC clone, preceded by a ~100 MB drive which was far too small for SCO OpenDeathTrap.
I was startled by the small physical size of my first 1 GB drive.
Nowadays my biggest drives are 4* and 8* 8 TB drives in a couple of NASs.
I wonder when 8 TB SSDs will become affordable.
Mid 1996 I remember fitting a 2x cd-rom drive. Later that year someone lent me a 'gold' CD that had lots of really useful programs on such as Office. Only problem, the 500mb hard drive didn't have enough space to store everything off the 640MB CD. I remember thinking at the time how can this little bit of gold plastic store more than the 5.25" hard drive.
what are the useful applications for a 400GB micro SD card?
I'm not saying i'm not impressed, (if a little freaked out), I just can't think of what it would be genuinely good for, over say a 128GB card.
GoPro? Surely you'd be backing up / using that footage long before you hit 400GB (or is UHD footage much larger than i think?)
Music in a smartphone? really?
Media store in a media server / rPi? maybe.
Traveling.
Kiwix Wikipedia articles: 60 GB
OsmAnd+ maps: 13 GB
Music: 20+ GB
Classic movies for the flight: 20+ GB
Itinerary and tourism maps : 1 GB
IMAP mail cache: 0.6 GB
Google Translate files: 0.5 GB
+ Backup of photos taken with DSLR
+ Backups of videos taken with high-end digicam
With 400 GB I think I can get some star and planetary maps in there too. I wonder if I can order it with a towel.
I have a couple of 200 GB cards in a FiiO 5 music player. Not large enough for my excessively big mainly music collection. Unfortunately the number of tracks broke the FiiO's ability to index them, leaving just navigation which is s l o w, so I won't be splashing out on 400 GB cards.
My first ones were all bought by my employer (I was very persuasive), as I couldn't afford anything at the time.
Don't know the make of the first one but it was huge, had two 8" floppy drives and no hard disk. I think the screen was from Israel.
Company mainframe at the time was ICL with cat's cradle of metal rings for memory.
Second was a Torch micro, built in Cambridge, based on BBC micro ... 20MB hard drive.
Ah, the joy's of non MS operating systems and applications!
Happy days!
Bit pricey but worth it.
You could literally write an entire library on a handful of these and then send them on the next NASA probe out of the Solar System as a high tech version of the Pioneer 10 plaque.
Not sure on the radiation resistance but 3D-NAND is quite good now. In order to get this much storage the
chip has been rigorously tested and low-reliability units weeded out during production.
I did my own experiments with 32GB cards a while back and its quite hard to muck them up: the radiation dose needed is in the Rads and only had an effect due to the DAC32 / 5642 series tube.
My scintillator screen lit up like a neon sign (yes used lead and lots of it!) and to affect the card required putting it on the tube at the point of maximum X-ray intensity and it also scrambled equipment nearby even with the shielding so not doing this experiment again for a long time.
Incidentally it looks like most commercial scanners intentionally screen out low and intemediate energy rays to prevent image fogging so unless you fly North Korean air there is no need to worry.
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