Did they add it back? That’s good. But SD cards aren’t really replacements for primary disks. It’s silly that you can’t get your primary disk as big as an SD card.
Western Digital will launch the SD card, which follows the SD Association’s Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard, under its SanDisk brand and market it toward “complex media and entertainment workflows,” such as high-resolution video with high framerates, using cameras and laptops, the announcement said.
The spacious card will use the Ultra High Speed-1 (UHS-1) bus interface, supporting max theoretical transfer rates of up to 104 MB per second.
“Attendees will get a preview of the 4TB SD card’s full capacity and learn more about how it will expand the creative possibilities for cameras and laptops,” Western Digital said.
Western Digital didn’t say what the SD card would cost, but with its advanced capabilities and targeted audience of professional creators, the offering will likely have premium pricing.
However, Western Digital’s announcement also comes as SanDisk’s reputation for reliable storage is in serious question by professional and long-time customers.
These alleged failures, combined with frustration around Western Digital’s limited response to reported data losses, could have professionals with work-critical storage needs consider waiting for another brand to make the leap to 4TB.
The original article contains 566 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
To be honest, SD cards are usually not meant for extending storage anyway. They should only ever be used for temporary storage like taking pictures and later transferring them to some other storage medium.
Yeah, I’ve filled 256GB pretty easily by recording on an action camera all day, maybe for a couple of days. 4TB would be very convenient for a holiday.
Me. I am basically trying to squeeze the desktop (PC) out of my phone, so there’s a lot of “unnecessary” stuff.
For example, I am currently deciding whether to keep the 110GB of DVD ISO files which I can stream from my phone using VLC (on client side) which are served by nginx server from my phone (this way I still get all menus, just like with a physical DVD) or delete it and replace it with equally sized 110GB EN Wikipedia maxi .zim package, install kiwix-tools on Termux and set up nginx on Termux to serve as revese proxy to kiwix-serve so I could also host a mirror of the whole English Wikipedia, including (downscaled) images on my phone. I guess that sounds cooler than DVDs.
Or I should get a 512GB SD card and keep both.
I can’t afford 1TB one.
But yeah, that’s just one example. My 256GB SD card is about to pop while my video and music collection (The latter of which which is also served using Navidrome server in Termux 🙂. For videos I just use nginx with material fancyindex theme.) keeps growing.
I already have to keep some stuff on phone’s internal storage.
Termux is godsent. Otherwise I’d absolutely have to get a PinePhone as I couldn’t live with something as locked down as Android or even iOS without a nice terminal emulator.
Alternatively, I could benefit from pocket-sized passively cooled laptop.
Really depends on the person. I have never managed to fill up a 128 gigabyte phone, but that is because I am blind, so I am not taking pictures in 4K videos. The biggest thing on my phone is my music collection, which only takes about 5 gigs or so. This phone that I have now is a 64 gigabyte phone and while it’s mostly full, it’s still not there yet. According to the Android settings, I still have about 23 gigabytes left on this 64 gig phone. It says I have used about 64% and if this were a 128 gig phone, that would be about 32% or so.
Partly a mismanagement issue, but my music library at home is more than 120gb. I’d rather just carry my full library - why not? Storage is cheap.
Then there’s video. I prefer pulling video on wifi, rather than stream and burn data. Again, why not? Storage is WAY cheaper than cell data. And I’m being a good neighbor by leaving bandwidth available for other uses.
I’m not deleting them. They’re uploaded to the cloud at the time of creation. I also move them off my phone to my computer every 6 months or so - I do this just in case the upload to the cloud has ever silently failed. I deduplicate the images, so I don’t have multiple versions of the same image with different file names.
For me it’s not entirely about space. I rarely let the device get more than 2/3rds full. It’s also about speed. If I want to pull a photo/video off my phone, it seems sluggish when there are thousandths of files in that one directory.
Ah, yea, I see. Makes sense. Minimizes your risk while also minimizing your effort to manage them.
Yea, I don’t mind having photos on my phone, but managing them is far easier on a pc. So like you, mine all sync to my PC instantly, then when I feel like it I spend some time there cleaning them up (and the changes sync back).
Since the PC has Crashplan for backup, and a NAS it syncs too, I feel pretty comfortable my stuff is safe.
The ones used for 4K recordings are not slow 100+MBps, I won’t say prone to failure as such, flash storage can only handle a finite number of writes but we can mitigate that by using wear leveling.
The NVMe SSDs are very fasy - up to 4GB/s even for a not especially fast drive - because NVMe is an interface that connects to the PCI bus and depending on the PCI version and number of lanes in the NVMe interface (in that interface there are two variations for SSDs, so they can use 2 or 4 PCI lanes, with 4 lanes having twice the bandwidth that 2 lanes have).
The most recent version of NVMe SSDs which use PCIe version 4 can, when using 4 lanes, theoretically reach 8GB/s and there are already drives out there that get pretty close to it.
However some drives of a similar size and connector are not NVMe but actually SATA (same protocol as the older SSDs) and that stuff is limited to about 500MB/s same as the fastest SSDs from a few years ago.
I’ve recently got a mini PC and had to dive again into all this stuff (I’ve been doing the hardware update of my own desktop PCs for decades now and even building them from scratch but haven’t had to look into it for several years) and the tech has really advanced since the earlier SSD days which were not that long ago.
I wish SD Cards also had some specifications for random access speed.
I used to have a UHS-I SanDisk card which felt much faster than my current UHS-III Samsung card. It’s really evident when searching through the storage, waiting for photo thumbnails to cache, etc…
I am not sure whether to go for a UHS-I SanDisk or UHS-III Samsung next. That SanDisk might not handle higher bitrate 4K.
Honestly, neither does having to securely wipe SD card (or any storage device for that matter) as one cross the international border like the thread further up suggests. So the whole thing is just having fun with (potentially roleplaying) over paranoid people :)
Tbh, if you’re that nervous about crossing the border with data, I’m sure you could find other ways to use the internet and decent encryption (behind multiple layers and/or people with a Deadman’s switch if you’re really paranoia and worried a judge will force you to unlock the precious 4mb worth of information) to protect your data when crossing a border.
Or probably even safer if you’re talking about just 4mb of data: send it from a random address in one country to a postbox in your destination or something by post. Tampering with mail carries a pretty heavy fine in most countries, chances a random postman opens a random envelope to a random address abroad are basically non existant. Security through obscurity.
I like reading about infosec, but some of it borders on absolute paranoia tbh :)
I don’t know what your particular situation is but if you’re just using it on computers you could use LUKS or BitLocker or FileVault. Then if you want to wipe it, you only need to destroy the key and the data is rendered effectively gone.
Right. Like, my use case for SD cards is for my cameras. I want to take pictures and bring them home across international borders. And a 4TB card would be amazing, though probably not fast enough. I simply don’t put files that I don’t want people to find onto my SD cards in the first place.
I assume you’re joking, but if not: the 4MB of flash you see is not mapped 1:1 with 4MB of actual flash on the SD card. Instead there might be something like 5MB, but your OS only sees 4MB of that.
The extra unallocated space is used as spare sectors (sectors degrade and must be swapped out) or even just randomly if it somehow increases IO performance (depending on the firmware).
Erasing the 4MB visible to your OS will not erase everything, there still may be whole files or fragments of your files sitting in the extra space. Drive-vendor specific commands can reliably access this space (if they exist and are available to you, which they mostly are not). Some secure erase commands may wipe the unallocated space but that’s vendor specific, not documented and I don’t think even supported over the SD interface (although I might be wrong on this last point).
Encryption and physical destruction are your best bets.
The file size discrepancy is usually due to 1000 vs 1024
No, that’s something else entirely. It doesn’t matter what measurement system you use, the drive juggles more sectors than your OS can see.
but filling the drive with random data until its full should wipe the drive.
Only if you assume people can’t access the reserved/unallocated/over-provisioned sectors. If you are only worried about small thieves then this might not be an issue. If you’re handling sensitive data (like medical records for other people or anything with sensitive passwords) then it’s completely inadequate to leave any form of data anywhere on the disk.
The article says 10MB/s minimum write speed, which would take 4.6 days to transfer 4TB, so… yeah. Even with the “max theoretical transfer rates” of 104MB/s (which is probably just read if anything) that’s still almost 11 hours.
Oh I know, I’m still on Motorola because they have unlockable bootloaders and SD card slots. But in recent years they’ve started taking them out of some of their mid-range models.
Point is there should be more options. Removing the SD card slot is just a bullshit way to push cloud storage.
They are, but mostly in budget phones. If you want a flagship camera or processor as well, you’re sadly out of luck. And god forbid you want a folding phone.
Which is pretty stupid because you’d think that it would be really logical to have a way to have plenty of storage for those flagship cameras which would fill that lame ass basic storage… I mean do those flagships have more than a TB of storage? I’d think not most models.
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If only I could get this much storage on my Mac.
MacBook Pros have an SD card slot.
Did they add it back? That’s good. But SD cards aren’t really replacements for primary disks. It’s silly that you can’t get your primary disk as big as an SD card.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Western Digital will launch the SD card, which follows the SD Association’s Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard, under its SanDisk brand and market it toward “complex media and entertainment workflows,” such as high-resolution video with high framerates, using cameras and laptops, the announcement said.
The spacious card will use the Ultra High Speed-1 (UHS-1) bus interface, supporting max theoretical transfer rates of up to 104 MB per second.
“Attendees will get a preview of the 4TB SD card’s full capacity and learn more about how it will expand the creative possibilities for cameras and laptops,” Western Digital said.
Western Digital didn’t say what the SD card would cost, but with its advanced capabilities and targeted audience of professional creators, the offering will likely have premium pricing.
However, Western Digital’s announcement also comes as SanDisk’s reputation for reliable storage is in serious question by professional and long-time customers.
These alleged failures, combined with frustration around Western Digital’s limited response to reported data losses, could have professionals with work-critical storage needs consider waiting for another brand to make the leap to 4TB.
The original article contains 566 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Finally /s
Thank god. I didn’t want to live in a world without 4tb SD cards anymore.
Come on guys, I’ve had an 8TB microsd card since 2018…my files just start to act funny whenever it is fuller than 8GB ;)
Finally! Been waiting for this for since Pacman wouldn’t fit on my punch card. 2025 here we come!
and i still cant use it in most phones cause there is no freaking port!
To be honest, SD cards are usually not meant for extending storage anyway. They should only ever be used for temporary storage like taking pictures and later transferring them to some other storage medium.
Who need that much storage on their phone? Honestly asking.
This isn’t about phones. It’s mainly about cameras recording 4k/8k video, and devices such as the steamdeck storing lots of games.
Cameras recording high bitrate video generally use a better format than SD
That make sense. Thanks.
Unfortunately, the card mentioned in the article is far too slow to record high resolution, high bit-rate video from even older “pro” cameras.
Yeah, I’ve filled 256GB pretty easily by recording on an action camera all day, maybe for a couple of days. 4TB would be very convenient for a holiday.
Well I mean, 640KB of memory ought to be enough for anybody.
Me. I am basically trying to squeeze the desktop (PC) out of my phone, so there’s a lot of “unnecessary” stuff.
For example, I am currently deciding whether to keep the 110GB of DVD ISO files which I can stream from my phone using VLC (on client side) which are served by nginx server from my phone (this way I still get all menus, just like with a physical DVD) or delete it and replace it with equally sized 110GB EN Wikipedia maxi .zim package, install kiwix-tools on Termux and set up nginx on Termux to serve as revese proxy to kiwix-serve so I could also host a mirror of the whole English Wikipedia, including (downscaled) images on my phone. I guess that sounds cooler than DVDs.
Or I should get a 512GB SD card and keep both.
I can’t afford 1TB one.
But yeah, that’s just one example. My 256GB SD card is about to pop while my video and music collection (The latter of which which is also served using Navidrome server in Termux 🙂. For videos I just use nginx with material fancyindex theme.) keeps growing.
I already have to keep some stuff on phone’s internal storage.
Termux is godsent. Otherwise I’d absolutely have to get a PinePhone as I couldn’t live with something as locked down as Android or even iOS without a nice terminal emulator.
Alternatively, I could benefit from pocket-sized passively cooled laptop.
Thanks. That sounds pretty cool.
Storage needs kind of grow to the size of their container. Like a goldfish.
Really depends on the person. I have never managed to fill up a 128 gigabyte phone, but that is because I am blind, so I am not taking pictures in 4K videos. The biggest thing on my phone is my music collection, which only takes about 5 gigs or so. This phone that I have now is a 64 gigabyte phone and while it’s mostly full, it’s still not there yet. According to the Android settings, I still have about 23 gigabytes left on this 64 gig phone. It says I have used about 64% and if this were a 128 gig phone, that would be about 32% or so.
I have 128gb SD on my phone and it’s alway full.
Partly a mismanagement issue, but my music library at home is more than 120gb. I’d rather just carry my full library - why not? Storage is cheap.
Then there’s video. I prefer pulling video on wifi, rather than stream and burn data. Again, why not? Storage is WAY cheaper than cell data. And I’m being a good neighbor by leaving bandwidth available for other uses.
I won’t mind that much storage, the 256GB I have are nearly full.
I’m using a 128GB phone and it’s never full. But I export photos And videos off it once every 6 months. If I didn’t I’d need 1TB phone.
Once every 6 months?
So at any one time you could lose 6 months of photos?
Or do you have a regular sync to somewhere, and this is just space freeing?
I’m not deleting them. They’re uploaded to the cloud at the time of creation. I also move them off my phone to my computer every 6 months or so - I do this just in case the upload to the cloud has ever silently failed. I deduplicate the images, so I don’t have multiple versions of the same image with different file names.
For me it’s not entirely about space. I rarely let the device get more than 2/3rds full. It’s also about speed. If I want to pull a photo/video off my phone, it seems sluggish when there are thousandths of files in that one directory.
Ah, yea, I see. Makes sense. Minimizes your risk while also minimizing your effort to manage them.
Yea, I don’t mind having photos on my phone, but managing them is far easier on a pc. So like you, mine all sync to my PC instantly, then when I feel like it I spend some time there cleaning them up (and the changes sync back).
Since the PC has Crashplan for backup, and a NAS it syncs too, I feel pretty comfortable my stuff is safe.
Same. I should have gotten a 512GB Micro SD. “I could never use that much storage.” Yeah, I could.
What do you use all that storage for?
Apps, photos, audio books, and the OS.
PinePhone?
Nope just plain old Android, haven’t gotten around to using something better
Phones don’t have (full size) SD card slots, this is for cameras and such.
Aren’t SD cards slow and prone to failures?
The ones used for 4K recordings are not slow 100+MBps, I won’t say prone to failure as such, flash storage can only handle a finite number of writes but we can mitigate that by using wear leveling.
That’s pretty slow for terabyte sized storage. And slow compared to the alternatives, too (600 MB/s or Gabs/s).
Spinning hard disks are faster than this, too. Have been for decade(s).
Hehe, I think I haven’t caught up with the improvements, flash with 1GB/s transfer speed is ludicrously fast!
The NVMe SSDs are very fasy - up to 4GB/s even for a not especially fast drive - because NVMe is an interface that connects to the PCI bus and depending on the PCI version and number of lanes in the NVMe interface (in that interface there are two variations for SSDs, so they can use 2 or 4 PCI lanes, with 4 lanes having twice the bandwidth that 2 lanes have).
The most recent version of NVMe SSDs which use PCIe version 4 can, when using 4 lanes, theoretically reach 8GB/s and there are already drives out there that get pretty close to it.
However some drives of a similar size and connector are not NVMe but actually SATA (same protocol as the older SSDs) and that stuff is limited to about 500MB/s same as the fastest SSDs from a few years ago.
I’ve recently got a mini PC and had to dive again into all this stuff (I’ve been doing the hardware update of my own desktop PCs for decades now and even building them from scratch but haven’t had to look into it for several years) and the tech has really advanced since the earlier SSD days which were not that long ago.
Gen 4 isn’t even the fastest any more.
One of the fastest Gen 5 NVME SSDs can do max Sequential read at 14 500 MB/s (theoretical of course, but not far of)
All SSD and NVMe are also “just flash”, and reach 5GB/s and more, often limited by the available interface bandwidth until very recently.
Other formats can exceed that by caching & writing to multiple chips at once i guess.
I wish SD Cards also had some specifications for random access speed.
I used to have a UHS-I SanDisk card which felt much faster than my current UHS-III Samsung card. It’s really evident when searching through the storage, waiting for photo thumbnails to cache, etc…
I am not sure whether to go for a UHS-I SanDisk or UHS-III Samsung next. That SanDisk might not handle higher bitrate 4K.
Meanwhile I’m struggling to find 4MB SD cards, so I can easily overwrite it with random data to securely wipe it between uses.
How the heck do people with 4TB SD cards do data hygiene wipes of their medium before crossing international borders? That would take days…
Encryption.
May I interest you in this $5 wrench?
Hidden volumes / plausible deniability
While I also like that comic, this doesn’t exactly happen regularly and no one here ever needs to worry about something like this.
So unless you’re an international spy or some very important whistleblower that won’t happen.
A court could probably order you to decrypt it but again if they have to do that, odds are that you are doing something pretty terrible.
These SD cards are for photographers and normal expandable storage for devices and not state secrets or something highly illegal.
Honestly, neither does having to securely wipe SD card (or any storage device for that matter) as one cross the international border like the thread further up suggests. So the whole thing is just having fun with (potentially roleplaying) over paranoid people :)
Tbh, if you’re that nervous about crossing the border with data, I’m sure you could find other ways to use the internet and decent encryption (behind multiple layers and/or people with a Deadman’s switch if you’re really paranoia and worried a judge will force you to unlock the precious 4mb worth of information) to protect your data when crossing a border.
Or probably even safer if you’re talking about just 4mb of data: send it from a random address in one country to a postbox in your destination or something by post. Tampering with mail carries a pretty heavy fine in most countries, chances a random postman opens a random envelope to a random address abroad are basically non existant. Security through obscurity.
I like reading about infosec, but some of it borders on absolute paranoia tbh :)
That’s true.
I don’t know what your particular situation is but if you’re just using it on computers you could use LUKS or BitLocker or FileVault. Then if you want to wipe it, you only need to destroy the key and the data is rendered effectively gone.
Yeah that’s best for most things, but SD cards are generally used in situations where that’s not an option. Namely for use in (video) cameras.
The other situation is when I need to transfer a large file to someone else’s device where encryption isn’t an option (rare but happens)
They don’t
Right. Like, my use case for SD cards is for my cameras. I want to take pictures and bring them home across international borders. And a 4TB card would be amazing, though probably not fast enough. I simply don’t put files that I don’t want people to find onto my SD cards in the first place.
I assume you’re joking, but if not: the 4MB of flash you see is not mapped 1:1 with 4MB of actual flash on the SD card. Instead there might be something like 5MB, but your OS only sees 4MB of that.
The extra unallocated space is used as spare sectors (sectors degrade and must be swapped out) or even just randomly if it somehow increases IO performance (depending on the firmware).
Erasing the 4MB visible to your OS will not erase everything, there still may be whole files or fragments of your files sitting in the extra space. Drive-vendor specific commands can reliably access this space (if they exist and are available to you, which they mostly are not). Some secure erase commands may wipe the unallocated space but that’s vendor specific, not documented and I don’t think even supported over the SD interface (although I might be wrong on this last point).
Encryption and physical destruction are your best bets.
Link to source? The file size discrepancy is usually due to 1000 vs 1024, but filling the drive with random data until its full should wipe the drive.
A good search term is “SSD over-provisioning”
No, that’s something else entirely. It doesn’t matter what measurement system you use, the drive juggles more sectors than your OS can see.
Only if you assume people can’t access the reserved/unallocated/over-provisioned sectors. If you are only worried about small thieves then this might not be an issue. If you’re handling sensitive data (like medical records for other people or anything with sensitive passwords) then it’s completely inadequate to leave any form of data anywhere on the disk.
removed by mod
Tempting, but I’m waiting to see whether SD cards catch on before buying in.
I’m guessing with a three day dump estimate? Thermal throttling on SD cards is brutal.
The article says 10MB/s minimum write speed, which would take 4.6 days to transfer 4TB, so… yeah. Even with the “max theoretical transfer rates” of 104MB/s (which is probably just read if anything) that’s still almost 11 hours.
It’s almost two for a 256GB, so that sounds about right. I wonder how big microSD will get?
Now can we please get them back in phones?
Mine’s got one.
deleted by creator
Speak for yourself. My Motorola g73 has a micro SD card slot.
Oh I know, I’m still on Motorola because they have unlockable bootloaders and SD card slots. But in recent years they’ve started taking them out of some of their mid-range models.
Point is there should be more options. Removing the SD card slot is just a bullshit way to push cloud storage.
Yes, I want storage offline, specifically.
They are in some phones… Shop around :)
I know, and I do, but the point is choices shouldn’t be so limited. They should be standard.
Yeah, just like headphone jacks. Oh wait…
They are, but mostly in budget phones. If you want a flagship camera or processor as well, you’re sadly out of luck. And god forbid you want a folding phone.
Which is pretty stupid because you’d think that it would be really logical to have a way to have plenty of storage for those flagship cameras which would fill that lame ass basic storage… I mean do those flagships have more than a TB of storage? I’d think not most models.
I would bet money that phone makers such as Google keep storage low to steer people towards their cloud storage options.
They aren’t really even in budget phones anymore. When you don’t want a notch and want a headphone jack there is almost nothing to choose from: https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2023&chk35mm=selected&sFormFactors=1&sOSes=2&idDisplayNotch=1 :/
Yeah but when can I get a 4TB floppy?
when 4TB is stressed.
deleted by creator
That’s just Micro SD cards.