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!
It’s good for offloading things that otherwise eat useful fast storage.
For example, OneNote uses a cache and a backup folder. So whatever size your notebook is, it will consume 3x that storage space.
I use the SD slot for the cache and backup folders (my backup folder is synced to a file server, so I don’t need it locally, and in 15 years of using OneNote, I’ve needed that backup one time).
It’s also useful for temporary stuff that you don’t care about/is available elsewhere. I’ll pull large installers from my file server and put them on the SD, until l I get around to using them (laptop drive is 250, which is tight for me, and the SD was a quick, dirty solution since I have a bunch of micro SD’s from phones over the years).
I would happily use one for my music and movies to access them on the go. I already have copies elsewhere, so it would be no big loss if the card died.
If you set it up properly (like using apps to sync folders) a big enough sd is like local “cloud” service.
I was thinking about it recently, after my phone data were very close to being deleted (I managed to prevent it eventually), I was angry at how not having an sd slot caused me so many issues. If I had a 1tb sd I would just autosync app backups and files to my card and not worry ~at all about losing data from bootloops etc.
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.
That’s nice, but I’m more interested in prices coming back down. The manufacturers have been pumping up storage prices even though demand has gone down by artificially constricting supply.
Yea, those are specifically configured to only be accessed at boot time, all the cache writes, etc, go to another drive that tolerates regular reads/writes.
And I think even VMware, etc, are moving away from SD and going to M2, for reliability.
It makes sense to go with NVMe drives instead for a RAID NAS as it’s the same memory technology (and what mostly determines the price in all of them is the amount of memory) so the price per GB isn’t any higher (probably a bit lower as size is less of a constraint), the size is still quite small (it’s surprising just how small NVMe SSD drives are compared with the older SSD 2.5 inch SATA ones) and NVMe is a much faster interface than SD so that things is going to be way faster.
It think I saw some in AliExpress the other day, but for what I use my NAS, plain old HDs with no RAID for redundancy or speed are just fine.
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.
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.
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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.
In addition, manufacturers will make a smaller and easier to lose format.
That’s just Micro SD cards.
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!
I can’t fathom a good reason for 4TB SD cards.
Most cameras have CF Express which is probably 5-8 times faster.
Even UHS-III is 600MB/s while CF Express Type B is hitting 4GB/s.
Even so, why would you risk 4TB of data on removable storage.
CF Express is also running PCI-E. This article isn’t talking about SD Express.
Steam games. I want to have all my 50-100 GB games available without having to decide what to uninstall.
Currently I have two 512gb SD cards for my Steam Deck.
If it craps out, it’s okay.
We need a better storage solution than SD cards…
Doesn’t the steam deck have an upgradeable nvme drive? That would be a much better solution.
80mm30mm m.2 drives are to much of a nicheI think you mean 30mm (that’s what the steam deck uses, 80mm is the standard).
At about $80 per TB, it is more expensive than the 80mm ones, yes. But still comparable to SD cards an much faster and more reliable.
Yeah I meant the stubby smaller size.
I always forget the sizes of the M.2 :D
My laptop has an SD card slot. So if this were reliable I could add a significant permanent storage capacity to my laptop.
Valid point, but I think most built in SD card slots are on a laptop can read 100MB/s. Hopefully yours is perhaps USB 3.0 speeds.
It’s good for offloading things that otherwise eat useful fast storage.
For example, OneNote uses a cache and a backup folder. So whatever size your notebook is, it will consume 3x that storage space.
I use the SD slot for the cache and backup folders (my backup folder is synced to a file server, so I don’t need it locally, and in 15 years of using OneNote, I’ve needed that backup one time).
It’s also useful for temporary stuff that you don’t care about/is available elsewhere. I’ll pull large installers from my file server and put them on the SD, until l I get around to using them (laptop drive is 250, which is tight for me, and the SD was a quick, dirty solution since I have a bunch of micro SD’s from phones over the years).
I think it’s primarily targeting the handheld gaming market
I would happily use one for my music and movies to access them on the go. I already have copies elsewhere, so it would be no big loss if the card died.
deleted by creator
If you set it up properly (like using apps to sync folders) a big enough sd is like local “cloud” service.
I was thinking about it recently, after my phone data were very close to being deleted (I managed to prevent it eventually), I was angry at how not having an sd slot caused me so many issues. If I had a 1tb sd I would just autosync app backups and files to my card and not worry ~at all about losing data from bootloops etc.
3-2-1
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?
look into chinese phones, vast majority of them have it
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.
Mine’s got one.
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.
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 :/
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.
Yeah but when can I get a 4TB floppy?
when 4TB is stressed.
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Finally /s
That’s nice, but I’m more interested in prices coming back down. The manufacturers have been pumping up storage prices even though demand has gone down by artificially constricting supply.
Do people setup RAIDs with sd cards? There should be a super mini box for a sd card RAID
You probably don’t want it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2jKKFUnycA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3frnBoqqI_Q
I tried to watch it but that guy is just way too boring to listen to
I know right? It’s like he and Linus(LTT) are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Long story short, it’s not worth it.
deleted by creator
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=O2jKKFUnycA
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=3frnBoqqI_Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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More writes, more failures. SD cards work best when you write once and don’t delete it for a long time
I doubt they would be reliable enough for a RAID array. It would be much better to use m.2 drives.
They’re not reliable individually, but they’d be perfectly reliable in RAID if replaced promptly.
Although since SD cards degrade on read, I would want to have at least RAID 6. Reading all the data for a rebuild could result in another one dying.
Sound more like a fun project to implement than an actual decent product (compared with the alternatives).
Sure. Look on aliexpress for “SD Raid” and you will find some for ~$15
I’ve seen them set up in servers a RAID 1 booting ESXi
Yea, those are specifically configured to only be accessed at boot time, all the cache writes, etc, go to another drive that tolerates regular reads/writes.
And I think even VMware, etc, are moving away from SD and going to M2, for reliability.
SD is a poor choice (though could be an interesting solution in certain cases, maybe).
SSD and M2 can be used, if you get the right SSD, and ensure everything is setup properly.
Even SSD doesn’t guarantee a lower power consumption than 2.5" spinning disk drives - it depends on the drives and usage patterns (mostly the drives).
The self-hosting community discusses this quite a bit.
It wouldn’t be the best of ideas because the flash used for SD cards do not have the same kind of write endurance as other types of flash media.
It makes sense to go with NVMe drives instead for a RAID NAS as it’s the same memory technology (and what mostly determines the price in all of them is the amount of memory) so the price per GB isn’t any higher (probably a bit lower as size is less of a constraint), the size is still quite small (it’s surprising just how small NVMe SSD drives are compared with the older SSD 2.5 inch SATA ones) and NVMe is a much faster interface than SD so that things is going to be way faster.
It think I saw some in AliExpress the other day, but for what I use my NAS, plain old HDs with no RAID for redundancy or speed are just fine.
Finally! Been waiting for this for since Pacman wouldn’t fit on my punch card. 2025 here we come!
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?
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 :)
That’s true.
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 :)
Hidden volumes / plausible deniability
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
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.