this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Why would someone wanting to store huge amounts of data to put it on a storage device that is the most fragile/short lived?
short term storage of uncompressed high resolution data
I don't think microSD has the write speed for that, might be more useful for HD surveillance cameras
Uncompressed 4k stream @ 30fps and 24bpp would be 5.7 GB/s. The top regular SD card speed, UHS-III, maxes at 0.6 GB/s. SD Express, where a PCIe lane is added, goes to 3.9 GB/s.
So, yeah, going to need at least some compression. Good news is that just a little compression can go a long way.
Even full 4K HDR Blu-ray rips come in at about 30GB an hour.
That's 500MB per minute which just about fits in the 10MB/s of UHS Class 1.
I would consider those fairly standard these days. You'd have to have picked an extra shitty AliExpress special to not have your card meet that.
Yeah pictures and videos is all I can think of. I am no photophile but I assume some small digital camera benefits from storage of the micro variety. Has me thinking of the 2015 movie Victoria, 140m straight, one shot, no cuts, and actually a good movie, pretty amazing stuff.
Games, the easiest way to expand the storage on a Steam Deck is a micro sd card.
SD card is limited to 100MB/s iirc.
It may be simplest, but it's far from ideal.
Given some reviews I've seen, it's more than good enough for games. Loading times may be a bit longer, but not that bad. HDDs are in that range, and plenty of people use HDDs for gaming.
I can't even imagine going back to an HDD for gaming.
I was recently given a laptop to check and make sure there was no info on it before disposal, and it took so long to boot into Windows and get into a usable state, I legit thought it was faulty.
And the worst thing was, that was a fresh install. Somebody had already cleared it.
Games are just so stupidly big now. They're pushing 200GB. To fill 16GB RAM from SD (and not all games load that much) would take 3 minutes. The SSD can do that in about 6 seconds.
Yeah, there's no way I'd be playing a 200GB game on something like a Steam Deck. Most games I'm interested in playing on a SD is something like 20-50GB, and most of that doesn't need to be loaded to play.
I have an SD card with windows installed so I can run windows games without dual booting. It takes a while to startup, but is fine once it gets going.
Certainly not ideal, but that's a whole OS and it's decent.
Why would anyone need a 24TB HDD?
Because in the time we have gone from 4GB SD cards to 4TB cards, movies have gone from being 700MB to 70Gb, and games from coming on a few cds or dvds to requiring a mountain of them - Baldurs Gate 1 came on 5 CDs, BG3 would require around 200 of them.
That 4TB card has only space for 26 games, if they are as large as BG3.
The original Baldur's Gate came on a single CD and had full install size of under 600MB. It was also possible to do a partial install and to load files off the CD at runtime.
I wonder what the other disks were all for then.
An uncompressed CD audio soundtrack, maybe?
(That doesn't appear to be the case for Baldur's Gate in particular since the discs pictured in the listing have "compact disc data storage" logos, but I do remember some '90s games being like that.)
In this case, the question was rhetorical - the original release of BG1 takes 5 CDs, and the sixth is the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion. Installed the game takes around 2.8GB IIRC. They did eventually re-release it as only a 3 CD set because they could cram more data on a single CD by then.
You could do that with a lot of PS1 games. The first track was data, the rest were just regular CD audio tracks.
This got rarer later on, once they realised the could fill the discs with FMV sequences instead.
Speaking of PS1 games and disk-filling FMVs: Final Fantasy 7 on the PSX comes on 3 disks but the actual game itself is duplicated on all of them and you can swap them out during gameplay, and the only thing that happens is that it plays the wrong FMVs.
It all breaks down to the actual "game" taking 133MB, plus few hundred for the uncompressed pre-rendered backgrounds, out of the available ~1.8GB (according to this old post about how a Nintendo DS port could easily fit on a 256MB flash cart.)
I see one is an expansion disk.
There might be a few with CD Audio
As was the fashion at the time...
Last I remember, Baldurs Gate was on 6 separate discs, but I haven’t installed it from those in probably 20 years.
Steam deck
Right, the 1Tb of internal storage and the 1Tb SD card is still really cramped if you play a lot of games
Video Cameras
My GoPro can record 4k@30fps. A 20-25min video is 5+gb. The newer GoPros will do 8k@60fps i believe, maybe only 30fps. That will take up a lot more space.
The cards have to be the higher speed cards to be able to record those resolutions, but if I were a person that recorded a lot of stuff, having a card that large would be nice for a day long session.
I bought a 1TB SD card for my go pro/drone the other day. In theory it's good for 16 hours of recording non stop.
I also have both a 512gb and a 256gb sd card for my dash cam, I'd really like to get a compatible 1TB card, but 4TB would be even nicer. Maybe I'd be able to go a month without offloading the card.
It's really a convenience thing. I have a 256 in my GP, and that lasts me a couple of days worth of snowboarding sessions, or longer with miscellaneous recordings. Upload my stuff and clear it. EzPz.
Sneakernet. There's places that don't have access to get l good Internet and relatively inexpensive storage like this allows them to buy and trade media and consume it on inexpensive devices like a cellphone.
People doing production on their MacBooks might be a target per the small form factor.
They're awesome for modding iPods, though my music library's probably less than 1 gb.
Flash modding iPods is a cool use case for larger-capacity SD cards. However, the limiting factors seem to be the database file for the songs on the device and the RAM available.
At a certain point you get diminishing returns on the card capacity as you couldn’t fill up the card with songs and have them all be indexed without the iPod crashing. In these situations, one can be fine staying at 128 or 256 GB.
Unmodded low-end steam deck.
Security camera run time.
DSLR for events.