SanDisk Crams 400GB Into An SD Card The Size Of Your Finger Nail

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Wow. And I remember marveling at a 16MB SmartMedia card just before 2000. 400GB is 3.2 trillion bits. Even assuming just one transistor per cell, it boggles the mind.
 
So crazy. And they keep cramming in more and more capacity and they never seem to slow down. It's like every year, Sandisk says "Remember last year's MicroSD cards? Well, we just added another 200GB."
 
Actually, it's 1 transistor per 4 bits, because that's what QLC means, quad-level cell, quad as in 4. They can do 16 different states, which is what's needed for one cell to account for 4 binary bits.
 
It would be interesting to know what its data retention period is. I just found a CF card with 12-year-old photos on it (and probably hasn't been read since) that still reads without errors.

With this thing, I'd feel lucky to get 2 years. Perhaps the MFG-supported retention period could even be as low as a few months.
 
20 of those could easily fit in a 2.5" bay = 8TB. Does anyone make such a device? (NAS, PCI card,etc) that could hold many micro SDs and JBOD or RAID them together?
 


I'd imagine the latency would be off the charts. Not to mention the enormous number of bad sectors you'd accumulate across the whole array. Not to mention that SD card speeds are nowhere near SSD speeds. Barely even HDD speeds. And SD cards are not built to the same MTBF as SSDs. If you put a MicroSD card under the same workload as, say, an OS hard drive, A) you'd have a really slow computer, and B), you'd have a card failure probably within a year.
 

Wow.


Yeah, a million good reasons not to do it. But, if you had the cards lying around it might be kinda fun to try.

Back in the day, I used to think it'd be neat to RAID-5 a bunch of CD-R drives. After packet writing came along, that is. At least that had a GB/$ argument in favor of it. If you were just looking for a cheap way to move bulk data from one place to another, there was a time when it made sense.
 


lol The noise of that must've been ungodly.
 
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