2TB microSD card is on the way early next year

If you want to blow the mind of a non-tech person. Show them a high capacity MicroSD card and tell them how many 1’s and 0’s it can reliably store.<p>A 2TB MicroSD card really is a modern marvel in engineering.

That&#x27;s a whole 25 Johnny Mnemonics! (Or 6 of him when he quadruples his capacity which is life threateningly dangerous.)

What about speed? Is the adoption of SD Express slow compared to previous standards? I never see any computer (or smartphone) specs advertising &quot;microSD Express&quot; speeds, and it is already 4 years old.<p>The coming standard claims &quot;up to 2GB&#x2F;s possible.&quot; [1], and at this &quot;speed&quot; (of adoption, that is), this is not coming anytime soon.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2124706&#x2F;sd-express-9-1-new-standard-ensures-transfers-at-almost-2-gb-per-second.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2124706&#x2F;sd-express-9-1-new-s...</a>

If only they&#x27;d let you put any SD card in a new phone, but nah, how about an extra $500 for like 256gb

The first 1TB microSD card was released in 2019[0]. It is disappointing that the time to double was about 4 years.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;micron-releases-worlds-first-1tb-microsd-card&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;micron-releases-worlds-first-1...</a>

My first digital camera came with a 4MB SD card. What a time to be alive!

I almost can&#x27;t believe this. Even 1TB is an insane amount of storage on something so small.

If you don&#x27;t mind shopping a bit off-brand, like SanDian and Sansumg, they&#x27;re already available, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aliexpress.com&#x2F;item&#x2F;1005006108748036.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aliexpress.com&#x2F;item&#x2F;1005006108748036.html</a><p>(caution: read the one-star reviews)

Just don&#x27;t get them from Amazon.

With so many layers, I’d be deeply concerned about how fragile it is. Probably much better off being inserted in a semi-permanent role (Switch, Steam Deck), than camera storage.

<i>Enough with floppy-analogies.</i><p>Those who know, know that Algol-68 was 20 kbytes and it was one full roll of punched paper tape. Weighing 100 grams.<p>So, 2 TB would require 10000 tons of papertape. (2e12&#x2F;20e3&#x2F;10&#x2F;1e3)<p>And as we all know Finland&#x27;s yearly paper production is 4 million tons. Hence it could produce only one 2TB SD-disk worth of reliable paper tape storage in a day.

From the photo, the 2TB microSD card appears to be UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) and Video Speed Class 30 (V30) which correspond to a minimum of 30 MB&#x2F;s transfer speed [1]. This is good but still pales in comparison with external SSDs with &gt;1,000 MB&#x2F;s transfer speeds [2] and internal SSDs with &gt;7,000 MB&#x2F;s transfer speeds [3].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kingston.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;personal-storage&#x2F;memory-card-speed-classes" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kingston.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;personal-storage&#x2F;memory-car...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;reviews&#x2F;best-external-hard-drive-ssd,5987.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;reviews&#x2F;best-external-hard-driv...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;reviews&#x2F;best-ssds,3891.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&#x2F;reviews&#x2F;best-ssds,3891.html</a>

Are microSD cards the densest we can store information digital information?<p>As in bytes&#x2F;mm³ or bytes&#x2F;gramm.

I would be happy just getting a micro SD UHS-II card with decent storage. All this storage space and it takes forever to transfer anything to it on UHS-I

Imagine storing whole internet text from November&#x2F;December 2023 on 5 such microSD cards (CommonCrawl.org WET files for this crawl are 9.30 TiB)...

If we&#x27;re at the point of 2 TB microSD cards, why can&#x27;t I buy a 6+ TB flash drive yet? As far as I can tell, non-fake ones top out at 1 TB.

I don’t know why I still get excited about huge storage capacity in tiny cards, but weirdly I really do.

I know we all like big numbers but<p>&gt;said to have read speeds of up to 100 MB a second and write speeds of up to 90 MB a second<p>is useless to say, especially when write caches exist. I only care about minimum speeds, short of in depth analysis. The card is V30, which guarantees 30MB&#x2F;s write.

Really wish there was something between SD&#x2F;usbstick and SSD in terms of speed and reliability.

May be someday we could have a mini NAS build with microSD card. If I could have 8 of these in ZFS with 4 of them being for redundancy bring a total 8TB storage. In Raid it would still be able to saturate 2.5Gbps Ethernet.

Does any more knowledgeable person know if this is something that will require hardware support or software support or should it just plug and play in any old microsd slot?

I remember when consumer external gigabyte hard drives were just coming available. They were still thousands of dollars. They weighed in the pounds, and about half a cubic foot in volume.<p>I mean, I remember floppies and 5.25 format hard drives in the kb and multiple mb size too, but the gigabyte hard drive era seemed like a significant milestone, so it made an impression. That gb external drive was probably just multiple (4-8) 5.25 drives in a case.<p>1TB didn&#x27;t make the same impression because we were already getting to the &quot;more than you need for most use cases&quot; range and the external formats were about as compact as the internal ones with laptop form factor drives.<p>But TB scale in a micro SD format... Yeah, that is a similar impression to the GB HDD era.

That&#x27;s enough to store chat GPT.<p>As you can imagine, infosec people are stressed.

corporate spies rejoice?<p>whose filling up terabytes at this size?

Wow! Now I can have an 8TB iPod!