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Comment by gene-h | Hacker News Reader

The first 1TB microSD card was released in 2019[0]. It is disappointing that the time to double was about 4 years.

[0]https://www.zdnet.com/article/micron-releases-worlds-first-1...

Well, we're getting to the point of diminishing returns. Who is going to be buying these?

It's like with HDDs, very few consumers are buying these 20 TB HDDs. Unlike HDDs, MicroSD is largely a consumer product.

The steam deck is a pretty good use case for these cards

Baldur's Gate 3 is a 150GB install size, so with games of this size increasingly being the norm it will quickly get used up.

I was going to say, has OP downloaded a game recently? You can fit 10-20 modern games on this card tops.

Action sports cams, dashcams, handheld gaming device such as the switch and steamdeck, I'm sure there's plenty more application. All fairly niche but it's a market

The Nintendo Switch has sold 132 million units, so I'm not sure how niche that is. Presumably the successor is going to keep using microSD cards, and filesizes will increase in line with graphical capabilities.

Cartridges are pretty popular, if only because you can sell / borrow them.

I have an SD card for the online-only titles, but it's pretty small IIRC.

But yeah, this still seems like a major use case for larger MicroSD cards.

I feel gaming devices are the primary target...as someone who used to shoot wedding videography a few years ago, there is a limit of how much footage you want to store on one card - if only because you can easily lose them. The smaller storage limit is a feature, not a bug :) It forces "normal" users to actually figure out a backup solution. Most action cams are going to take a long while to fill up 2TB.

I have a steam deck and have no interest in a 2tb sd card, i am subscribed to some steam deck communities and the preference, given the reliability of sd cards, is to have multiple smaller rather than risk a single big sd card to fail and having to reinstall them all

I have a steam deck and my primary interest would be to use it on mine. I'd apply the WORM method with it. Load it up with ROMs and only ROMs. I have a back up of all that data so suffering a failure would be a minor inconvenience.

We're hitting diminishing returns in manufacturing, irrespective of consumer vs enterprise markets. The biggest datacenter SSD today is 100TB, up from 60TB in 2016. That's just 67% growth over 7 years. And the price per TB has risen significantly for these high end drives since then, so it is a lot more economical to just buy more smaller drives.

The average person’s storage needs will likely increase a lot over the next decade: AI models, AR/VR, and six-degrees-of-freedom video are very storage intensive technologies that are close to going mainstream.

I have strong doubts that an average person will have an offline AI model.

I use microSDs for offline backups. Every Friday I zip my home folder and copy it onto one of two rotating 1TB SSD. One SSD stays at the house, another at my office, so I always have a fairly recent offsite backup.

Using 1TB as my backup size I keep my active development projects to a size limit of 1TB. That’s fine for code, it can fit all type typescript I want. I’ve began branching out into asset heavy projects, such as video editing and game development, and that 1TB limit is feeling more and more constraining. Now every quarter or so I “archive” projects out of my documents folder, which is a lengthier backup process.

I know there are cloud based backup solutions, but I find this way to be cheaper and having a physical copy to hold gives me a feeling of security.

Have you looked at automated solutions like Borg/Vorta? You could reduce disk wear and increase speed, plus have versioning and deduplication.

The file sizes of medium format cameras is gigantic.

Back when phones had micro SD card slots, I would download my entire music library from music streaming services for offline listening. I also tend to take an excessive number of photos and videos in the best quality possible with my phone, and I'd offload them to the micro SD card to avoid filling up my internal storage.

4K60p video takes up a lot of space..

They still do have the card slots, just not the flagship phones.

When I was looking at the Galaxy S23, they also had their Midrange model, and that had an SD card slot. But it wasn't the hot new flagship phone.

You so much as blink at these cards and they mysteriously stop booting, my 4K-capable A7R IV tops out at 100 Mbit/sec write rate for video, that's almost 24 hours worth on a 1TB card.

Given the technical limitations of these devices, already storing that much footage on a card that is so slow to backup and with such limited rewrite lifetime seems insane. I love the idea of 2TB in such a tiny package, but the reality of who would actually buy these in large numbers and for what does not quite seem to line up with the tech.

If they are not written to very much they're a lot more reliable

Disappointing? We have magic at our fingertips and it's not good enough yet? What are some cost of faster progress? Why are you disappointed?

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