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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 ones used for 4K recordings are not slow 100+MBps, I won’t say prone to failure as such, flash storage can only handle a finite number of writes but we can mitigate that by using wear leveling.
The NVMe SSDs are very fasy - up to 4GB/s even for a not especially fast drive - because NVMe is an interface that connects to the PCI bus and depending on the PCI version and number of lanes in the NVMe interface (in that interface there are two variations for SSDs, so they can use 2 or 4 PCI lanes, with 4 lanes having twice the bandwidth that 2 lanes have).
The most recent version of NVMe SSDs which use PCIe version 4 can, when using 4 lanes, theoretically reach 8GB/s and there are already drives out there that get pretty close to it.
However some drives of a similar size and connector are not NVMe but actually SATA (same protocol as the older SSDs) and that stuff is limited to about 500MB/s same as the fastest SSDs from a few years ago.
I’ve recently got a mini PC and had to dive again into all this stuff (I’ve been doing the hardware update of my own desktop PCs for decades now and even building them from scratch but haven’t had to look into it for several years) and the tech has really advanced since the earlier SSD days which were not that long ago.
I wish SD Cards also had some specifications for random access speed.
I used to have a UHS-I SanDisk card which felt much faster than my current UHS-III Samsung card. It’s really evident when searching through the storage, waiting for photo thumbnails to cache, etc…
I am not sure whether to go for a UHS-I SanDisk or UHS-III Samsung next. That SanDisk might not handle higher bitrate 4K.
Me. I am basically trying to squeeze the desktop ^(PC)^ out of my phone, so there’s a lot of “unnecessary” stuff.
For example, I am currently deciding whether to keep the 110GB of DVD ISO files which I can stream from my phone using VLC (on client side) which are served by nginx server from my phone (this way I still get all menus, just like with a physical DVD) or delete it and replace it with equally sized 110GB EN Wikipedia maxi .zim package, install kiwix-tools on Termux and set up nginx on Termux to serve as revese proxy to kiwix-serve so I could also host a mirror of the whole English Wikipedia, including (downscaled) images on my phone. I guess that sounds cooler than DVDs.
Or I should get a 512GB SD card and keep both.
I can’t afford 1TB one.
But yeah, that’s just one example. My 256GB SD card is about to pop while my video and music collection (The latter of which which is also served using Navidrome server in Termux 🙂. For videos I just use nginx with material fancyindex theme.) keeps growing.
I already have to keep some stuff on phone’s internal storage.
Termux is godsent. Otherwise I’d absolutely have to get a PinePhone as I couldn’t live with something as locked down as Android or even iOS without a nice terminal emulator.
Alternatively, I could benefit from pocket-sized passively cooled laptop.
Yeah, I’ve filled 256GB pretty easily by recording on an action camera all day, maybe for a couple of days. 4TB would be very convenient for a holiday.
Really depends on the person. I have never managed to fill up a 128 gigabyte phone, but that is because I am blind, so I am not taking pictures in 4K videos. The biggest thing on my phone is my music collection, which only takes about 5 gigs or so. This phone that I have now is a 64 gigabyte phone and while it’s mostly full, it’s still not there yet. According to the Android settings, I still have about 23 gigabytes left on this 64 gig phone. It says I have used about 64% and if this were a 128 gig phone, that would be about 32% or so.
I’m not deleting them. They’re uploaded to the cloud at the time of creation. I also move them off my phone to my computer every 6 months or so - I do this just in case the upload to the cloud has ever silently failed. I deduplicate the images, so I don’t have multiple versions of the same image with different file names.
For me it’s not entirely about space. I rarely let the device get more than 2/3rds full. It’s also about speed. If I want to pull a photo/video off my phone, it seems sluggish when there are thousandths of files in that one directory.
Ah, yea, I see. Makes sense. Minimizes your risk while also minimizing your effort to manage them.
Yea, I don’t mind having photos on my phone, but managing them is far easier on a pc. So like you, mine all sync to my PC instantly, then when I feel like it I spend some time there cleaning them up (and the changes sync back).
Since the PC has Crashplan for backup, and a NAS it syncs too, I feel pretty comfortable my stuff is safe.
Partly a mismanagement issue, but my music library at home is more than 120gb. I’d rather just carry my full library - why not? Storage is cheap.
Then there’s video. I prefer pulling video on wifi, rather than stream and burn data. Again, why not? Storage is WAY cheaper than cell data. And I’m being a good neighbor by leaving bandwidth available for other uses.
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.
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.
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.
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