wow 32 dies. Thats insane. Although its interesting that they didn't went the same route as they did in the past: Stick more bits per cell. With 4X (as they called their 4bit per cell tech) 256Gbit die would be possible on the same area as 128Gbit MLC. Although i doubt it would be capable of write speeds like that, let alone being pro workload friendly.
4bpc tech was viable at larger lithographies but at 19nm and below it would be a pain to deal with. It's probably more cost efficient to just dump the not-good-enough-for-SSDs quality NAND to SD cards instead of spending millions in designing yet another die for yet another litho. In the past it was different when SD cards and USB sticks were the #1 application for NAND.
Yeah, that kinda makes sense. On the subject of 4bpc; Was there any endurance ratings at the time, when this was available ? 4bits per cell seems a lot to deal with, even at bigger litographies.
These are full size SD cards, not micro; so they're not going directly into your phone. However, in most cases the official max capacity on the specsheet is just the biggest card available for testing before the phone was released; but as long as the base SD spec doesn't increment (SD -> SDHC -> SDXC) the higher capacity card will almost always work.
I suppose we'll find out when they get around to using their gains in density to double uSD capacity to 256GB....
I've got a full SD card in my phone. The pin structure is about the same, and the interface is the same, so you can get adapters either way. It's a ribbon cable the width of a microSD that you slide into the microSD slot, and then on the other end there's a plastic sandwich with the larger spring-loaded SD slot. The ribbon cable is thin enough to fit in the space between the case and the back cover.
that's how i destroyed my 128gb kingston sdxc just days after getting it. but then again, i disassembled both sd card and adapter, soldered them together and modded my trusty nexus one so the contraption would fit beneath the battery cover.
suffice to say i'm happy to call a nice little sandisk 128gb micro sdxc my own since a couple of months.
At 128 GB and higher, most cards are the newer SDXC, not SDHC. Anything that says it has SDXC support should work. (And as someone else said, these are full-size SD, not micro, so no current smartphones need apply. These are for cameras.)
The biggest difference between SDHC and SDXC is the filesystem. The filesystem has microsoft tax attached. The SD standards specify the filesystem you must support. So, even if your device could use SDXC with fat32,ntfs, ext4, or any other filesystem, you aren't allowed to claim you support anything bigger than 32g.
My asus android tablet seems to work fine with 64gig cards, as long as they're not exfat. Even ntfs works.
Yeah, people are stupid when they say "You can put up to 128 GB of extra storage with microSD." What they mean is, "You could get a 128 GB microSD card today."
microSDXC goes up to 2 TB. I remember seeing the mockup of a 2TB microSD card a few years ago, to go with that announcement. It was completely ludicrous at the time, but all we need now is two more doublings.
Something along the lines of 'all the eggs in one basket' comes to mind when I see cards this big. Would be really bad to loose that much data of photos or video.
Depends on the compression... I mean you can easily get 1 hour in far less than 512GB (and have it still look good). Now.. uncompressed, lol yeah you would be talking tens of minutes, or less. Yikes!
128GB (the industry standard) holds 80 minutes of 1080P/60 video, so losing 14 minutes of recording time is somewhat manageable when your alternative, up until now, was 33 minutes for 4k/60 (on uncommon 256GB cards) or, *caugh* 16 minutes on 128GB cards.
4k video devours storage though. A bit of Googling turned up cameras recording at 150MB/sec on XQD cards (looked like a CF successor for high end systems) for 4k60. This card's not fast enough to match that; but it should be able to comfortably do half that and 75MB/sec is 287GB/hour. So this card as expensive and huge as it is can still only hold a few hours of 4k video.
The people who care about really high bitrate 4K video (when you're recording to ProRes or DNG something RAW-like) aren't recording to SD cards anyhow, they're recording to SSDs directly.
You don't say it straight up but the article suggests they stacked 32 dies and i don't think that's it since it's not needed.. Even the pic has 2 sets of dies. W/e you intended to say,maybe better to make it clearer. In their 128GB microSD they do stack 16 dies and the controller inside a 1mm thick package so in pure theory they should be able to do 32 dies in 2mm. But a SD card is 32 x 24 x 2.1 mm so there should be room for 2-3 stacks (32x24 is 768mm2) even if they use the second gen 19nm not the 15nm MLC. Your guess was 139mm2 for 15nm MLC and i assume second gen 19nm is well bellow 200mm2 while first gen 19nm at or slightly above 200mm2. Guess they could even use 64GB dies ,there is plenty of room if they would go with 4 stacks of 16 dies and might make more sense than to go with 2x16 bigger dies, yield wise.
There is only enough room for one stack in an SD card, MAYBE 2. Definitely not four though. The z height isn't going to be a concern though, because I doubt the 32 die stack ends up being much taller than a 16 die stack by the time it's packaged up and whatnot.
lol i hope and assume you are just trolling on purpose but for the sake of others i'll reply. You have the SD card dimensions in my first post and die sizes so yes you can fit a bunch of stacks next to each other(assuming everybody around here passed second grade math). In fact even old school cards had a couple of NAND packages and a controller on a PCB..There is lots of space in a SD. Fitting 16 dies in 1mm or 32 in 2 mm is something everybody else is yet to do, it's a remarkable thing that Sandisk managed to achieve and 16 or 32 not at all the same thing.
You most definitely can fit 4 stacks into an SD card; uSD cards have one and full size SD cards are more than 4x larger (32x24mm vs 15x11mm). You might even be able to squeeze 6 stacks in; depending on how much of the uSDs area is taken by external packing and the USB-Flash controller chip.
So UHS has been out for a while. What devices actually use it? Just cameras? Also, are there commodity-priced UHS card readers?
UHS sounded so cool when I read about it, but then I realized it means nothing without device support. Chicken and egg, I know, but this is one damn slow cooking chicken.
It seems they weigh 0.07 oz, in general. That much gold would be about $90, at most.
I have no idea how much diamonds cost, though! Googling reveals $800 per carat, and a carat is 0.007 oz, so Diamonds are worth ten times as much as this SD card by weight.
Further Googling shows that the lowest-grade 10-carat diamond would cost almost $170,000. I think being 10 carats makes them extremely rare and more valuable.
This is why smartphones need to ditch microSD slots and go back to full size SD. Phones are no longer getting like they used to years ago. All these 5"+ devices have plenty of space for dual SIM, full size SD slot, user replaceable batteries and Qi charging.
I'm guessing you are not interested in shooting long HD videos with your smartphone. It's not for everyone but there's plenty of people that will appreciate a full size SD slots. For the rest, there's plenty of phones without external storage whatsoever
Good point. Now that I look at the photo more carefully, it seems to be two 16-die stacks instead of one 32-die stack. I've added an update to mention this, but either way it is impressive since nobody else comes close to the density SanDisk offers.
Yeah, as far as sd card desity goes, they are really ahead. As far as chip density, samsung had 16 die stack for quite some time now (840EVO msata and 830 also had 16 die stack if i'm not mistaken).
4x16 64Gb makes more sense yield wise and even logistics wise (manage production,inventory) since they already have those from the 128GB microSD but less die area efficient so hard to say what would come on top cost wise. Another problem is that they might not be able to reach the rated speed with just 2 stacks but they sure can with 4.
They are most defenetly not using 64Gbit dies. For start, there is no room for 4 packages (as it would be reqired red for 16 die stackes each 64Gbit large). So they are most defenetly doing 128Gbit, as these kind of dies are also used for SSDs and flash drives. They just need to stack more of them into a single package (other products top at 8 stacks) so its probobly gonna be exclusive for this sd card for now (unless they bring out 1TB msata).
As far as speed is concerned; There is plenty of dies to make ~100MB R/W. Read are no problem (Since those are limited by controller anyway) but for writes, they probobly need around 4 decently binned 128Gbit dies to hit 100MB/s. So plenty of room here, since card itself employs 32 dies total (so really no need for 64Gbit dies).
Hmm, at 95MB/s, if I ever fill it completely, I'd need about 2 hours to copy it to my workstation. At these capacities, we really need faster interfaces.
I'll be buying 1 or 2 512GB cards at some point. One to extend my laptop's storage another potentially for mobile use. Is anyone else thinking of using these inside a mobile?
I'm tempted to trying modding my Nokia 808 with a full size SD card (I've seen others do so with other phones). I wonder if Symbian would work with 528GB of storage.
Just bought a...I think it's a regular Extreme one, 128GB a few months ago that I use as a transfer disk. Been great although for some reason it sometimes runs at 1/2 speed (once when I reseated it it then switched to full speed...once it didn't).
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hojnikb - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
wow 32 dies. Thats insane.Although its interesting that they didn't went the same route as they did in the past: Stick more bits per cell. With 4X (as they called their 4bit per cell tech) 256Gbit die would be possible on the same area as 128Gbit MLC. Although i doubt it would be capable of write speeds like that, let alone being pro workload friendly.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
4bpc tech was viable at larger lithographies but at 19nm and below it would be a pain to deal with. It's probably more cost efficient to just dump the not-good-enough-for-SSDs quality NAND to SD cards instead of spending millions in designing yet another die for yet another litho. In the past it was different when SD cards and USB sticks were the #1 application for NAND.hojnikb - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Yeah, that kinda makes sense.On the subject of 4bpc; Was there any endurance ratings at the time, when this was available ?
4bits per cell seems a lot to deal with, even at bigger litographies.
Zertzable - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
This is totally insane, 512GB in less than a square inch. I wonder how its performance would compare to a modern hard drive.dananski - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
I get around 90-100MB/sec from my 3TB 5400rpm drives, so roughly the same if their specs are to be believed... :ohojnikb - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
random performance (atleast write) is probobly even worse than harddrives, since sd cards aren't suited for that.MrSpadge - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
What about device support? Most smartphones etc. currently claim up to 128 GB SDHC support, as far as I know.DanNeely - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
These are full size SD cards, not micro; so they're not going directly into your phone. However, in most cases the official max capacity on the specsheet is just the biggest card available for testing before the phone was released; but as long as the base SD spec doesn't increment (SD -> SDHC -> SDXC) the higher capacity card will almost always work.I suppose we'll find out when they get around to using their gains in density to double uSD capacity to 256GB....
mkozakewich - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
I've got a full SD card in my phone. The pin structure is about the same, and the interface is the same, so you can get adapters either way. It's a ribbon cable the width of a microSD that you slide into the microSD slot, and then on the other end there's a plastic sandwich with the larger spring-loaded SD slot. The ribbon cable is thin enough to fit in the space between the case and the back cover.fokka - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
that's how i destroyed my 128gb kingston sdxc just days after getting it. but then again, i disassembled both sd card and adapter, soldered them together and modded my trusty nexus one so the contraption would fit beneath the battery cover.suffice to say i'm happy to call a nice little sandisk 128gb micro sdxc my own since a couple of months.
MrSpadge - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Thanks!CharonPDX - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
At 128 GB and higher, most cards are the newer SDXC, not SDHC. Anything that says it has SDXC support should work. (And as someone else said, these are full-size SD, not micro, so no current smartphones need apply. These are for cameras.)pixelstuff - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
Pretty sure SDHC is limited to 32GB. Any SD card larger than 32GB is by default SDXC.shadowjk - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
The biggest difference between SDHC and SDXC is the filesystem. The filesystem has microsoft tax attached. The SD standards specify the filesystem you must support. So, even if your device could use SDXC with fat32,ntfs, ext4, or any other filesystem, you aren't allowed to claim you support anything bigger than 32g.My asus android tablet seems to work fine with 64gig cards, as long as they're not exfat. Even ntfs works.
mkozakewich - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Yeah, people are stupid when they say "You can put up to 128 GB of extra storage with microSD." What they mean is, "You could get a 128 GB microSD card today."microSDXC goes up to 2 TB. I remember seeing the mockup of a 2TB microSD card a few years ago, to go with that announcement. It was completely ludicrous at the time, but all we need now is two more doublings.
Silverbullet126 - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
Something along the lines of 'all the eggs in one basket' comes to mind when I see cards this big. Would be really bad to loose that much data of photos or video.p1esk - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
512GB only holds about 1 hour of compressed 4k/60 video.extide - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
Depends on the compression... I mean you can easily get 1 hour in far less than 512GB (and have it still look good). Now.. uncompressed, lol yeah you would be talking tens of minutes, or less. Yikes!Samus - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
128GB (the industry standard) holds 80 minutes of 1080P/60 video, so losing 14 minutes of recording time is somewhat manageable when your alternative, up until now, was 33 minutes for 4k/60 (on uncommon 256GB cards) or, *caugh* 16 minutes on 128GB cards.DanNeely - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
4k video devours storage though. A bit of Googling turned up cameras recording at 150MB/sec on XQD cards (looked like a CF successor for high end systems) for 4k60. This card's not fast enough to match that; but it should be able to comfortably do half that and 75MB/sec is 287GB/hour. So this card as expensive and huge as it is can still only hold a few hours of 4k video.Guspaz - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
The people who care about really high bitrate 4K video (when you're recording to ProRes or DNG something RAW-like) aren't recording to SD cards anyhow, they're recording to SSDs directly.Barilla - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
About 75% of people I know sill use hard drives this size or smaller.Talk about insane...
jjj - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
You don't say it straight up but the article suggests they stacked 32 dies and i don't think that's it since it's not needed.. Even the pic has 2 sets of dies. W/e you intended to say,maybe better to make it clearer.In their 128GB microSD they do stack 16 dies and the controller inside a 1mm thick package so in pure theory they should be able to do 32 dies in 2mm.
But a SD card is 32 x 24 x 2.1 mm so there should be room for 2-3 stacks (32x24 is 768mm2) even if they use the second gen 19nm not the 15nm MLC. Your guess was 139mm2 for 15nm MLC and i assume second gen 19nm is well bellow 200mm2 while first gen 19nm at or slightly above 200mm2.
Guess they could even use 64GB dies ,there is plenty of room if they would go with 4 stacks of 16 dies and might make more sense than to go with 2x16 bigger dies, yield wise.
jjj - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
64Gb dies not GB obviously*extide - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
There is only enough room for one stack in an SD card, MAYBE 2. Definitely not four though. The z height isn't going to be a concern though, because I doubt the 32 die stack ends up being much taller than a 16 die stack by the time it's packaged up and whatnot.jjj - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
lol i hope and assume you are just trolling on purpose but for the sake of others i'll reply.You have the SD card dimensions in my first post and die sizes so yes you can fit a bunch of stacks next to each other(assuming everybody around here passed second grade math). In fact even old school cards had a couple of NAND packages and a controller on a PCB..There is lots of space in a SD.
Fitting 16 dies in 1mm or 32 in 2 mm is something everybody else is yet to do, it's a remarkable thing that Sandisk managed to achieve and 16 or 32 not at all the same thing.
hojnikb - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link
Actually, samsung has been doing 16 die stack for quite some time now. So its not a sandisk thing.DanNeely - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link
You most definitely can fit 4 stacks into an SD card; uSD cards have one and full size SD cards are more than 4x larger (32x24mm vs 15x11mm). You might even be able to squeeze 6 stacks in; depending on how much of the uSDs area is taken by external packing and the USB-Flash controller chip.hojnikb - Sunday, September 14, 2014 - link
Yeah, but you can only fit one half sized die (eg 64Gbit at 19nm). So one package and 16 dies is all you can get away with on mSD cards.MadMan007 - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
So UHS has been out for a while. What devices actually use it? Just cameras? Also, are there commodity-priced UHS card readers?UHS sounded so cool when I read about it, but then I realized it means nothing without device support. Chicken and egg, I know, but this is one damn slow cooking chicken.
pixelstuff - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
I think the Panasonic GH4 actually requires a card with the UHS-I Class 3 speed rating when recording in 4K at 100Mbps or Full HD at 100 or 200 Mbps.However, it also helps when getting data back off the card too even for low bit rate recordings by other cameras.
Mayuyu - Thursday, September 11, 2014 - link
So this is literally worth it's weight in gold.mkozakewich - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
It seems they weigh 0.07 oz, in general. That much gold would be about $90, at most.I have no idea how much diamonds cost, though! Googling reveals $800 per carat, and a carat is 0.007 oz, so Diamonds are worth ten times as much as this SD card by weight.
Further Googling shows that the lowest-grade 10-carat diamond would cost almost $170,000. I think being 10 carats makes them extremely rare and more valuable.
SuperSpy00bob - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
https://what-if.xkcd.com/108/Samwise Clemens - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
ahem... https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/semo - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
This is why smartphones need to ditch microSD slots and go back to full size SD. Phones are no longer getting like they used to years ago. All these 5"+ devices have plenty of space for dual SIM, full size SD slot, user replaceable batteries and Qi charging.althaz - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
No, they REALLY don't.semo - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
I'm guessing you are not interested in shooting long HD videos with your smartphone. It's not for everyone but there's plenty of people that will appreciate a full size SD slots. For the rest, there's plenty of phones without external storage whatsoeverhojnikb - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Hmm. Something has come to my mind. Since sd cards are big enough to hold two packages, isn't it kinda pointless to go with 32 die stackes ?I mean 512GB is totally doable with 2x 256 packages, each having 16 128Gbit dies. Or am i missing something here ?
hojnikb - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Or does 32 die stack just means that there are 32 dies in the sdcard but NOT stacked on to each other in a single package ?Kristian Vättö - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Good point. Now that I look at the photo more carefully, it seems to be two 16-die stacks instead of one 32-die stack. I've added an update to mention this, but either way it is impressive since nobody else comes close to the density SanDisk offers.hojnikb - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Yeah, as far as sd card desity goes, they are really ahead. As far as chip density, samsung had 16 die stack for quite some time now (840EVO msata and 830 also had 16 die stack if i'm not mistaken).jjj - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
4x16 64Gb makes more sense yield wise and even logistics wise (manage production,inventory) since they already have those from the 128GB microSD but less die area efficient so hard to say what would come on top cost wise.Another problem is that they might not be able to reach the rated speed with just 2 stacks but they sure can with 4.
hojnikb - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
They are most defenetly not using 64Gbit dies. For start, there is no room for 4 packages (as it would be reqired red for 16 die stackes each 64Gbit large). So they are most defenetly doing 128Gbit, as these kind of dies are also used for SSDs and flash drives. They just need to stack more of them into a single package (other products top at 8 stacks) so its probobly gonna be exclusive for this sd card for now (unless they bring out 1TB msata).As far as speed is concerned; There is plenty of dies to make ~100MB R/W. Read are no problem (Since those are limited by controller anyway) but for writes, they probobly need around 4 decently binned 128Gbit dies to hit 100MB/s. So plenty of room here, since card itself employs 32 dies total (so really no need for 64Gbit dies).
jjj - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
There is room for 4 stacks of any of their 3 most recent processes. The dies are 80-85mm2 for 15nm and 94mm2 and 113mm2 for the two 19nm genshojnikb - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Actually, there is room for 16 stacks (just like its shown in the picture).So i really dont get what you're traing to say here. It's NOT 64Gbit, you can be sure of that. It makes no sense.
hojnikb - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link
trying*Samwise Clemens - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
unless who brings out 1TB mSata? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...chris471 - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Hmm, at 95MB/s, if I ever fill it completely, I'd need about 2 hours to copy it to my workstation. At these capacities, we really need faster interfaces.hojnikb - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
We already have UHS-II, which is capable of 312MB/sGlynG - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
I'll be buying 1 or 2 512GB cards at some point. One to extend my laptop's storage another potentially for mobile use. Is anyone else thinking of using these inside a mobile?I'm tempted to trying modding my Nokia 808 with a full size SD card (I've seen others do so with other phones). I wonder if Symbian would work with 528GB of storage.
titanmiller - Friday, September 12, 2014 - link
Someday you'll be able to buy these for $50.hojnikb - Saturday, September 13, 2014 - link
A few dieshrinks and we'll actually get there.Wolfpup - Tuesday, September 16, 2014 - link
Wowzers, I haven't really even seen 256GB cards.Just bought a...I think it's a regular Extreme one, 128GB a few months ago that I use as a transfer disk. Been great although for some reason it sometimes runs at 1/2 speed (once when I reseated it it then switched to full speed...once it didn't).