1TB SD card puts one sixth of Wikipedia in your camera

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/20/1tb-sd-card-puts-one-sixth-of.html

3 Likes

I’d love to get some x-rays of that puppy. The source says that there are 32 flash dice in there; and also speculates that it is likely using Toshiba’s 48 layer stacked flash. That suggests that there are some crazy and/or heroic die bonding and packaging tricks going on in there.

As for your flash-floppy wish; what you want is an old ‘SmartMedia’ card and a ‘Flashpath’ adapter. That makes the smartmedia card physically compatible with any 3.5in floppy drive, though a special driver is required to interact with it because it behaves differently than a standard floppy. Those haven’t been made in years; but fleabay still has them.

7 Likes

After a certain capacity, does more really make any difference? There are only so many angles, lighting options and costumes for dick pics.

10 Likes

Some people literally never take photos off the card, only keep them on their camera.

I can’t figure those people out either.

7 Likes

1TB SD card puts one sixth of Wikipedia in your camera

ugh, this is the U2 auto-download debacle all over again. Do I at least get to choose which sixth?

15 Likes

I just sent my mother a zip of every photo she had ever taken with one camera. It had years of stuff, enough that it took minutes to upload. She’s actually reasonably technically competent when she feels like it, and she’d have been pretty upset if she lost all the photos—I’m baffled.

5 Likes

These are the same people that would call our desktop support office to try to get their storage space increased so they didn’t have to delete any of their 4 gigs of email. (Actually the base storage was 2 gigs, but they’d already had that increased once …)

3 Likes

I’m confused. Where exactly are we getting an indication that Wikipedia is 6TB? I keep a copy (with pictures!) from www.kiwix.org on me most of the time, and it usually runs something like 50-60GB. Maybe the 6TB is with a complete copy of the edit history or something?

5 Likes

1TB I remember when that was a big deal. Now my toast has that much. When I can get it to stop trying to take over the kitchen. DON’T OPEN THE SAFE.

5 Likes

I love doing the physical comparison to the 64Kb (128Kb double-sided) 5.25" floppies I used at University in the 80s (under Thatcher). A bookshelf ~8km long would hold enough to match a 1Tb SD card.

6 Likes

Having recently had a weeks old 128GB card just flat out die on me (unmountable on any device) I have to say I’d be wary of a terabyte version. :slight_smile: It costs at least a $1000 to have a company wire around a dead controller to the memory chips themselves on a 128GB card to, hopefully, pull the data off. If it is even possible to do on a terabyte card, the cost would be perhaps $10,000, as the companies charge opportunistically.

4 Likes

I’m not quit sure why this is; but some brains appear to short-circuit at the idea that a ‘camera’ can become a ‘disk drive’ when you plug it in to a computer.

What’s really weird is the people who are OK with flash drives; but still can’t accept that a camera will just appear as a flash drive with the pictures you’ve taken stored on it.

I have tried, at some length, to comprehend this; and it defies me.

4 Likes

I used to plug my camera in to download images, but was driven a bit nutty by the image download/management software (that I didn’t want to use) it would automatically trigger . Maybe that’s what freaks them out. I am am much happier to just slip the card out, and into the SD-card slot on my MBP. Then Lightroom to drag them in, and I’m done. Much faster, too.

2 Likes

Annoyingly, mounting an SD card on a Mac always launches the Apple Photos app, even when you only ever want to use Lightroom. It is not optional and there is no method in the OSX UI to turn off this default behavior. :frowning:

2 Likes

That sentence was extremely confusing to me. Took me like 5 reads before I could grok it.

3 Likes

I guess that’s what people mean when they tell me Apple stuff “just works.”

They never mention that it “just works well”…

7 Likes

That’s actually a pretty damn impressive bit of tech there. How does it get the 3.3V to the card, I wonder.

ETA: Looks like it has two coin cell batteries in it.

6 Likes

Oh, it just works, the way Apple wants it to. What you want doesn’t necessarily matter. Simplifying the OS often means removing features you actually like. For instance, you can tag OS file folders with colors to mnemonically organize them. Except to clean up the look of the OS, the tag color no longer colors the folder icon, instead you get a separate column with a colored dot. The farther you remove the mnemonic color from the folder, the less mnemonic it is. Grrr…

But, let’s not pretend that Microsoft doesn’t do similar user hostile things, too.

6 Likes

I suppose, but there’s generally a large enough user base that someone writes a script that I can use to get around it.

However, every time I put in a SD card it fires up Lightroom and jumps to the import dialog. Because I told it to once and that’s that.

1 Like

I don’t know how kiwix packages its representation of Wikipedia, but that 6TB could be the size without any compression. Since Wikipedia is mostly text 80+% compression is definitely feasible.

3 Likes