My now long-in-the-tooth camera makes JPG files of about 3.5 MB each. If I had 1TB of storage on board, it would be enough for about 285,000 photos.
The expected lifetime of the shutter mechanism in my camera is only about 100,000 shots. Even if I got lucky and my camera’s shutter lasted twice as long, this card would be large enough to store every photo the camera snaps in its lifetime, without ever deleting anything.
When the camera finally broke, I could fumble the card out and instantly drop it in a sewer drain, probably.
The files my camera makes are nearly 13 megapixels; if you were to use those files as video frames, this card would hold 158 minutes of them at 30 FPS. Quite a lot for one card.
A real, modern 4K video camera works at more like 8 megapixels and is much more efficient with storage space besides, and would probably get around 1,000 minutes of footage on this card.
I still have my first flash drive - a 128 megabyte drive that cost me $50. And I’ve got the first 1gb sd card I bought ($98 on sale), for a camera that’s long gone.
Today, I’ve got a cheap but fast 256gb sd card in my phone. It’s got about 5000 books on it, the majority of which I haven’t read yet, and about 40 music albums. Adding on the space used for apps, I’ve still got over 200 gb left for taking videos. HD is good enough for me, so 200 gb is several hours of video, and I can back it up when I get home.
I think many of us early adopters who had to deal with floppy disks, then zip drives, then small capacity hard drives etc are just so pleased with this new world of vast data capacity that we over-buy, knowing that we’re over-buying, and pleased that we are able to over-buy.
(Assuming that the read and write speeds are up to the task). If you don’t intend to grade your video, there are heavily compressed alternatives. Red cameras don’t use SDCards, but I suppose that people on vacation on location might want to have space for more than a day’s footage.
(If it stays in the camera, it might be less likely to get lost. On the other hand, if it breaks, everythnig will be lost.)
8TB drive goes on sale like every third week at Best Buy for $130, finally had to get one for backups, makes it effortless (10TB is $180 but lesser value)
I’m old enough to remember 10MB drives, 10TB is incredible in the size of a small book
Hell, I built an overkill NAS server with plenty of extra hot-swap bays, only to discover that (for now at least) the existing 6 TB RAID10 is still more than enough for my needs. I can always slide in some extra drives if needed, though. Unfortunately, the SAS HBA doesn’t support drives greater than 2 TB, but the SATA ports are happy with bigger drives.
I remember the early hard drives as well, and also the 300 MB disk packs on a Prime 650 at my junior college, or the 28 MB RK07 packs at my high school. It’s weird to think now that an actual megabyte of anything was an expensive proposition back in the day.
This is mainly for photography and video use, shooting RAW on cameras with large sensors, and 4/8G video. The thing is, the price will drop rapidly - I have a 1Gb card that I bought for my first digital camera, a Nikon. The camera cost £800, the card £200. A couple of years or so ago a 512Gb card would have cost nearly twice what this 1Tb card costs, in 18 months one of these will probably cost less than £200/$200; in three years they’ll cost less than £100.
I remember the first hard drive that my father bought in the late 80s, it was the size of a small pizza and held 20 MB. I loved it because I no longer had to switch floppies to play games on our Atari ST. Ah, progress.
