The 400GB MicroSD Card

Around $130 each? A bargain really for what it is.

+$50.00 for the 400GB....256GB @ $130. is a good price

That is worth current price (special).

It's more expensive than rotating memory (HD drives), but not so long ago something like this was beyond anyone's imagination at any price.

This should be sufficient even for those with the most voracious appetite for selfies!

I consider those novelty items given their ridiculously long transfer times to use one up entirely for a single bulk file transfer.

Would be great for video, like surveillance or auto...

..."Ultra cards speed can range from 10MB/s to 80MB/s"...the extreme's go up to 300MB/s...

average HD movie is about 4 GB...@80MB/s that's about 50 seconds...

https://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7491/~/sandisk-products-transfer-speed

Long transfer rate?...compared to what? Dial-up?

I have a number of external harddrives in both solid state and spinning plus a bunch of assorted mini storage devices as well that all run USB 3.0 connections or run through SD and micro SD or other adapters with the same connection methods.

All are suposed to work at the higher end transfer rates but none actually do in real life operation . A typical movie transfer is about 1 - 2 minutes regardless of what computer or hard drive or memory device I have them on including my main PC that runs a dedicated USB 3.0 card and USB 3.0 USB hub. The SD and microSD are way worse.

The best ones I have will do aobut 100 GB an hour so a 400 Gb device on my systems would fall pretty close to 4 hours. Considerably more on my older USB 2.0 only laptops and other PC's.

Theoretical and as advertised rates always fall way short in every experiences have had so far.

If I really need to transfer larger file collections fast I go direct contention to the spinning hard drives with a SATA cable. Then I can do movies at 30 - 45 seconds each.

The 400 GB device for it's capacity and physical size is impressive but from my experience it would still take hours to load or unload given its microSD format.

That's all I know.

Real world microSD card testing results.

Thanks,.. on the topic of file transfer,... (Video that is) I wish I understood more is why videos files compression is so difficult or none existence.

I don't know either.

At my last job out in the oil fields once we were done with a job us E-techs had to take the main file archives for that job and back them up on external memory devices.

Depending on the job we either used larger capacity USB sticks/SD devices or actual external hard drive units.

Towards the end we were doing everything with the spinning disk hard drives just because we could cheat and pull a spare SATA line out the back of the main computers and do direct hard drive to hard drive transferring that way by popping the EHD case open and plugging indirectly to the drives with the SATA cables and a power feed cheater.

Mainly it was just because dumpling 100 - 250 GB of mixed files through USB ports was too slow.

The first jobs I was on that could take 2 - 5 hours but once we went with the SATA cheat those bigger jobs were well under an hour start to finish including hook up and unhook time which of course meant shutting down the systems to tie in and unhook.

From there those copies went back to the main office to get dumped to the companies main server system which using the EHD normal USB connections and we just let them run all night while we were gone.

I know a lot of people who claim they get the super fast USB and like connection transfer rates yet so far none of them have ever stepped up and explain let alone proven themselves to be true.

The best ones I have will start out at 100+MBs which lasts for about 5 - 10 seconds before dropping into the far more realistic 40 - 50 Mbs range and several hundred GB takes way longer than I care for standing and waiting for at that speed.

Fortunately or unfortunately, these little critters have become my hobby's stock and trade for data logging that goes on for weeks at a time. The files can be large, and getting bigger all the time. It takes some serious software to deal with the csv files.

I don't know if you're a MatLab user. I used MatLab at work but I can't justify the license price for at home, so I use Octave, which is very much like MatLab in almost all respects except price (it's free). You can read and write csv files, so you can do huge plots, correlations, etc.

Thanks, I sent myself a reminder for it just now. I think Andrew Westman pointed me already in that direction once, in an earlier thread about just this thing: crunching large vectors too big for Excel.

My wife is an amateur photographer but take it seriously. She shoots a lot of our local high school sporting events. There are days when she is shooting all day at tournaments where she will fill 3 or 4 64GB SD cards. I can see where the 400GB card could come in handy.

Its interesting how times change... I recall Kodak marketing as to 'capturing the moment' with a picture... but this older lady's picture has been in meme's, rings more true today as in 'enjoying the moment'.

Yep. That is what making "memories" is all about. What will this generation say when they get older?

Well, I used to keep all my life on my Facebook, my SD cards, and YouTube, but then the Great Zero happened, and

it all went bye-bye.

Can you run a fast PC system from one? Just putting that out there. I am going to do some research now...

I work with a guy who tried something similar when 2.0 thumb drives first became popular. He found that the constant R/W cycling trashed the thumb drive in about a month. Did he do something dumb with his code, maybe. Have they improved on this, maybe but doubtful because that's not what thumb drives are supposed to do. Do microSD cards have a better R/W cycle clock since they are intended for cameras and phones, possibly but how much better.

This unverifiable anecdote is brought just for amusement purposes.

Most operating systems require a read/write media and do a huge number of minor housekeeping writes to the media. Both in terms of time and flash wear this is a problem.

At work we have some boxes that run a Linux OS from flash. Some Wizard spent a lot of time tweaking and adjusting things to make that possible. I don't have a pointy hat or magic wand so this is beyond my abilities.

An OS intended for a cell phone or tablet would probably be ok from the start. An OS intended for normal hard drive media would typically require too much advanced customization for most of us.

Yes, I know solid state drives are flash drives. They typically do both RAM caching and flash wear leveling to get around the problem of OS housekeeping writes.

Next week China will have their knock offs on the market for $30.00 (USD)

For that kind of money, I could stick to a pencil and a notepad.

How many times can one write to, remove files, etc. before there are so many bad sectors that you have to pitch this chip in the trash and start over?

I am planning on one for my GoPro.

To put this in perspective:

In 1978 I bought my first RAM chips. The set of 8 chips to store 4kB of data (doubling the capacity of my computer!) was $70, plus the sockets required to mount them. At that rate, 4MB would have been $70,000, 4GB would have been $70,000,000, and 400GB would have been $7,000,000,000. That's 7 Billion dollars! ...and that's using 1000 for the meaning of k; Using 1024 would make it even higher (over $7.5B)

And what you bought was far above the memory of the onboard computer of the LEM that landed on the moon!

a hand calculator had more memory then the LEM

"Program alarm."

ERROR CODE 1202

I remember that, and wow was there a lot of panicking going on, Walter Cronkite nearly soiled himself.

I just now realized that you were talking about the LEM. I have no idea how much RAM the LEM's computer had, but I doubt that it was less than 4k. I have been led to believe that the main computer on the lunar missions had around 64k, about the same as an Apple II.

You are right at the edge to still be correct. The Apollo Guidance Computer had only 2048 words (4 kilobytes) of magnetic core memory for RAM. Now the read only core rope memory was just over 64 kilobytes of memory.

It is amazing how hardware has improved in fifty years. But still nobody else has been to the moon. We shall now lament about opportunities lost.

At that time... was it also called bubble memory? very inefficient data retrieval by todays standards (similar to machine tool CNC machinery from the 80's)

No, bubble memory did use a similar but not identical architecture to rope memory. Bubble could also be written. With rope memory the writing was in the weaving of the wires. Also bubble memory ate far more power than rope memory, a bad thing with limited power available.

Thanks,...

I think it is the actual hardware that gets one to the moon, although the software is somewhat indispensable.

How long before we're talking about yottabytes? yada yada yotta!

Only SE could possibly find an image that is a hybrid of Anthony Newman and Yoda.

I am totally impressed.

Anthony? is that Alfred's brother?

Sheesh! I even got THAT wrong? I guess I need more sleep.

we'll keep that under our hats... have you met Alfred's Sister Alice?...

Only by her stage name.

Lucy?

Barbara S.

I did some movie archive updates today and took a closer look at my transfer numbers.

As of now my best USB 3.0 external memory devices top out at ~50 MBs or about 2 GB per minute average which for loading one of my 400 GB 2.5" EHD units was about 3.5 hours.

As for a test with one of my ~1 year old 32 GB Sandisk microSD cards that device topped out at a marginal 22 - 25 MBs which would by proxy put a 400 GB device at a ~ 8 hour transfer time.