I’m just wondering. I’ve seen it all the time like in smartphone specifications where it would say “Micro SD slot: Up to 128GB” or on other devices it would be like “Can read up to 1TB”. I can understand if its about the compatibility issues like how you could only use DDR3 memory to certain motherboard or a software could run on windows 7 or newer. But I can’t think about why bigger storage would cause a problem for that matter.
I’m pretty sure I could get an easy logical reasonable answer for that so here I am asking.
In: Technology
Processing limitations. Think of it like a highway. You could have a six lane highway so you can handle a lot of traffic but that would cost a lot to maintain. However, traffic could go really fast and pretty much always go the speed limit, say 65. Or you could have a one lane highway with a 100 mph speed limit that gets easily clogged by one slow car.
In this example, you’re seeing the posted speed limit (up to X) while they manage the number of lanes.
To balance throughput (number of lanes) and performance (speed limit), the architects make a call to balance cost, long-term maintenance, and benefit.
It’s because storage is like a phone book. You have to have an INDEX, at the start, telling you which page in the book you can find file A, file B, file C, etc. And the device cannot handle this INDEX if it’s got more than 128 GB of pages, or more than 1TB of pages.
The data can be present on the pages, but your device cannot address more than x number of pages.
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