Wouldn’t it just cost more to produce? Do MicroSD cards with 1 TB of information cost more than making a Solid State Drive that also holds 1 TB?
In: Technology
A micro SD card and an SSD have very different rates when they transmit data to a computer.
A micro SD card will transmit data at a rate of around 25 Megabytes per second which would take 40,000 seconds (11.111 hours) to complete a full transfer of a 1 Terabyte data file.
A SSD can ideally transmit data at a rate of 550 Megabytes per second which would take about 1818 seconds (30.3 minutes) to complete a full transfer of a 1 Terabyte data file.
Overall, it’s when you want to use it that matters. A micro SD is great for cameras and smaller devices that do not require a fast data rate to function. A gaming PC or a supercomputer would not run very fast if it were running off of an micro SD card but will run fine when using an SSD.
Sorry if I did not explain that simply enough. Let me know if you want more clarification. I love this stuff.
Edit: I am merely giving an example to understand the difference. It is definitely not the best case scenario. These are merely averages I searched up to give the example simplest.
SSD hard drives on SATA connectors have performance and longevity expectations. Users fully expect to run the SATA connection at full speed for reads, and pretty close for writes. Drives are usually warranty’d for either 1/3 or 1 full copy of the disk written to per day, for the duration for the warranty on the disk.
These are things you don’t get on SD cards. That stuff takes space for the additional chips, including the processor, RAM for the processor, and multiple storage chips accessed simultaneously to make up the speed needs.
Now, if you really want to make use of the size of the disk and you have the cash, you can get a ~16 TB SSD in the same physical size for SATA SSD disks. I think they cost over $2,000 each though.
So, is this subreddit’s name supposed to be ironic?
SSD is supposed to work super fast so it has extra stuff in it to help make it work fast. SD card is supposed to be very small, so it doesn’t have extra stuff in it.
Here’s a video on what happens when you install Windows on a SD card;
So they can fit a standard port that will enable a housing to hold a wide array of SSD configurations.
If you have an old one you don’t use any more crack it open. The actual drive is quite possibly very similar to a little SD drive chip, and maybe there’s a printed circuit board in there and a couple of other things that help various processes and optimization. All this might fill maybe 1/4 or less of the SSD volume and the rest is empty space.
More sophisticated drives have more “guts” in them, and maybe multiple smaller drives to add up to the total volume, but chances are even then the contents take up less than half the space inside. Google it.
But you, the person building a computer, probably don’t want a minimized drive, you want one that fits a standard tray so you don’t need custom inserts that might not even fit in your computer case preset trays. So they have an agreed upon housing size that gives all manufacturers plenty of flexibility.
An SD card is just storage chips on a PCB + one very simple controller for the whole thing. It’s usually a very low-performance chip that is only intended to perform the very basic duties a storage controller needs to perform.
An SSD on the other hand has a lot more going for it. Its larger PCB contains *much* more sophisticated control circuitry that enables advanced features like caching, TRIM, and wear leveling. Those *significantly* increase the read/write performance and the reliability of the whole thing.
SSDs are a more-sophisticated, higher-performance design of otherwise the same basic thing as an SD or micro SD card.
They have additional or more powerful components; They have cache that is basically RAM (even faster than the actual storage itself. Helps make reads and writes almost instant, up until the cache gets too full to be helpful.) They have a microcontroller (brain) capable of speedily zipping data around and wear-leveling (spreading reads/writes over the whole storage area to prolong the life of the whole drive). They probably do a little bit of error detection and correcting. Stuff like that.
But even then, the SATA 2.5″ drive size is pre-determined since before SSDs were a thing.
To see how small SSDs can be, crack open a 2.5″ SATA SSD. It will probably be a small circuit board inside taking up hardly that much of the space taken up by the outer shell at all.
Source: https://youtu.be/mnk6gnOBYIo?t=10m30s
(Whole video is worth a watch if you’re curious about SSDs. Goes into what makes an expensive one more expensive, what a good SSD should have, and some objective speed benchmarks for comparison.)
Easier still, take a look at M.2 SSDs. These can be the size of a couple or a few full-sized SD cards. And some of them are even faster than the larger 2.5″ drives, if they support the NVMe standard.
Tl;dr they are bigger because they have more, better components that have to operate at higher performance. But the big old 2.5″ ones are big mostly just because the physical standard needs to be backward-compatible, with mounting screw holes on the sides lining up with mounting solutions for existing hard drives.
It mainly has to do with speed. SSD drives are fast because they use multiple flash chips at the same time, this way the work of storing or reading data is split over multiple chips and can be done faster. In an SD card, there is only a single flash chip which has to do all the work, so it is slower.
Power is also an issue. Most devices meant to read SD or microSD cards are low power (phones, cameras, MP3 players), so SD cards are designed to use very little power. SSDs are optimized for performance, they use extra electricity in order to speed up reads and writes.
SD cards range in speed from 10MB/s to 100MB/s or so. SSDs range from 500MB/s to over 2000MB/s, which is up to 200x faster than SD cards.
High end Flash drives, for example IBM’s FCM or FlashCore Module run NMVE, support compression and encryption in hardware, and can now be up to 38 TB or so before compression. They also vary voltage on areas that are getting worn along with the many other features you’d expect. They would be sold in a storage system holding 24 drives, with expansions possible.
The fastest drives currently are Storage Class Memory (SCM). Though they are currently much smaller capacity. They offer lower latency.
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