Why are there 1TB micro SD cards that are the size fingernail and most 1TB hard drives are bigger than my hand?
In: Technology
Drives are standardized so they will work in any computer, the size doesn’t have much to do with the capacity. The size and mounting has been the same for a long time, from when 80gb was a pretty big drive and now there’s 10+tb drives that are exactly the same size.
As cards are unreliable as fuck. I have yet to have one that didn’t fail and delete all of my data. They are definitely not meant for continual usage
They getting smaller though – an 1TB m.2 nvme drive can get 5,000 MB/s and it’s a stick of Ram size wise basically
It’s just a form factor. Computer cases have 2.5 and 3.5 inch form factors for hard drives, and they are made to fit that size. If you look at a NVMe drive, it looks like a tiny stick of memory, yet that can be a couple of terabytes as well. Once again, even that is a set form factor size.
It’s not about getting data as dense as possible. It’s about cost. Hard drives are much cheaper than solid state storage per unit of storage. The best deals are around $15 per TB while a 1 TB microsd card is several hundred dollars.
You can get those massive densities with a hard drive like physical size. There are solid state drives that are tens of terabytes but they cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars each.
Would you be scared if I told you there were 1TB drives the size of one index finger in length & a little less than two fingers in width?
**And is faster that the drive the size of your hand?**
Lol this isn’t engineering wtf.
Solid state data storage like an SD card and magnetic storage like a hard drive are fundamentally different technology; this is like asking why a VHS Tape needs to be bigger than a Blu-Ray despite the latter having a larger capacity.
The reason they both exist is that they have different characteristics and use cases. An SD card is slow but physically compact, a HDD faster than an SD but far larger and probably cheaper. An SSD is faster than both, smaller than a HDD but bigger than an SD and more expensive than both.
You can get 1TB or bigger hard drives the size of thumb drives and faster than anything else, they’re generally called NVMe drives. I just ordered a system with three of them.
Unless the harddrive is a solid state, it has spinning disks mounted on the inside. If it is a solid state, it will be about the size of a long credit card. That’s why
Another reason: PC cases already have bays to hold 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch drives. Even if the hard drive itself can be made to work in much less space, it would still be made in one of those form factors to be useable in PC/laptop cases.
The connector alone is bigger than a microSD card
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