Why are there 1TB micro SD cards that are the size fingernail and most 1TB hard drives are bigger than my hand?
In: Technology
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
Hard drives or HDDs are magnetic storage methods that are a few decades old. They are reliable and you can store a lot of data on them. Their size is due to the mechanical components in them and partially due to standardisation. For example, you can find laptop hard drives that are very small. No need to make them smaller as they are quite slow and the machines that use them are servers or desktop computers.
Solid state drives SSDs have no moving parts and they store data in small memory chips. Their size is the same as a laptop hard drive and this is due to standardisation as well. If you open one of these up, you’ll see it’s mostly empty space with a tiny board a few chips in them. There is no need to make them smaller as most devices have bays where these need to fit. Standards again.
M2 drives are the next gen of SSDs. They are faster than SSDs and as robust, but they are smaller than an SSD. They don’t have any casing which saves a lot of space and the new standard allows for a smaller form factor. So thanks to technology, the industry has agreed to make drives a bit smaller for the next gen of SSDs.
MicroSD cards are tiny yes, but this is because the devices that require them are fairly small as well like your mobile phone. Some of the hardware required to make them work is also on your device so that saves space. They are also limited in terms of input/output. Going smaller than this is probably not practical as they are delicate enough to crack or get lost.
In short, storage gets smaller as technology advances but some of the form factors you see are due to industry standards. While I’m sure they could make an SSD the size of your fingernail, it all depends on what devices can support. It usually takes a few years for different manufacturers to agree/adopt new form factors.
a lot of it is due to technical specification. Where an micro SD basically requires the operating system manage how data is written to it, a hard drive has its own system to handle that.
The other part of it is due to industry standards for sizes.
[removed]
In SD card technology software on the phone or device acts as the hard disk controller allowing the physical chip to be smaller.
In an SSD hard drives a motherboard which also contains the NAND chips acts as the controller. The SSD NAND hard drive is also a slightly more advanced NAND storage medium (think extra features) requiring a larger die size.
Side question, but how much does it cost to produce a MicroSD card? SanDisk’s been dropping the price on their 1TB pretty violently, and it’s got me wondering just how much profit they’ve been able to make per unit.
With solid state hard drives, part of the issue is backwards compatibility. It has to match the size of a magnetic drive to fit security in the case, as well as it has to be large enough for the Sata connector.
Other than the underlying technical reasons, there’s also a matter of standardisation. Hard drives have to be big enough to fit in a drive bay and have the appropriate connectors.
Latest Answers