I’m kinda curious as to why everything hasn’t just shifted over to these tiny, affordable little guys. They can have so much on them!
In: Technology
Because SD cards have comparably terrible read and write performance.
So, it will work, it will just be very slow and awful compared to an SSD.
because for the same price you can get a 1TB SD card, you can get 8TB of HDD or 2TB of SSD storage.
With the added advantage that the the SSD has 6GBps, the HDD has 600MBps read speeds, where the SD card has a pathetic 160MBps read speed and only 90MBps Write speed
AND you can only write to a specific part of the SD card about 1000 times before it is worn out. VS more like 10000 for an ssd or effectively unlimited for an hdd
Imagine you had a book that had 1000s of pages. You can read 250 words a minute but your friend can read 10,000 words a minute. You would definitely say your friend is a better reader even if the book he is reading from has bigger pages. SSDs just have much better performance and longevity.
Four reasons: speed, storage capacity, price, and reliability. All are orders of magnitude worse with SD cards than modern NVMe drives.
Read/write speed, mostly.
There’s a better alternative called M.2 (NVMe SSD) which is similar to an SD card in function, but can read/write data muuuuuuuuuch faster than SD cards. like up to 15 times faster, theoretically, but still at least 5-10x in practice right now.
SSDs are basically what happen when you take the tech in an SD card and then add enough reliability, throughput and resiliency to actually work as the main storage device for somethingexpected to last for years like a personal computer or server.
Those cards are cheap but they don’t last with accurate storage through as many read/writes as an SSD by orders of magnitude.
Most of the cheap SD cards are also using a slower interface, but it does vary by which standards you’re comparing. SDUC is faster than older sata II and sata III connections, but significantly slower than the M2 interface you see on many current SSDs.
Performances!
When we are talking about storage it’s never only about the size, physical or logical.
You have read write speed. Number of read write cycle. Temperature. Cost. And some other aspects you have to consider.
MicroSD card is good at what it does for being small, but when you try to write it as the speed of pc does, you can feel it heat up and doing that constantly will kill it fast.
SD cards are slower and don’t last as long. That’s *why* they’re cheaper.
System drives need to be faster and last longer.
Same question could be asked about SSDs—why do we use SSDs when HDDs hold more information for a fraction of the cost?
Not everything is about storage and size. SSDs are much faster than HDDs, but more expensive. Same w SD cards—they can have more space, sure, but they’re a lot slower than HDDs and SSDs. Additionally, SD cards have worse longevity than HDDs/SSDs, meaning that they’ll start to break down after fewer reads/writes than other drives.
With anything, there’s tradeoffs. Storage media is always a tradeoff between speed, cost, and capacity. SD cards are slow, cheap, and big. SSDs are fast, expensive, and small. HDDs are medium speed, cheap, and big. Servers use HDDs because you can get a lot of reliable storage for the price at minimal cost. Modern home computers use SSDs because they’re fast and the cost isn’t a super big deal since you don’t need massive amounts of storage. SD cards are used for cameras and other similar storage because they’re cheap, large, and have a small footprint, and the speed/reliability is a low concern (since you’re just going to transfer them to a computer quickly anyway).
Reliability. Compared to SSDs and HDDs SD cards have a *very* finite lifespan.
Ask any Raspberry Pi user – they die in all sorts of ways.
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