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
As others have explained, SD cards are built to be physically small and power-efficient. So they typically incorporate just one actual flash chip (and the term chip here is loosely used as it’s probably a single combined storage and controller chip all moulded into the body of an SD card directly). Flash chips are limited in performance, so a computer SSD will often incorporate multiple actual flash chips so that accesses can be striped across them, improving performance. Computer SSDs can also incorporate things like DRAM chips that their controllers can use to help improve performance even further. For an SD card in a camera or a phone, all of these things are unnecessary (performance is good enough!) and it would be better to just devote that space to storage.
As for why do we use hard drives still, the short answer is that they still provide more economical storage than SSDs. But that gap has been closing for awhile now. We’re at the point where it only really makes sense to use a hard drive if you have a lot of data to store.
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