Why is microSD cards affordable and have high capacity of upto 1 TB and very small compared to SSD and HDD?
In: Technology
SD cards are cartridge storage whereas HDDs are disk storage. So why use disks? The main reason is we already invested alot of money and tech in developing them. As such, alot of problems dont exist in disk that exist on cartriges.
Longevity
Disks don’t wear down over time like cartridges do and, more importantly, are far less prone to wear.
The biggest issue with cartridge, however, is that, when not plugged in, they are open to the elements and other forces (like dust and debris). Furthermore because of the way carts work, they often leave the system open to them as well without a cover. Disk trays dont really expose anything negative. Cartridges, due to the hardware, stop working after periods of time. An example of this is old pokemon games. They all had batteries for thr memory. They ran out after a number of years, deleting the save data in them
Hardiness
Cartridges are less prone to breaking from impact and things than disks. Also, no moving parts in cars so that’s a plus. Though not much if anything moves in SSDs modern day either. Point for cartridges
Speed
Cartridges , on average, do read faster than disks, however, with the development of SSDs this is negligible if at all
Industry
Disks are cheaper to make and distribute as well as avoid the several legal issues (such as kids choking on cartriges). Furthermore making cartriges from roms is much more difficult, time consuming, and error prone than copying disks from a master copy
Piracy
Disks have many antipiracy measures developed that carts dont
More info
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-discs-considered-better-technology-for-game-systems-when-older-machines-used-cartridges-that-seem-to-be-what-we-now-call-solid-state-hard-drives
Micro SD is really good at being small, but not great at being the things a typical SSD or HDD is good at. Most notably, the microSD isn’t good at doing lots of things simultaneously, or in queue (quasi-simultaneously). If you think of the uses of micro SD it’s usually just _storage_ on devices that use that storage for one thing at a time. For a SSD you are running lots of applications at the same time, or maybe you’re a server handling thousands of nearly simultaneous web requests. The capacity to read and write rapidly and efficiently and in parallel and buffer large amounts of data is not something a microSD card is good at.
The size is more based on the usage. MicroSD cards are designed for small electronics, stuff like phones and cameras. SSDs and HDDs are meant for laptops and desktop computers. They don’t need to be as small, they’re for larger electronics. This makes them cheaper (the smaller something is the harder it is to make) and allows SSDs to be faster and use better memory management than a MicroSD card. It also allows them (HDDs in particular) to have a lot more storage, you can’t get an SSD or HDD that has 8 gb of storage while you can get a microSD card that small.
As for affordable, we’ve gotten really really good at making small transistors for really cheap. But that’s also true for SSDs and HDDs. MicroSD cards are actually pricey compared to the others (once size stops being a factor). Here’s the cost of 1Tb of memory.
MicroSD: $250
SSD: $90
HDD: $40
Because they have very limited write life (you can only save so much to them before they stop working).
A just-released microSD from Western Digital, specifically for always-on writing (e.g. CCTV recorder, etc.) has a stated life of 2 years of constant operation.
SSDs suffer the same problem, but WAY past that. For instance, I have a 1Tb one that’s 5 years old and reading only having used 1% of its write life.
HDD don’t suffer the same problem, but they suffer others instead, which means that SSD and HDD are now on a par with each other in terms of longevity.
This is why microSD are relatively cheap.
Basically, the type of memory used but right now per GB, SSD´s are cheaper then MicroSD cards.
also MicroSD and usb sticks usually use Flash memory and have around 1000 Read/write cycles per Sector, Flash memory can compete with linear transfer speeds in some cases but is horrible at parallel operations and concurrent I/O.
There is a nice video from Linus Tech Tips where they try to install windows on a 512gb MicroSD, and it takes forever to load due to SD cards only having decent speeds in linear transfers.
SSD´s, Both sata and NVME use flash memory and have dedicated on board storage controllers which manage I/O and are MUCH more efficient, so you can have many parallel transfers and concurrent operations.
There are many SSDs on the market that are nothing more than a shell. Upon opening this, one typically sees a Sdcard to SATA interface. Best explaination i have is blatant greed.
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