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
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