back to article SanDisk's little microSD card sucks up 400GB

WDC has the highest-capacity microSDXC card at 400GB – pumping up mobile device storage space – and has launched a natty little iPhone charger that backs up the phone’s data. The SanDisk Ultra Plus microSDXC UHS-I card comes in a range of capacities, from 16GB through 32, 64, 128, 200, and 256 to 400GB. The read speed is up to …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    400 Gb on your little fingernail....

    Ah can remember 't time when a lad would be proud to say 'ee held 80 Mb on a dustbin lid sized Winchester. In fact, kids o'today (1) probably don't even kno' what a fuckin' doostbin is. Bastads the lot of 'em.

    Note 1: Kids o'today, ALA lazy, shithead, know nothing millennial tossers with a ghastly sense of entitlement.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

      Are you speaking British?

      Because most of it doesn't seem to be English...

      1. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

        "most of it doesn't seem to be English..."

        I dunno, in my head I heard a thick Scottish accent. It sounded like Fat Bastard or Shrek

        1. ArrZarr Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

          You're thinking too far down the miser scale. It's a Yorkshire accent.

          1. Lotaresco

            Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

            "You're thinking too far down the miser scale. It's a Yorkshire accent."

            Too far down? You mean Scotsmen are less miserly than tykes? I can agree on that one, after all it's a Lancashire maxim that a Yorkshireman is a Scot who has had the generosity kicked out of him.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

          In my head it came out in pseudo-Yorkshirish..(c.f. a well known Monty Python sketch.)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

      A dustbin lid - is that the rectangular thing on a wheelie bin? A wheelie bin lid sized Winchester what? Have you been drinking a Winchester of white lightning? It often takes people that way.

      1. PhilipN Silver badge

        Dustbin lid

        Rhyming slang for baby goat*

        *Just, for fun, maintaining perplexity on the part of all Cross-the-Ponders here. After all, they have problems distinguishing between braces and a garter belt.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Dustbin lid

          "Rhyming slang for baby goat"

          Funny, I thought "dustbin lid" was rhyming slang for us birthright Spurs supporters.

    3. David Roberts
      Happy

      Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....Dustbin Lid

      As used in Stomp.

    4. Mage Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

      My first HDD was only 5 M Byte.

      I forget what capacity the cake cover like Winchesters were. The drive system was stand alone and about the size of a desk height filing cabinet. OS was ISIS II. I think much smaller than 80 MByte. 1983.

      1. juice

        Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

        5mb? Tha were lucky!

        Back in t'day, I had a ZX Spectrum which loaded data from tape; a C15 would hold up to around 160kb of data, or approx. 80kb per side. A C90 was absolute luxury, though you really needed a counter on your tape player to figure out where each program was.

        Fast-forwarding past the C64 and Amiga, my first PC was a 486 Viglen with (I think) a 50mb HDD. Oh, the joys of running doublestacker over this to try and increase the amount of space, as well as the hypnotic patterns of the defragger...

        At some point, I acquired an 850mb 3.5" HDD; sadly, this exceeded the 540mb limit set by the BIOS in the PC. IIRC, there was a software patch, though some drives had a physical jumper you could set to fool the BIOS.

        A while later, I worked for a large company which was clearing out vast swathes of obsolete tech. Among a few other things, I picked up a SCSI card and a mahoosive 2GB HDD - at 5.25 double-height, it was literally the size of two CD drives duct-taped together. I ended up with this huge bronze lump sat atop the PC case, as there was no way it'd fit inside!

        In some ways, this makes me even more appreciate the fact that I can fit the sum of all human knowledge[*] onto my fingernail. However, I do also slightly miss the challenges of the old days, when PC technology was still a bit of a wild-west arena...

        [*] Wikipedia is quoted as being around 160gb in size, though this is for text only. Still it'd leave a bit of room for some light reading!

        1. DJO Silver badge

          Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

          5mb? Tha were lucky!

          Luxury.

          First computer I used was a Varian V70 which used paper tape. That had enough core (and I mean "core" as in ferrite ring memory) for each of the 8 users (each sat at an ASR33 teletype) nearly 4k of storage - happy days.

          The next one was an IBM 360 which used punched cards, well it would if they weren't all nicked to use as roaches.

          First real hard drive was a ST157a - 57M unformatted, about 44M formatted.

          Now these however could be fun, 9 in RAID 5 to make a smaller than matchbox sized 3TB array with redundancies. about 100 of those could be crammed into a 1U rack, that's a lot of storage in a small space, probably glowing red-hot due to heat dissipation problems but that's part of the fun.

      2. aqk
        Paris Hilton

        Re: 400 Gb on 4000 Winchesters.

        If you were thinking of the IBM 3330, they held about 100 MB each and weighed about 10 lb .

        As I recall, unlike those fancy new SUVs where one kicks under the tailgate to open it, you had to actually MANUALLY open the disk drive cover when replacing the diskdrive.

        So about 4000 of these big cakeboxes could probably replace one of these micro-SD.

        Understandably, direct-access would be somewhat slow, depending on how motivated the computer operator was. From my experience, the female access mechanism was generally faster, unless her nail polish was drying.

        On the other hand, the older 2311 and 2314 held 7MB and ~30 MB respectively, Sadly, they were permanently nailed into their ersatz washing machine. So unlike the 3330, there was no "low-speed" direct addressing, except on the same drive.

      3. M Mouse

        Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

        ICL 1904A where I worked had 4 tape decks, 128 kB of RAM, and a number of EDS 8 and EDS 60 ( 8 MB and 60 MB disks). For someone not wanting to search on Google, a disc pack was like a stack of vinyl LPs, in a "cake cover" as Mage described it.

        After opening the drive and carefully lowering the pack vertically, screwing it onto the spindle, the lid was closed, the vacuum inside established and then the delicate arms could be seen sliding between the discs.

        While I don't want to claim things were any better then, I think those of us who saw and used the older technology perhaps appreciate the massive changes over the past ~40 years just that little bit more than some of the younger generations.

        Just found a photo... (for those who need one)

        http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/gallery/ral/orig/r12600e.jpg

    5. mediabeing

      Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

      Oh boy, a hateful aging ageist. That hateful crap is supposed to be mouthed by the stupid young folks, not the seasoned. Shame on you. I'd say it's time for you to grow up, but you've clearly missed the boat. Way to spread a blind blanket of hate. Just what we need.

      1. HieronymusBloggs

        Re: 400 Gb on your little fingernail....

        "Oh boy, a hateful aging ageist."

        Did you cc your post to the writers of the famous Monty Python sketch on which the OP was clearly based?

  2. Youngone Silver badge

    It's how big?

    I'm pretty sure my phone won't see a 400GB disk.

    I could be wrong though, or would I need to create a bunch of 64GB* partitions to use the whole card?

    * That's the largest my phone can use, as far as I know.

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: It's how big?

      I'm pretty sure my phone won't see a 400GB disk.

      There may be FAT issues with something that size. It should see it all right. Would it be able to use it properly is another story. I suspect you may have to "adopt it" and/or format it using something different from vFAT.

      1. MacroRodent

        Re: It's how big?

        > There may be FAT issues with something that size.

        Havent' all very large cards been using exFAT for a while now (despite the name, a very different and more capable file system).

        1. jelabarre59

          Re: It's how big?

          Havent' all very large cards been using exFAT for a while now (despite the name, a very different and more capable file system).

          Yeah, that's because the camera, phone and memory-card makers were all too cowardly to go for something not-patent-encumbered like EXT4 (or some other open-sourced FS). All it takes is a simple installable-filesystem driver (even in MSWin) to make the system recognize ANYTHING formatted in it. Cowards the lot of them.

    2. LewisRage

      Re: It's how big?

      LG, since the G4 at least, has been claiming it can address SD cards up to 2TB so in theory this should be viable on one of their phones.

      I'm not sure I entirely believe it will work as advertised but the technology is apparently there.

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Trollface

    Egads

    Can you imagine just how much data 007 could smuggle right under the noses of just about any police force in the world and he wouldn't even have to do anything more than hide it in his socks ?

    I'm guessing not even a TSA metal detector would pick that up.

    1. arctic_haze

      Re: Egads

      Why bother with hiding it on you?

      Put the card in your phone with a FAT 64GB partition and a second one with a file system the phone does not understand. It would be practically invisible without rooting the phone or taking the card away. Chances are no one would bother unless you were arrested.

      On a second thought, nowadays it would be much easier to upload the data across the border, using some form of steganography.

  4. The Man Who Fell To Earth Silver badge
    WTF?

    What's the write speed?

    I bought a SanDisk 256GB Ultra CZ48 USB 3.0 Flash Drive (SDCZ48-256G-U46) drive that when being written to slowed down after the first couple of GB to about 1-2MB/sec, so a 20GB movie took hours to write to it. 400GB at an equally bad speed is worse than no storage at all.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And that's why you need to lock down ports..

    Take chip, add or engineer hollow coin with an insert to prevent the microsSD from rattling and there is no way to detect it.

    Someone could wander out with 400GB of data and change.

    That said, at the READ speed it takes over an hour to read it, so writing must be even slower. You will need a bit of patience to fill that up :).

    1. Adam 52 Silver badge

      Re: And that's why you need to lock down ports..

      A credit card number is 19 bytes. You could steal every credit card number in the world on the 32GB USB stick that you picked up free at a trade show.

      This card changes absolutely nothing.

      1. dajames

        Re: And that's why you need to lock down ports..

        A credit card number is 19 bytes. You could steal every credit card number in the world on the 32GB USB stick that you picked up free at a trade show.

        You might have to remove some of the malware first ...

    2. scrubber
      Facepalm

      Re: And that's why you need to lock down ports..

      "hollow coin"

      Then get drunk at the airport and accidentally put it in the fruit machine...

    3. Chris G

      Re: And that's why you need to lock down ports..

      You realise how many extra hours of waiting at airport security you have added while TSA goons around the world try to pry open evreyone's small change?

    4. Mage Silver badge

      Re: And that's why you need to lock down ports..

      Or a coin cell with innards removed and stored in a car key.

  6. Sgt_Oddball
    Devil

    I was thinking of madder things

    Like going nuts with 10 of them in something like this... Might be pricey but It'd be interesting to see what speeds you could get out of it in raid 0....

    1. J. Cook Silver badge

      Re: I was thinking of madder things

      I'm not sure how good that would be, cost wise:

      10x $249 for 4000 GB raw storage = $2490

      + $~45 for the adapter board, plus shipping = $2535

      Or you could buy a pair of 2 TB Crucial MX300 SSDs for half that and raid 0 them either using an appropriate sata controller or software raid0, and still have money left over for a proper data backup device.

      Performance wise, you'd probably hit the 3 Gbps ceiling that the sata spec that board uses before you'd run out of bandwidth on the cards for read speed.

      1. Fred Flintstone Gold badge

        Re: I was thinking of madder things

        I'm not sure how good that would be, cost wise:

        Good point. It might be cheaper to bribe someone, or use the $5 socket wrench approach..

    2. Roland6 Silver badge

      Re: I was thinking of madder things

      Shame the adaptor only supports RAID 0, now if it supported RAID 1 might be more interesting.

  7. bombastic bob Silver badge
    Linux

    it'd work well on an RPi I bet

    makers might take note on this, for an RPi-based device

    1. Mystic Megabyte
      Linux

      Re: it'd work well on an RPi I bet

      Last weekend I installed Tvheadend on a RPi3. With a USB DVB-T dongle as input I can now stream ~60 channels via wifi to my laptop. Being a miser I only used an eight GB SD card. (5GB free space)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: it'd work well on an RPi I bet

        "Last weekend I installed Tvheadend on a RPi3. With a USB DVB-T dongle as input I can now stream ~60 channels via wifi to my laptop."

        Just install Kodi Magick on your laptop and you can stream several hundred channels without needing another device...

  8. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

    It's all well and good... but...

    Whilst I do like the fact that storage continues to increase.... the fact that the devices they go into seem stuck in the dark ages in comparison renders them next to useless in reality.

    My phone (Wileyfox Storm) will actually take up to a 128gb card... but there's very few devices out there that will take anything above 32gb still.

    Almost everything on the middle ranges down to budget end... doesn't take anything larger than 32GB... even my high end nextbase dashcam was supposedly only fit for 32gb, but thankfully takes a 64gb card ok... But it's not worth buying a high capacity mSD card and 'hoping' that it works.

    128gb should be the minimum spec we are seeing these days across the board on all devices

    1. Aitor 1

      Re: It's all well and good... but...

      Most phones say "32GB", mine says "64GB" yet is quite happy with a 128GB card...

      1. Adam 52 Silver badge

        Re: It's all well and good... but...

        SDHC is 4GB to 32GB and uses FAT32.

        SDXC is 64GB to 2TB and uses exFAT.

        So a device specified in the 64GB+ range will likely work with big cards, a device quoting 32GB and below is less likely to work.

        1. TheVogon

          Re: It's all well and good... but...

          "SDXC is 64GB to 2TB and uses exFAT."

          exFAT use requires patent fees to Microsoft - hence why it's not used on smaller devices...

  9. 0laf

    That's staggering really.

    And to join in the sketch my first PC in 1996 came with a 20Gb hd and I know I've not been in the game nearly as long as others.

    1. gsf333

      That's a massive hard drive. My first PC (an Escom computer from Christmas 1995 only had a 500mb hard drive, 4mb of ram and a speedy (lol) DX2 66mhz Cyrix cpu.

    2. ponga

      Heh. Nine years earlier, I splurged on a 20 MB hard drive for my first PC. And a full length extension memory board to get 2 MB RAM based swap space for complilation, above the MSDOS limit of 640/768kB… Good heavens, I'm ancient!

      1. M Mouse
        Mushroom

        a bit more ancient, perhaps !

        Around the same time, after assisting a GP Surgery with their transfer of data from an IBM 286 (I think - the model escapes me right now) to their new multi-terminal Linux based system, provided by a drugs firm (in return for anonymous patient data), I ended up with

        Dual floppy (5.25", 360 kB) drive IBM PC, with 192 kB RAM

        + mono Hercules (green) monitor

        + Tallgrass storage unit (12 MB hard drive + tape backup unit)

        The initial PC system and software had cost them dearly... the Tallgrass Technology add-on was over 1000 GBP alone, and the unit was the same size as the desk model IBM PC. An initial 6 months "support" was provided by the Fareham based supplier, but they couldn't actually fix problems!

        Patient data for ~ 8000 patients had been typed in by their young secretary (max 20 procedures/ problems per patient to limit storage requirement) and I provided them with support to fix the BASIC software written by a Hampshire GP (for example, none of his patients was over 100, so the array for a histogram had an out of bounds index when their patient data was used, crashing the software and giving them no output)

        A response to ponga claiming they're "ancient" :)

        1. abortnow

          Re: a bit more ancient, perhaps !

          My personal hard disks have included:

          A 1 MB (equivalent) IBM 2315 disk pack for a university 1130, in 19:69.

          A 25 MB drive (Cumana?) for an Amstrad PPC.

          A 300MB full height (like a shoe box) drive for an early PC clone, preceded by a ~100 MB drive which was far too small for SCO OpenDeathTrap.

          I was startled by the small physical size of my first 1 GB drive.

          Nowadays my biggest drives are 4* and 8* 8 TB drives in a couple of NASs.

          I wonder when 8 TB SSDs will become affordable.

    3. theN8

      Our first PC in 1996 only had an 800mb hard drive - we didn't venture into the GB's until Windows 98 made an appearance.

      1. Not That Andrew

        My first IBM compatible PC had a 80 Mb HDD and an AMD 386 DX40 CPU. The dealer threw in Windows 3.1 for free with MS-DOS 5

  10. gsf333

    Mid 1996 I remember fitting a 2x cd-rom drive. Later that year someone lent me a 'gold' CD that had lots of really useful programs on such as Office. Only problem, the 500mb hard drive didn't have enough space to store everything off the 640MB CD. I remember thinking at the time how can this little bit of gold plastic store more than the 5.25" hard drive.

  11. Adair Silver badge

    Now, can we please ...

    have a proper general purpose operating system on our phones, to go with all that lovely memory.

    Or, are we just going to fill it with selfies and cat videos?

    1. jelabarre59

      Re: Now, can we please ...

      have a proper general purpose operating system on our phones, to go with all that lovely

      memory.

      AOSP is pretty darned close. Finding hardware that isn't kneecapped and locked down so that you can *run* that OS is really the problem.

    2. Swiss Anton

      Re: Now, can we please ...

      "...cat videos?"

      With 400gb I be looking for something bigger - lion videos?

  12. D@v3

    honest question

    what are the useful applications for a 400GB micro SD card?

    I'm not saying i'm not impressed, (if a little freaked out), I just can't think of what it would be genuinely good for, over say a 128GB card.

    GoPro? Surely you'd be backing up / using that footage long before you hit 400GB (or is UHD footage much larger than i think?)

    Music in a smartphone? really?

    Media store in a media server / rPi? maybe.

    1. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

      Re: honest question

      Traveling.

      Kiwix Wikipedia articles: 60 GB

      OsmAnd+ maps: 13 GB

      Music: 20+ GB

      Classic movies for the flight: 20+ GB

      Itinerary and tourism maps : 1 GB

      IMAP mail cache: 0.6 GB

      Google Translate files: 0.5 GB

      + Backup of photos taken with DSLR

      + Backups of videos taken with high-end digicam

      With 400 GB I think I can get some star and planetary maps in there too. I wonder if I can order it with a towel.

    2. abortnow

      Re: honest question

      I have a couple of 200 GB cards in a FiiO 5 music player. Not large enough for my excessively big mainly music collection. Unfortunately the number of tracks broke the FiiO's ability to index them, leaving just navigation which is s l o w, so I won't be splashing out on 400 GB cards.

  13. David McCarthy

    1st PCs

    My first ones were all bought by my employer (I was very persuasive), as I couldn't afford anything at the time.

    Don't know the make of the first one but it was huge, had two 8" floppy drives and no hard disk. I think the screen was from Israel.

    Company mainframe at the time was ICL with cat's cradle of metal rings for memory.

    Second was a Torch micro, built in Cambridge, based on BBC micro ... 20MB hard drive.

    Ah, the joy's of non MS operating systems and applications!

    Happy days!

  14. aqk
    Linux

    Will it work on a Raspberry?

    I'm too lazy to look up the specs, but will my Raspberry Pi and its Rasbian support one of these drives?

    It's time I upgraded the 32 GB file & web server on it. And needless to say, it also contains my bitcoin and ether wallets!

  15. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    How soon?

    How soon before we will be using these things for RFID's on tins of baked beans where the DNA of each individual bean in the can, plus the tomato sauce is recorded on the chip?

  16. new666uk

    Is there a particular reason they've not followed the standard of 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 etc and plumped for something in the middle ?

    400gb is an awful lot of space to fill on a mobile device - just how much tentacle pr0n do people need?

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    400 Fapobytes

    Bit pricey but worth it.

    You could literally write an entire library on a handful of these and then send them on the next NASA probe out of the Solar System as a high tech version of the Pioneer 10 plaque.

    Not sure on the radiation resistance but 3D-NAND is quite good now. In order to get this much storage the

    chip has been rigorously tested and low-reliability units weeded out during production.

    I did my own experiments with 32GB cards a while back and its quite hard to muck them up: the radiation dose needed is in the Rads and only had an effect due to the DAC32 / 5642 series tube.

    My scintillator screen lit up like a neon sign (yes used lead and lots of it!) and to affect the card required putting it on the tube at the point of maximum X-ray intensity and it also scrambled equipment nearby even with the shielding so not doing this experiment again for a long time.

    Incidentally it looks like most commercial scanners intentionally screen out low and intemediate energy rays to prevent image fogging so unless you fly North Korean air there is no need to worry.

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