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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1980s...
Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.
How about the new 2Tb m.2 drives? Not only vastly larger yet still, transfer speeds are also insane. I once had a computer with a 20Mb hard drive, current drives transfer 600-1200mb per second.
Not so impressive, of course its faster when its smaller. The data have to travel shorter.
Jk, it is damn impressive!
Actually, that's true! It's not significant enough to affect the throughput directly, but when you transmit data on parallel leads, they have to be roughly the same length in order to keep the signals synchronised with the time frames when they are received. Otherwise part of the data might not arrive in time. The higher the throughput (and shorter the frames), the greater the leads' lengths affect the timing. This is why you often see long squiggly leads on circuit boards - they extend the shorter leads to roughly the same lengths.
Eh, parallel hasn't been used for a while already. SATA literally means "Serial ATA" and no longer uses parallel connections. I haven't seen parlallel connectors since like a decade or so
I wasn't talking about connectors, I was talking about circuits inside the devices. Even if something is as simple as a clock and a data signal travelling in parallel, timing is still an important factor.
I saw 1tb microsd cards for sale at the shops the other day and had a bit of a 'what the fuck...' moment
I remember my parents talking about some thing or other in star trek that would be impossible because you'd need "terabytes of storage, and that's probably not possible". And now you can go buy 1 tb of storage and lose it in your couch cushions.
Poor Keanu Reaves gave up his childhood memories in Johnny Mnemonic to store something like 100GB of data in his brain. I don't remember the Star Trek storage callout cause they were generally pretty good about just fabricating their own units for stuff (future sci-fi writers should take note, it's always easier to make up units then deal with pedantic people on the internet).
indeed, most of their references to quantities of information use quads; there are a few using bytes though.
I lost a 1tb flash drive with ventoy and a bunch of files and I'm still mad, but I had a backup lol
The latest SDUC standard allows for up to 128 TB.
It gets better. The size of the SD card isn't the storage area. Look carefully at the back of an SD card and you should see how a tiny square area in the middle is a bit 'thicker' than the rest; that's the actual chip, that tiny bump!
SD cards make sense to me. Hard Drives... Now there is some spooky technology.
The reader head on a hard drive changes direction so fast, that it experiences accelerations like that of a bullet being fired, hundreds of times a second.
The "Fly height" or distance a reader floats above the platter is so tiny, that it would crash into a thumbprint.
The actual magnetic media that stores your data is a layer of iron a few atoms thick deposited on to a ceramic or glass platter, with a single atom layer of a protective metal coating (typically rhodium) in top of it.
Despite these incredible tolerances, they damn things are dirt cheap, and surprisingly reliable.
And the price of that 128 gb sd card? €10-15, 512 gb cards are even crazier right now at like €35 a piece, that's €0,068 per gigabyte
Also fun, they rely on quantum mechanics.
Individual "bits" on a SD card are electron buckets that are either "full" (they have an electron) or not. 8 bits to a byte ~1 trillion bytes to a terabyte.
What’s a floppy disk?
That's just another name for the save icon.
I really get the feeling that this question isn't being asked seriously but here goes.
Floppy disks are an older removable storage format for a computer. The media inside the disks was flexible like a piece of paper, hence the term "floppy". There were three different common sizes, there was an 8", a 5.25", and a 3.5". The 8" and 5.25" had the flexible media in a sort of heavy fabric and plastic sheath that was itself flexible, amd the 3.5" disks had a hard plastic cover on the outside, with a sliding metal door, and some people erroneously called these "hard disks".
I've got a 1tb microsd and it's crazy to see the difference between a 60MB harddisk and it