61–70 of 111 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I need this slot added back to my phone. Thank you very much, phone manufacturers.
I think you can thank Apple for that. They destroyed all the funky phones from competition.
The other phone manufacturers slavishly imitating them is what destroyed "all the funky phones".
There was no particular reason other manufacturers needed to copy absolutely everything Apple did.
Despite the title of the article, this seems useful in phones or laptops to me. Even if not user replaceable without opening the device it would make it possible to have replaceable drives at a tiny fraction of the current minimum size. Even just for relatability compared to soldered on storage it would be a plus.
it would make it possible to have replaceable drives The manufacturers don't seem to want that. Even the small Chinese companies which were the last holdouts have gone full forced-obsolescence.
- water tightness. Yes, seals are a thing, a few Samsung models (Tab Active 3) support that... but guess where I had damage from water ingress on mine? Yup, through the SD card slot. Rubber seals eventually dry out.
- power. SD cards tend to require large amounts of power during writes and behave unpredictably when the power is jittery for whatever reason.
- thermals. Getting the heat away from an SD card, particularly a high-speed one, during writes is tough.
- quality. Even if you buy a brand name SD card, chances are too high you end up with counterfeits. Phone companies do not want the support effort associated with that any more. And with cheap SD cards, you have to account for delivering actually clean and stable power because they don't have enough onboard capacitors.
- BOM complexity and cost. SD card slots take up board space and parts - the card enclosure, capacitors, voltage regulators, fuses (you don't want a broken/dirty SD card to fry the main power rail), high-speed data lanes, at least one GPIO for card presence detection... best to avoid that.
The Verge reports that a Chinese company called Biwin has developed the "Mini SSD," a 15 by 17 mm-thick card that supports read speeds of up to 3,700MB per second due to a two-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface. So this is basically a smaller NVMe SSD?
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Worth mentioning that the Nintendo Switch 2 supports SD Express, so in a few years millions of households will have these cards laying around.
*lying around Laying is transitive and requires an object.
We already have this though. SD Express, which allows SD cards to actually protocol switch to one lane PCI-E NVME. It's been part of the spec officially since 2018, and an enhancement slightly later to add more pins to allow a second lane. And since, underneath, it becomes a standard PCI-E NVME with standard lanes, there is no inherent speed limit from the bus itself, only from the fact that SD cards are tiny and any…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
*lying around Laying is transitive and requires an object.
Laying around is a fairly common usage, it might be regional not sure.
But I digress.
We already have this though. SD Express, which allows SD cards to actually protocol switch to one lane PCI-E NVME. It's been part of the spec officially since 2018, and an enhancement slightly later to add more pins to allow a second lane. And since, underneath, it becomes a standard PCI-E NVME with standard lanes, there is no inherent speed limit from the bus itself, only from the fact that SD cards are tiny and any…
Yet I don’t trust any SD*. They always seem to corrupt, and I feel like the connector is not reliable enough. I’d rather not have such a thing directly connected to the bus
That's entirely a function of NAND quality and controller sophistication. Why would a different form factor make a difference here?
Also, for an apples to apples comparison, you'd have to compare this new standard to microSD Express cards, not regular ones.
> I feel like the connector is not reliable enough.
Have you actually had a connector wear out? I'm not the biggest fan of the spring loading myself (I've had devices catapult microSD cards into the next room in the past!), but it seems pretty reliable in terms of actually making and keeping a connection to me.
SD download option is the answer. I think this whole issue shouldn't exist in the first place. I do understand that full voice over and 4k ready textures comes at a price but some devs are getting lazy and some games are just ridiculous. We're talking about handhelds like Steam Deck. Even if I plug it in as a console it won't have the juice to run at full resolution. When I want to quickly grab an episode of a tv ser…
The Verge reports that a Chinese company called Biwin has developed the "Mini SSD," a 15 by 17 mm-thick card that supports read speeds of up to 3,700MB per second due to a two-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface. So this is basically a smaller NVMe SSD?
Yes, but so is microSD Express, which already has a significant shipped base of supporting devices including the Nintendo Switch 2!