Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 111 posts

Re: Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

#71

Post by lxgr »

mschuster91 wrote: post #62
userbinator wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a multitude of problems with SD card support, purely from a hardware design standpoint: - 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 pow…

> - 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.

In most of the world, physical SIM cards are still a thing, yet most phones have been waterproof for a while now.

> - 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.

Very solvable: Run a mandatory performance and "lying about storage size" benchmark upon formatting.

> - BOM complexity and cost.

I'd pay hundreds of dollars extra for being able to upgrade the storage on my phone.

The real reason is that device manufacturers would never willingly give up the privilege of being able to charge hefty premiums on storage capacity.

Re: Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

#72

Post by throwawayben »

unwind wrote: post #64
userbinator wrote: post #11

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?

That size obviously doesn't parse, so it's hard to tell. It's how thick, again? I guess they just mean "15x17x1 mm" but somehow edited the 1 out and ... I don't know.

"if you multiply by 1 it's always the same so that's pointless - I should remove that"

Re: Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

#75

Post by rasz »

echelon wrote: post #31
seabrookmx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth mentioning that the Nintendo Switch 2 supports SD Express, so in a few years millions of households will have these cards laying around.

I need this slot added back to my phone. Thank you very much, phone manufacturers.

funnily enough iPhones had tiny NVMe storage since 6s 10 years ago, but Apple wont ever sell expandable storage option when it can gouge on upsells.

Re: Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

#76

Post by usui »

marcianx wrote: post #67
justincormack wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laying around is a fairly common usage, it might be regional not sure.

I've found this to be a common Americanism, but it's still incorrect, I believe. When I moved to the US in my teens, I was surprised at the sheer disregard of English grammar rules in common vernacular here, to the point that some folks (though not my English teachers) think their incorrect use is correct. :) The most marked case I saw was in a Dodo video where the person correctly said "lying", but The Dodo's captio…

I could care less about your explanation!

> When I moved to the US in my teens, I was surprised at the sheer disregard of English grammar rules in common vernacular here, to the point that some folks (though not my English teachers) think their incorrect use is correct.

You noted a common feature of incorrect Americanisms, which is that many of its speakers proudly and ignorantly proclaim their usage is correct. Disregarding descriptive linguistics, all it takes is one second of logic to realize why an incorrect saying doesn't make sense at all, but even that is asking for too much without getting into an argument sometimes.

Re: Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

#77

Post by delusional »

lxgr wrote: post #69
zeroq wrote: post #2

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…

Unless you're suggesting that games fit into memory completely, why would you not want your storage to be as high throughput and low latency as possible even for reduced texture sizes?

I'd argue that game sizes at this point are whack, and I think the reason for that is the speed and size of modern storage. We started chasing our own tail, faster/bigger storage leads to larger games which needs faster/bigger storage and on it goes.

The problem isn't that either of those things are inherently bad. A game being "large" doesn't mean anything as long as it works, and a storage device being fast/large is good. The problem is when both of those things conspire to spiral out of control and we end up having to invent faster/larger storage devices without any need other than "well this size worked".

I guess it's a problem of incentives. The developer of the game doesn't pay when the game is larger, I do.

Re: Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

#78

Post by kbolino »

lxgr wrote: post #69
zeroq wrote: post #2

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…

Unless you're suggesting that games fit into memory completely, why would you not want your storage to be as high throughput and low latency as possible even for reduced texture sizes?

In this scenario, low latency would be a lot more useful than high throughput.

Re: Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

#79

Post by lxgr »

kbolino wrote: post #78
lxgr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're suggesting that games fit into memory completely, why would you not want your storage to be as high throughput and low latency as possible even for reduced texture sizes?

In this scenario, low latency would be a lot more useful than high throughput.

Why? Both high latency and low throughput (given large asset sizes) mean longer waiting times.

Re: Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds

#80

Post by MYEUHD »

dontlaugh wrote: post #46
LeoPanthera wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is probably that disk read speed just isn't that important for casual applications like games. We had a lot of great games even when storage was spinning rust.

It’s actually essential for more serious games without loading screens, which is why for example the PS5 ships with and mandates fast SSDs.

Grand theft auto games on the PS2 ran without loading screens
Post reply on HN