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 real controller is going to cook.
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 captions "corrected" it to "laying".
Linguistics should seek to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. The field should, primarily, seek to describe language as used. Prescriptions can be useful and should be made if they improve a language's ability to provide clarity (please mind the theirs and toos, and sometimes an Oxford comma would clarify your sentence) but they should be held to be mere suggestions and not authoritative mandates.
The idea that there is only one correct way to use a language and that it is determined in academic circles and should be enforced on the masses is inherently based in illegitimate authority and social exclusion and is not a social force for good.
> 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.
Xperia 5 IV owner here, don't give Sony any of your money.
Their support is garbage: 1 Android version and only 3 years of security updates for a phone that cost nearly $1000. Google and Samsung offer 5+ years on their flagship phones.
The cameras are held back by incompetent software; the camera app does not even rotate for a left handed mode (they only need to rotate text and icons). Their camera app behaves like a point and shoot camera from 2004, and you have to treat it like that or your photos will be a blurry, underexposed mess. The cameras are technically fine, but the software implementation is truly terrible.
Yes, the phone has a headphone jack and micro SD slot, but those aren't worth it when everything else sucks. Sony is far, far behind other major Android manufacturers when it comes to software quality and support.
I gleefully gave Sony money for the 5 IV in late 2022. The phone stops receiving all updates next month (September 2025). Custom ROMs (e.g. LineageOS) are nonexistent because Sony has such an insignificant market share.
I'm writing this from my own Xperia 5 I device, and I can corroborate some of your complaints.
Most of the frustrations can be resolved by liberal use of third-party apps from F-Droid. Lawnchair and the Fossify suite make the basic experience quite reasonable, because the system UI components are thankfully not too heavily modified, only the system apps. With apps such as DAVx⁵ and Fennec it's really very useable.
Unfortunately the locked bootloader (which is completely illegal of course) is a big frustration and the main reason why you can't get custom ROMs running on it. I don't think it's about market share; some less popular brands have better community support because their manufacturers don't build artificial barriers to modifications. For security, this puts Sony's phones right down in my estimation and I too would not recommend them for this reason alone.
They've pulled out of my market (Australia) 6 years ago, so that's not really an option, even if I imported one.
If I imported one, the majority of the handsets released before this year wouldn't be able to register on a network, given that the networks have gone and blocked the IMEI TAC associated with most of Sony's handsets.[1]
This is due to Sony not having the correct carrier settings in order to roam onto them for emergency calls, and a ham-fisted direction to have working emergency calls post-3G shutdown.
I loved the early Sony Ericsson but they lost their way on the phones. And the funky camera phones when their stand alone phones are decent to cutting edge.
There is a near-infinite variety of phones. People claim that they want them but really they don't.
I know this because I used to try to help. I used to think that, for whatever reason, people just didn't know about all of the options out there.
I was wrong.
"I want a smaller phone" here's a smaller phone "yeah but I don't like that one".
"I want a thicker phone with a huge battery" here's a thicker phone with a huge battery "yeah but I don't like that one".
"I want a dumber phone" here's a dumber phone "yeah but I don't like that one".
"I want a privacy-focused phone" here's a privacy-focused phone "yeah but I don't like that one".
People will make up an infinite variety of excuses why a product that meets their chief stated requirement isn't for them.
"Oh the camera is only 24.9999 megapixels instead of 25. Oh that's 9mm thick I really can only do 8.9mm at maximum. Oh that's only IP68 rated I want IP69. Oh that screen is 5.4 inches-- TOO BIG-- I want a 5.25 inch screen."
The best was when someone wanted a rugged phone with long battery life and they rejected an option because its ARM cores ran at like 525MHz less than the latest shiny Samsung joint so they bought the skinny non-rugged non-gigundo-battery Samsung instead. They didn't understand that the only distance between the two would be in benchmarks, and only by small margins, and that to human perception there would be no difference.
What I think they want, instead of a phone that meets their requirements, is a POPULAR phone that they consider to be an aspiration goal or status symbol to be specifically designed to meet their personal requirements and that everyone else should have those same requirements too.
There used to be phones with a secondary display, full QWERTY keyboard, wireless split remote, whole Windows computer in the back, a completely square display, two displays of which one rotate, a plug-in dual display cover, dual SIM slot, a miniature video projector, fingerprint sensor in the back, TV tuner, FM radio, sleep-swappable battery, IP68 rating, laser barcode scanner, 1" equivalent image sensor, 42MP image sensor, actually mechanically zooming lenses, IrDA, strap holes, 3.5mm headphone jacks,
iPhone killed them all. Yeah I personally kind of want iMessage. Doesn't change the fact that iPhone killed them all.
The problem is that the market has a few clear market leaders that have dominated the field. Every other player is fighting for scraps.
It's almost impossible to compete with Apple and Google. Samsung is managing to hang on, but not many others can.
I think the level of software control that Apple and Google wield alone is cause for regulatory scrutiny and possible antitrust action. Maybe something like that can oxygenate the field for better competition.
Smartphones shouldn't be this stagnant. It should be a highly competitive market. But it isn't.
> I know this because I used to try to help. I used to think that, for whatever reason, people just didn't know about all of the options out there.
> I was wrong.
You were wrong because you misunderstood the comment. When people say "I want a smaller phone" what they mean is "I want this phone, but smaller".
So when you tell them a smaller phone exists but it's also different in 20 other parameters, now there's a new problem, as you encountered. It's not because those people are disingenuous, it's because you misunderstood them.
Unfortunately the microSD form factor of SD Express does not seem to support more than one lane, due to a lack of physical pins compared to full-sized SD Express cards (which can have a third row, i.e. one extra on top of UHS-2 cards).
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
There are specialized heavy duty sd cards like Kingston industrial, Samsung pro endurance, gigastone mlc, that have MLC memory and are designed for long term storage in extended environment parameters
There are also other brands but are less known, more expensive and not available in typical places with consumer electronics
Same applies to SSD drives, there are consumer drives that have colorful boxes with claims like speed or size, and there are specialized SSD drives based on MLC chips that are still available here and there
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.
Hmm the article isn't about the interface being novel but the drives. The article claims the SD express cards top out a 900 MB/s but this drive does 3700 MB/s. They are using their own interface, but that's not the problem being solved here from my reading of this article.
I don't know the specifics but SD express might be patent/license encumbered so why pay when you can make your own for free?
I'm guessing this drive will eventually percolate down in the form of an SD Express card, and SD express is now in the Switch 2. The Biwin drive is currently too big to fit the SD spec, but that might not be true in the future.
I think Nintendo just sealed the deal against any SD Express competitors. This article is (probably) planted PR to promote this drive to Western buyers interested in maximizing their SD Express slots in a "Hey, why do these Chinese gamers get this amazing card and I'm stuck with this junk?" Now that lights a fire under a lot of people and Biwin can start licensing the technology or selling directly to the Western market.
Storage upgrades in handhelds seems to be a real problem. I was surprised my Steam Deck didn't have an easy to access M2 slot because of Valve's "pro-gamer" reputation. You have to take the entire thing apart to get to the SSD and the plain-jane SD slot you do get will never feel fast enough, especially since its hardware capped at 104 MB/s. Gabe didn't become a billionaire by not being ruthless I suppose, but it is disappointing.
I'm guessing a lot of these devices are sold at a premium for more storage so they don't want to make it easy to upgrade fast storage on your own. Instead we're just forced into the SD card ghetto. Maybe Biwin can change that, or the handheld makers will push against that if it means hurting their margins because the higher storage models are more profitable. Nintendo at least seems to signaling, "Do whatever you want with this fast SD slot," which is a breath of fresh air. What a time in gaming, where Nintendo is more progressive and pro-consumer than Valve.
The article is full of shit. SD Express cards, by virtue of being PCI-E x1 or x2, top out at whichever gen of PCI-E they implement.
Lets say its a brand new 4.0 card that implements x2 lanes, that is 3.93GB/s maximum speed (there aren't any 5.0 cards yet, afaik, but double that for 5.0).
Want to know where that 900MB/s figure came from? A 3.0 x1 card is 984MB/s. That is the first gen SD Express cards when the spec was launched, but not the currently available ones.
In other words, this is a PR release, this isn't news. It's marketing. They chose the worst case of their competitors, the best case of their own, and lied by omission.
Also, re: Valve's position on M2: they didn't support even swapping them when it first came out, although obviously allowed and expected, because you can put M2s in the device that are outside of the thermal parameters allowed by the design due to proximity to the battery and other heat producing items. This is also why they specifically used a 2230, as those are usually the lower power models meant for ultrathin laptops.
That said, Valve has worked with a few companies to get some officially blessed 2230s that actually do fit the intended use case and are also performant.
Like, if you think the Steam Deck sucks for actually doing the swap job, a) the new OLED replacement internally is a lot saner, with both construction and PCB layout, b) go try dealing with the really nasty designed laptops that don't have an externally accessible panel covering the drive bay; they're worse.
I'm sorry I dont care how hard valve tried. They still failed. To the consumer, the sd card limitation on the Deck is consumer hostile. 100 MB/s is inexcusable for a device being sold today and one expected to run Unity and Unreal 4 games that clock in at the tens of gigabytes. They should have made it more open and allowed easy access to M2 slots. Instead they used storage cynically to sell higher tier products.
The entry level deck is $399 but the 1TB one is $649. Almost $800 with tax and shipping for something that can't even play Unreal 5 games and has no proper expansion is inexcusable, not to mention the bizarre and shortsighted decision to have only one USB-C port on the device, and being locked onto the 15-watt mode of the chipset.
Some of that cost is the OLED update but frankly its deceptive and dishonest customer hostile pricing. The storage limitations are intentional to sell the higher tier Deck. Gabe didn't get 5 super yachts by being a "good guy." He's just maximizing his profit. There are no "good guys" in capitalism, instead its purely transactional and game theory dictated from top to bottom.
I do find it a little depressing that Chinese and Japanese companies are eating US companies lunches because they somehow are more open, more pro-consumer, and more affordable the US offerings. When in the past the US products were the more open and hackable ones and the imports were the proprietary and locked down customer-hostile messes. Not just this but a lot of electronics now. The hackable, learnable, fun, etc ones are foreign while the US domestic ones are overly 'not repairable' and 'not hackable' and by design to maximize profit. What a shame. How far we've fallen.
You bought a first gen product by a company that has never had an actual hardware design division, and you're complaining that it isn't perfect?
Also, how is the SD Card limitation on the Deck consumer hostile? The Steam Deck is an AMD platform PC. PCs typically do not even have SD card slots, and when they do, they are generic controllers plugged into the USB port.
To do SD Express, it requires a more expensive controller that can do PCI-E lane passthrough, and then you have to route those lanes somewhere and do it correctly. I am not aware of any laptop that opted to include an SD Express controller, and all of the Steam Deck competitors do not either.
The Steam Deck is advertised to implement a standard UHS-I card reader, and uses a better one that actually does do the full 104MB/s instead of the more frequently supported 52MB/s. UHS-I is common for 4k60fps cameras, such as Canon or Nikon bodies, or the GoPro, extremely few devices support UHS-II.
Like, I understand what you're trying to say, but nothing of that generation implements it, and the AMD SoC Valve uses afaik does not have the spare external PCI-E lanes to actually implement it anyways.
The Vive hardware platform was built and designed by HTC for Valve, and the software platform was all Valve. It's more like Google's relationship with partners under the Nexus program, but unlike Google's Pixel line.
And yes, Apple design is kind of shit, but in a consumer hostile sort of way, not in an incompetence kind of way.
Yes, but nothing like this. I had a Steam Link, for example, its really a verbatim copy of the dev kit of the ARM SoC they used. Fun fact, same SoC as the Chromecast 1, and the SoC is cursed.
The controller was kinda cool, I didn't get one with mine, but making a controller is an entirely different set of skills than making a computer.
> Hmm the article isn't about the interface being novel but the drives. The article claims the SD express cards top out a 900 MB/s but this drive does 3700 MB/s. They are using their own interface, but that's not the problem being solved here from my reading of this article.
It's a really weak claim when you frame it properly. If you have a good controller you can use either form factor just fine, at PCIe gen 4 x2 speed.
> maximizing their SD Express slots [...] Now that lights a fire under a lot of people and Biwin can start licensing the technology or selling directly to the Western market.
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 series to watch on my mobile I'll be super happy with 300mb 720p version. I don't need a 50gb rip in 4k in HDR with Atmos sound. Same option should be available for games.
This adds use cases to the devices. For instance, I am using my Steam Deck to type this hooked up to a 32 inch Monitor, as my daily driver on CachyOS.*
I bought the cheapest one, and upgraded the SSD. I also have an SD card. I use this for more than just playing games.
I would love to be able to just upgrade the storage and it be as fast as the internal storage. I could install a Windows install on it, and switch when it makes sense.
I've considered installing CachyOS on my Deck to be able to use bcachefs for a tiered storage setup with the SD card. For automatic movement of unused files to the SD card over time, because I don't want to deal with managing it myself.
Though I also did the SSD upgrade and haven't really been bothered by space, so haven't bothered. I have that setup on a spare parts PC with HDDs instead of microSD, since that's an older 1/2 TB SSD.
I spent too much time writing a script to do something like this but lost interest/gave up because I really don't swap between games that often and uninstalling/reinstalling was a lot easier.
That said, I do wish Valve would implement something like this first class in SteamOS.
And we know it can be done on existing download infrastructure, because it's available for all the games I own that added the hi-res textures after launch - selectable as a free DLC.
Heck, twenty years ago games like Guild Wars would download just the first few levels and then download the rest of the game in the background as you played!
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.
> I guess it's a problem of incentives. The developer of the game doesn't pay when the game is larger, I do.
This is everywhere in computing but there's a better reason for it than you're giving. It's a cheaper/easier for companies to develop "bloated" software that runs on more powerful hardware. That includes uncompressed textures/sound (because why bother finding a codec or fine tuning quality tradeoff when you can just get give uncompressed data). But the end result, for you, is more software is available and more developers exist (because writing efficient and performant code is much harder).
A game like Stardew Valley, for instance, probably doesn't exist. I've put a ton of hours into that game and I think it's excellent but, not to cast any shade, the game isn't exactly a masterclass in efficiency. It's only slightly more advanced than a SNES game but it consumes many many time more resources.
The benefit to you is that an inexperienced software engineer with a great idea can bring their idea to fruition using all sorts of bloated tools.
> A game like Stardew Valley, for instance, probably doesn't exist. I've put a ton of hours into that game and I think it's excellent but, not to cast any shade, the game isn't exactly a masterclass in efficiency. It's only slightly more advanced than a SNES game but it consumes many many time more resources.
Stardew Valley is a great example of why storage does not follow the same logic of "fewer constraints lowers the barrier of entry". Stardew is 600MB, it does not benefit from terabytes of capacity or 1900MB/s speeds. Instead, the only games pushing that frontiers are otherwise well staffed and well funded efforts that just don't bother. Call Of Duty would not be a worse game if it was 200GB instead of 300GB.
No understaffed indie game I know of takes up a large amount of storage.
An SNES cartridge holds up to 48 megabits. SV has better visuals and sound but is it that much better?
I don't think SV would have been made by ConcernedApe if he only had a SNES sdk. I believe he used XNA, at least initially. All that framework adds weight but it made SV possible. The tradeoff is 600 megabytes vs 48 megabits.
Wait, why large asset sizes? Aren't we talking about "reduced texture sizes" etc.? To me, this also implies reduced video sizes, compressed audio, and so on. So the scenario as I understand it is that, broadly, no individual asset is that large, but all of them together exceed what can fit in RAM. In that case, there would be a working set of loaded assets which is smaller than all available assets, and consequently, there would be a need to load different assets on demand quickly. So yeah, latency would be more important than throughput, though of course you would still need halfway decent throughput (time-to-last-byte is a kind of latency, after all).
I think many would be amazed at how the space used on a game today is broken down in space usage. Most will be along the lines of cut scenes, graphics, audio......library and librarys galore...logic code of the program that is unique to the game and finally some text file hidden away.
But talking your AAA kind of titles that seem to be the norm, not your chess games, though even then, graphics sure has gained space in those programs. Though I'm sure somebody active in the industry could paint a better picture.
Anybody active in the industry able to offer or point to better breakdown?
In general: code << world < audio << textures << video
Executable code is pretty tiny relative to everything else, including libraries. Libraries only get really big when they include media assets. When it comes to media, even high fidelity audio is relatively small. 44kHz stereo 16-bit sample audio, uncompressed, is 176kb per second of audio. A 1024x1024 texture, at 32bpp, is 4mb, uncompressed. Video depends heavily on codec, but roughly consider that 4k video is something like 4096x2160, so eight times the size of our static texture for a single frame. Encodings don't just store every frame whole, of course, but keyframes add up quick.
I had “Sargon” (chess game) on cassette tape for the Apple 2. Slow load times though it took very little memory. (The Apple 2 typically had 64kb of ram)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> - 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.
I can see the needed use case for portable devices. But I also get the feeling this shrinking down of physical volume for storage that's going to be generally available for A tier games (like on a steamdeck) is a status quo setting us back to 2010 levels of actual storage available. Again! Just when normal desktop computer SSD were finally rising in actual capacity beyond 2TB. And right when SSD storage is hitting the wall with no more multi-level cell improvements available.
Yeah, I am using my Deck with 512GB sdcard and could never tell it is actually running from sdcard. It does a lot of game updates and always finishes those in reasonable time, at least for me. That card is going strong with all the writes going on on steam deck
UHS-I cards easily go up to 100MB/s. This is the baseline for a modern SD card.
After that you can add more pins for UHS-II. This is used in a bunch of devices and goes up to 300MB/s, but you can't assume anything will have it. And UHS-III was dead on arrival.
Alternatively you can add a different set of more pins for SD Express. It can do gigabytes per second and is probably the future. It's backwards compatible with UHS-I, but not II or III.
And also SanDisk made their own spec for overclocking UHS-I which some things support. It can do about 200MB/s.
The steam deck supports none of those upgrade paths. You get about 100MB/s.
Considering the insane tempuratures the cards reach, and that it destroys brand new SD cards, I don't want them going any faster until it works safely.
This is obviously the direction of persistent storage: SD meets SSD. Technological innovations are reliably predictable at this relatively high level. If you didn't see it coming, better get in quick before everyone else catches on!
I was so amazed when I held the Microdrive harddisk in my hands for the first time. And later the first iPod that was made possible with a Microdrive. These things lead to new gadget categories, not only making existing ones better.
Mask ROM is actually pretty expensive to manufacture, which is why original DS game carts were so small you could fit a hundred of them onto a $20 MicroSD card during the same time period.
The upside of course is that your original DS cartridge might never go bad, even if you lose it under the sofa for 30 years.
The SD and micro SD form factors are not the most robust or reliable. It would be nice to have a next step up form factor. In some ways, that's the motivation for CF Express Type B (and XQD before it), as popularized in digital photography.
Interesting, I didn't knew about this format. Curious picture selection on the Wikipedia, I didn't knew about this manufacturer until reading the Ars article above.
It was new-ish, and it barely caught on, only in some digital camera lines for some brands (Nikon and Sony). If anything, plenty of prosumers were annoyed that they now had to buy new cards to use the second slot. The rollout was also bad. Some manufacturers thought they could get away with one slot only (Nikon Z6 mark I had only the single XQD slot, a precursor to CF Express Type B), owing to the improved reliability of CF Express as a form factor, but that was a bad idea, and didn't account for failures in the underlying flash or controller, and that annoyed actual pros.
I blundered onto this when looking for a way to swap out m.2 SSDs without opening my case. There are apparently adapters for an m.2 drive to be used in a CFexpress slot. When looking at prices for regular CFexpress cards it seemed like everyone should use the adapters since m.2 drives were so much cheaper, at least when I was shopping.
A step up form factor is great. The thing in the article is not a step up though, it's smaller than an SD card, and there's no great reason for it. Since it's brand new it can guarantee a better minimum speed than SD express, but that advantage falls away fast and it's not worth the hassle of an extra format.
I'm reminded of XFMEXPRESS, a tech that had some justification to exist as a low profile replaceable and coolable main storage for small devices. But it doesn't look like it went anywhere.
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 real controller is going to cook.
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.
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 captions "corrected" it to "laying".
But I digress.
The fun thing about grammar is if enough people do it and think it's correct, it's correct. Languages change.
Linguistics should seek to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. The field should, primarily, seek to describe language as used. Prescriptions can be useful and should be made if they improve a language's ability to provide clarity (please mind the theirs and toos, and sometimes an Oxford comma would clarify your sentence) but they should be held to be mere suggestions and not authoritative mandates.
The idea that there is only one correct way to use a language and that it is determined in academic circles and should be enforced on the masses is inherently based in illegitimate authority and social exclusion and is not a social force for good.
Languages evolve over time. Someone's rules from 200 years ago need not apply, just as they likely didn't apply 200 years prior to that.
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.
> I could care less about your explanation!
Maybe you should care less about it then.
bait?
It's *couldn't care less my dude
Maybe reconcile in your mind the first line with the follow-up explanation to see whether it's bait or not and if it should be taken seriously.
English has this neat feature where any word can be used as a verb. Especially words that have no business being verbed.
Please lay off with the pedantry.
This was educational, not pedantic. Pedantry would be dismissing his argument on the basis of a superficial flaw like this.
Pointless and unhelpful grammar Nazism.
Love the latent pedantry of HN. No shade! Bravo/brava!
I need this slot added back to my phone. Thank you very much, phone manufacturers.
Try a Sony Xperia! Vote with your dollar or else they'll stop making them!
Xperia 5 IV owner here, don't give Sony any of your money.
Their support is garbage: 1 Android version and only 3 years of security updates for a phone that cost nearly $1000. Google and Samsung offer 5+ years on their flagship phones.
The cameras are held back by incompetent software; the camera app does not even rotate for a left handed mode (they only need to rotate text and icons). Their camera app behaves like a point and shoot camera from 2004, and you have to treat it like that or your photos will be a blurry, underexposed mess. The cameras are technically fine, but the software implementation is truly terrible.
Yes, the phone has a headphone jack and micro SD slot, but those aren't worth it when everything else sucks. Sony is far, far behind other major Android manufacturers when it comes to software quality and support.
I gleefully gave Sony money for the 5 IV in late 2022. The phone stops receiving all updates next month (September 2025). Custom ROMs (e.g. LineageOS) are nonexistent because Sony has such an insignificant market share.
I won't be giving Sony any money for a new phone.
I'm writing this from my own Xperia 5 I device, and I can corroborate some of your complaints.
Most of the frustrations can be resolved by liberal use of third-party apps from F-Droid. Lawnchair and the Fossify suite make the basic experience quite reasonable, because the system UI components are thankfully not too heavily modified, only the system apps. With apps such as DAVx⁵ and Fennec it's really very useable.
Unfortunately the locked bootloader (which is completely illegal of course) is a big frustration and the main reason why you can't get custom ROMs running on it. I don't think it's about market share; some less popular brands have better community support because their manufacturers don't build artificial barriers to modifications. For security, this puts Sony's phones right down in my estimation and I too would not recommend them for this reason alone.
They've pulled out of my market (Australia) 6 years ago, so that's not really an option, even if I imported one.
If I imported one, the majority of the handsets released before this year wouldn't be able to register on a network, given that the networks have gone and blocked the IMEI TAC associated with most of Sony's handsets.[1]
This is due to Sony not having the correct carrier settings in order to roam onto them for emergency calls, and a ham-fisted direction to have working emergency calls post-3G shutdown.
[1] https://isthisphoneblocked.net.au/device-brands/sony
I loved the early Sony Ericsson but they lost their way on the phones. And the funky camera phones when their stand alone phones are decent to cutting edge.
I think you can thank Apple for that. They destroyed all the funky phones from competition.
There is a near-infinite variety of phones. People claim that they want them but really they don't.
I know this because I used to try to help. I used to think that, for whatever reason, people just didn't know about all of the options out there.
I was wrong.
"I want a smaller phone" here's a smaller phone "yeah but I don't like that one".
"I want a thicker phone with a huge battery" here's a thicker phone with a huge battery "yeah but I don't like that one".
"I want a dumber phone" here's a dumber phone "yeah but I don't like that one".
"I want a privacy-focused phone" here's a privacy-focused phone "yeah but I don't like that one".
People will make up an infinite variety of excuses why a product that meets their chief stated requirement isn't for them.
"Oh the camera is only 24.9999 megapixels instead of 25. Oh that's 9mm thick I really can only do 8.9mm at maximum. Oh that's only IP68 rated I want IP69. Oh that screen is 5.4 inches-- TOO BIG-- I want a 5.25 inch screen."
The best was when someone wanted a rugged phone with long battery life and they rejected an option because its ARM cores ran at like 525MHz less than the latest shiny Samsung joint so they bought the skinny non-rugged non-gigundo-battery Samsung instead. They didn't understand that the only distance between the two would be in benchmarks, and only by small margins, and that to human perception there would be no difference.
What I think they want, instead of a phone that meets their requirements, is a POPULAR phone that they consider to be an aspiration goal or status symbol to be specifically designed to meet their personal requirements and that everyone else should have those same requirements too.
There used to be phones with a secondary display, full QWERTY keyboard, wireless split remote, whole Windows computer in the back, a completely square display, two displays of which one rotate, a plug-in dual display cover, dual SIM slot, a miniature video projector, fingerprint sensor in the back, TV tuner, FM radio, sleep-swappable battery, IP68 rating, laser barcode scanner, 1" equivalent image sensor, 42MP image sensor, actually mechanically zooming lenses, IrDA, strap holes, 3.5mm headphone jacks,
iPhone killed them all. Yeah I personally kind of want iMessage. Doesn't change the fact that iPhone killed them all.
With the possible exception of IrDA, which in 2025 is like wanting a parallel port on a phone, pretty much all of that still exists.
Here's a phone with "a completely square display": https://www.walmart.com/ip/Rotatable-Phone-i19-Pro-Mini-Fold...
It even rotates but only the one screen.
I even found a phone with integrated barcode scanner, the UNIWA V9S.
The problem is that the market has a few clear market leaders that have dominated the field. Every other player is fighting for scraps.
It's almost impossible to compete with Apple and Google. Samsung is managing to hang on, but not many others can.
I think the level of software control that Apple and Google wield alone is cause for regulatory scrutiny and possible antitrust action. Maybe something like that can oxygenate the field for better competition.
Smartphones shouldn't be this stagnant. It should be a highly competitive market. But it isn't.
> I know this because I used to try to help. I used to think that, for whatever reason, people just didn't know about all of the options out there.
> I was wrong.
You were wrong because you misunderstood the comment. When people say "I want a smaller phone" what they mean is "I want this phone, but smaller".
So when you tell them a smaller phone exists but it's also different in 20 other parameters, now there's a new problem, as you encountered. It's not because those people are disingenuous, it's because you misunderstood them.
Apple just chose what the iPhone did.
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.
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.
Unfortunately the microSD form factor of SD Express does not seem to support more than one lane, due to a lack of physical pins compared to full-sized SD Express cards (which can have a third row, i.e. one extra on top of UHS-2 cards).
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
There are specialized heavy duty sd cards like Kingston industrial, Samsung pro endurance, gigastone mlc, that have MLC memory and are designed for long term storage in extended environment parameters There are also other brands but are less known, more expensive and not available in typical places with consumer electronics
Same applies to SSD drives, there are consumer drives that have colorful boxes with claims like speed or size, and there are specialized SSD drives based on MLC chips that are still available here and there
> They always seem to corrupt
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.
One time where I "express" suffix makes something better, TIL
See also: PCI Express.
See also: express trains
Hmm the article isn't about the interface being novel but the drives. The article claims the SD express cards top out a 900 MB/s but this drive does 3700 MB/s. They are using their own interface, but that's not the problem being solved here from my reading of this article.
I don't know the specifics but SD express might be patent/license encumbered so why pay when you can make your own for free?
I'm guessing this drive will eventually percolate down in the form of an SD Express card, and SD express is now in the Switch 2. The Biwin drive is currently too big to fit the SD spec, but that might not be true in the future.
I think Nintendo just sealed the deal against any SD Express competitors. This article is (probably) planted PR to promote this drive to Western buyers interested in maximizing their SD Express slots in a "Hey, why do these Chinese gamers get this amazing card and I'm stuck with this junk?" Now that lights a fire under a lot of people and Biwin can start licensing the technology or selling directly to the Western market.
Storage upgrades in handhelds seems to be a real problem. I was surprised my Steam Deck didn't have an easy to access M2 slot because of Valve's "pro-gamer" reputation. You have to take the entire thing apart to get to the SSD and the plain-jane SD slot you do get will never feel fast enough, especially since its hardware capped at 104 MB/s. Gabe didn't become a billionaire by not being ruthless I suppose, but it is disappointing.
I'm guessing a lot of these devices are sold at a premium for more storage so they don't want to make it easy to upgrade fast storage on your own. Instead we're just forced into the SD card ghetto. Maybe Biwin can change that, or the handheld makers will push against that if it means hurting their margins because the higher storage models are more profitable. Nintendo at least seems to signaling, "Do whatever you want with this fast SD slot," which is a breath of fresh air. What a time in gaming, where Nintendo is more progressive and pro-consumer than Valve.
The article is full of shit. SD Express cards, by virtue of being PCI-E x1 or x2, top out at whichever gen of PCI-E they implement.
Lets say its a brand new 4.0 card that implements x2 lanes, that is 3.93GB/s maximum speed (there aren't any 5.0 cards yet, afaik, but double that for 5.0).
Want to know where that 900MB/s figure came from? A 3.0 x1 card is 984MB/s. That is the first gen SD Express cards when the spec was launched, but not the currently available ones.
In other words, this is a PR release, this isn't news. It's marketing. They chose the worst case of their competitors, the best case of their own, and lied by omission.
Also, re: Valve's position on M2: they didn't support even swapping them when it first came out, although obviously allowed and expected, because you can put M2s in the device that are outside of the thermal parameters allowed by the design due to proximity to the battery and other heat producing items. This is also why they specifically used a 2230, as those are usually the lower power models meant for ultrathin laptops.
That said, Valve has worked with a few companies to get some officially blessed 2230s that actually do fit the intended use case and are also performant.
Like, if you think the Steam Deck sucks for actually doing the swap job, a) the new OLED replacement internally is a lot saner, with both construction and PCB layout, b) go try dealing with the really nasty designed laptops that don't have an externally accessible panel covering the drive bay; they're worse.
I'm sorry I dont care how hard valve tried. They still failed. To the consumer, the sd card limitation on the Deck is consumer hostile. 100 MB/s is inexcusable for a device being sold today and one expected to run Unity and Unreal 4 games that clock in at the tens of gigabytes. They should have made it more open and allowed easy access to M2 slots. Instead they used storage cynically to sell higher tier products.
The entry level deck is $399 but the 1TB one is $649. Almost $800 with tax and shipping for something that can't even play Unreal 5 games and has no proper expansion is inexcusable, not to mention the bizarre and shortsighted decision to have only one USB-C port on the device, and being locked onto the 15-watt mode of the chipset.
Some of that cost is the OLED update but frankly its deceptive and dishonest customer hostile pricing. The storage limitations are intentional to sell the higher tier Deck. Gabe didn't get 5 super yachts by being a "good guy." He's just maximizing his profit. There are no "good guys" in capitalism, instead its purely transactional and game theory dictated from top to bottom.
I do find it a little depressing that Chinese and Japanese companies are eating US companies lunches because they somehow are more open, more pro-consumer, and more affordable the US offerings. When in the past the US products were the more open and hackable ones and the imports were the proprietary and locked down customer-hostile messes. Not just this but a lot of electronics now. The hackable, learnable, fun, etc ones are foreign while the US domestic ones are overly 'not repairable' and 'not hackable' and by design to maximize profit. What a shame. How far we've fallen.
You bought a first gen product by a company that has never had an actual hardware design division, and you're complaining that it isn't perfect?
Also, how is the SD Card limitation on the Deck consumer hostile? The Steam Deck is an AMD platform PC. PCs typically do not even have SD card slots, and when they do, they are generic controllers plugged into the USB port.
To do SD Express, it requires a more expensive controller that can do PCI-E lane passthrough, and then you have to route those lanes somewhere and do it correctly. I am not aware of any laptop that opted to include an SD Express controller, and all of the Steam Deck competitors do not either.
The Steam Deck is advertised to implement a standard UHS-I card reader, and uses a better one that actually does do the full 104MB/s instead of the more frequently supported 52MB/s. UHS-I is common for 4k60fps cameras, such as Canon or Nikon bodies, or the GoPro, extremely few devices support UHS-II.
Like, I understand what you're trying to say, but nothing of that generation implements it, and the AMD SoC Valve uses afaik does not have the spare external PCI-E lanes to actually implement it anyways.
Vale has release several hardware products, many successful as well as being the brains behind the Vive.
Its not like Apple or other popular companies are any better in this regard.
The Vive hardware platform was built and designed by HTC for Valve, and the software platform was all Valve. It's more like Google's relationship with partners under the Nexus program, but unlike Google's Pixel line.
And yes, Apple design is kind of shit, but in a consumer hostile sort of way, not in an incompetence kind of way.
> You bought a first gen product by a company that has never had an actual hardware design division
They've released hardware before.
Yes, but nothing like this. I had a Steam Link, for example, its really a verbatim copy of the dev kit of the ARM SoC they used. Fun fact, same SoC as the Chromecast 1, and the SoC is cursed.
The controller was kinda cool, I didn't get one with mine, but making a controller is an entirely different set of skills than making a computer.
> Hmm the article isn't about the interface being novel but the drives. The article claims the SD express cards top out a 900 MB/s but this drive does 3700 MB/s. They are using their own interface, but that's not the problem being solved here from my reading of this article.
It's a really weak claim when you frame it properly. If you have a good controller you can use either form factor just fine, at PCIe gen 4 x2 speed.
> maximizing their SD Express slots [...] Now that lights a fire under a lot of people and Biwin can start licensing the technology or selling directly to the Western market.
That would be nice!
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 series to watch on my mobile I'll be super happy with 300mb 720p version. I don't need a 50gb rip in 4k in HDR with Atmos sound. Same option should be available for games.
This adds use cases to the devices. For instance, I am using my Steam Deck to type this hooked up to a 32 inch Monitor, as my daily driver on CachyOS.*
I bought the cheapest one, and upgraded the SSD. I also have an SD card. I use this for more than just playing games.
I would love to be able to just upgrade the storage and it be as fast as the internal storage. I could install a Windows install on it, and switch when it makes sense.
* Arch-by-the-way
I've considered installing CachyOS on my Deck to be able to use bcachefs for a tiered storage setup with the SD card. For automatic movement of unused files to the SD card over time, because I don't want to deal with managing it myself.
Though I also did the SSD upgrade and haven't really been bothered by space, so haven't bothered. I have that setup on a spare parts PC with HDDs instead of microSD, since that's an older 1/2 TB SSD.
I spent too much time writing a script to do something like this but lost interest/gave up because I really don't swap between games that often and uninstalling/reinstalling was a lot easier.
That said, I do wish Valve would implement something like this first class in SteamOS.
And we know it can be done on existing download infrastructure, because it's available for all the games I own that added the hi-res textures after launch - selectable as a free DLC.
Heck, twenty years ago games like Guild Wars would download just the first few levels and then download the rest of the game in the background as you played!
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.
> I guess it's a problem of incentives. The developer of the game doesn't pay when the game is larger, I do.
This is everywhere in computing but there's a better reason for it than you're giving. It's a cheaper/easier for companies to develop "bloated" software that runs on more powerful hardware. That includes uncompressed textures/sound (because why bother finding a codec or fine tuning quality tradeoff when you can just get give uncompressed data). But the end result, for you, is more software is available and more developers exist (because writing efficient and performant code is much harder).
A game like Stardew Valley, for instance, probably doesn't exist. I've put a ton of hours into that game and I think it's excellent but, not to cast any shade, the game isn't exactly a masterclass in efficiency. It's only slightly more advanced than a SNES game but it consumes many many time more resources.
The benefit to you is that an inexperienced software engineer with a great idea can bring their idea to fruition using all sorts of bloated tools.
> A game like Stardew Valley, for instance, probably doesn't exist. I've put a ton of hours into that game and I think it's excellent but, not to cast any shade, the game isn't exactly a masterclass in efficiency. It's only slightly more advanced than a SNES game but it consumes many many time more resources.
Stardew Valley is a great example of why storage does not follow the same logic of "fewer constraints lowers the barrier of entry". Stardew is 600MB, it does not benefit from terabytes of capacity or 1900MB/s speeds. Instead, the only games pushing that frontiers are otherwise well staffed and well funded efforts that just don't bother. Call Of Duty would not be a worse game if it was 200GB instead of 300GB.
No understaffed indie game I know of takes up a large amount of storage.
An SNES cartridge holds up to 48 megabits. SV has better visuals and sound but is it that much better?
I don't think SV would have been made by ConcernedApe if he only had a SNES sdk. I believe he used XNA, at least initially. All that framework adds weight but it made SV possible. The tradeoff is 600 megabytes vs 48 megabits.
I'll take SV any day of the week.
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.
Wait, why large asset sizes? Aren't we talking about "reduced texture sizes" etc.? To me, this also implies reduced video sizes, compressed audio, and so on. So the scenario as I understand it is that, broadly, no individual asset is that large, but all of them together exceed what can fit in RAM. In that case, there would be a working set of loaded assets which is smaller than all available assets, and consequently, there would be a need to load different assets on demand quickly. So yeah, latency would be more important than throughput, though of course you would still need halfway decent throughput (time-to-last-byte is a kind of latency, after all).
I think many would be amazed at how the space used on a game today is broken down in space usage. Most will be along the lines of cut scenes, graphics, audio......library and librarys galore...logic code of the program that is unique to the game and finally some text file hidden away.
But talking your AAA kind of titles that seem to be the norm, not your chess games, though even then, graphics sure has gained space in those programs. Though I'm sure somebody active in the industry could paint a better picture.
Anybody active in the industry able to offer or point to better breakdown?
In general: code << world < audio << textures << video
Executable code is pretty tiny relative to everything else, including libraries. Libraries only get really big when they include media assets. When it comes to media, even high fidelity audio is relatively small. 44kHz stereo 16-bit sample audio, uncompressed, is 176kb per second of audio. A 1024x1024 texture, at 32bpp, is 4mb, uncompressed. Video depends heavily on codec, but roughly consider that 4k video is something like 4096x2160, so eight times the size of our static texture for a single frame. Encodings don't just store every frame whole, of course, but keyframes add up quick.
I had “Sargon” (chess game) on cassette tape for the Apple 2. Slow load times though it took very little memory. (The Apple 2 typically had 64kb of ram)
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?
> 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!
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"
Yes. A very very small one.
And presumably a mechanical interface designed to be external to a device to allow plugging them in and out.
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.
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 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.
> - 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.
I can see the needed use case for portable devices. But I also get the feeling this shrinking down of physical volume for storage that's going to be generally available for A tier games (like on a steamdeck) is a status quo setting us back to 2010 levels of actual storage available. Again! Just when normal desktop computer SSD were finally rising in actual capacity beyond 2TB. And right when SSD storage is hitting the wall with no more multi-level cell improvements available.
I’m still surprised the steam deck runs so well even with games installed to microSD - I’m not sure how they do it.
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.
I would guess that's only a small percentage of popular games, though. The Steam Deck and the PS5 probably don't attract the same kind of gamer.
Grand theft auto games on the PS2 ran without loading screens
Many games have done it historically, almost always with trade offs.
Today it’s possible to do it in almost any game if you are guaranteed a fast SSD and the consoles do that.
Yeah, I am using my Deck with 512GB sdcard and could never tell it is actually running from sdcard. It does a lot of game updates and always finishes those in reasonable time, at least for me. That card is going strong with all the writes going on on steam deck
decent SD cards can do 200 or 300 MB/s of reads now
Those speeds are... complicated.
UHS-I cards easily go up to 100MB/s. This is the baseline for a modern SD card.
After that you can add more pins for UHS-II. This is used in a bunch of devices and goes up to 300MB/s, but you can't assume anything will have it. And UHS-III was dead on arrival.
Alternatively you can add a different set of more pins for SD Express. It can do gigabytes per second and is probably the future. It's backwards compatible with UHS-I, but not II or III.
And also SanDisk made their own spec for overclocking UHS-I which some things support. It can do about 200MB/s.
The steam deck supports none of those upgrade paths. You get about 100MB/s.
Not in the Steam Deck, it maxes out at 104Mb/s.
Considering the insane tempuratures the cards reach, and that it destroys brand new SD cards, I don't want them going any faster until it works safely.
The Steam Deck only supports up to UHS-I. There are UHS-II and UHS-III cards out there that support higher bandwidth.
CFexpress type B already exists and does the same thing.
This is obviously the direction of persistent storage: SD meets SSD. Technological innovations are reliably predictable at this relatively high level. If you didn't see it coming, better get in quick before everyone else catches on!
Any chance someone builds a phone with removable storage now that we have better SD cards?
https://m.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2025&idCardslot...
195 results
It was never about the SD cards, it was about the removable part.
I was so amazed when I held the Microdrive harddisk in my hands for the first time. And later the first iPod that was made possible with a Microdrive. These things lead to new gadget categories, not only making existing ones better.
What happened to ROM cartridges?
Mask ROM is actually pretty expensive to manufacture, which is why original DS game carts were so small you could fit a hundred of them onto a $20 MicroSD card during the same time period.
The upside of course is that your original DS cartridge might never go bad, even if you lose it under the sofa for 30 years.
This is not true of modern switch cartridges.
Oh so now you want the game developer to actually complete the game and make sure it works before shipping it??
No. We have MicroSD Express. We don't need yet another form factor.
The SD and micro SD form factors are not the most robust or reliable. It would be nice to have a next step up form factor. In some ways, that's the motivation for CF Express Type B (and XQD before it), as popularized in digital photography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFexpress
Interesting, I didn't knew about this format. Curious picture selection on the Wikipedia, I didn't knew about this manufacturer until reading the Ars article above.
It was new-ish, and it barely caught on, only in some digital camera lines for some brands (Nikon and Sony). If anything, plenty of prosumers were annoyed that they now had to buy new cards to use the second slot. The rollout was also bad. Some manufacturers thought they could get away with one slot only (Nikon Z6 mark I had only the single XQD slot, a precursor to CF Express Type B), owing to the improved reliability of CF Express as a form factor, but that was a bad idea, and didn't account for failures in the underlying flash or controller, and that annoyed actual pros.
I blundered onto this when looking for a way to swap out m.2 SSDs without opening my case. There are apparently adapters for an m.2 drive to be used in a CFexpress slot. When looking at prices for regular CFexpress cards it seemed like everyone should use the adapters since m.2 drives were so much cheaper, at least when I was shopping.
A step up form factor is great. The thing in the article is not a step up though, it's smaller than an SD card, and there's no great reason for it. Since it's brand new it can guarantee a better minimum speed than SD express, but that advantage falls away fast and it's not worth the hassle of an extra format.
I'm reminded of XFMEXPRESS, a tech that had some justification to exist as a low profile replaceable and coolable main storage for small devices. But it doesn't look like it went anywhere.
Weird how this three day old comment shows up as 52 minutes old right now. What is going on with HN?
HN redates comments/submissions to boost engagement. Original post date is still available by hovering the date, in the alt text.
It's called the "second chance pool" for articles.
Would be nice if it were flagged as such with faithful timestamps.
What if it can offer better transfer speeds? A system that downloads large files often would presumably be bottlenecked by a MicroSD's write speeds.
it's microSD express, unless you have multi-gigabit network, you won't saturate it.
The biggest issue with these small form memory is heat, they heat up a lot, but seem like no one care.
Another dumb move by Nintendont. UFS has been around since 2010 and is much faster.
So, uh, game cartridges?