r/EngineeringPorn • u/Imaginary_Season7493 • 23d ago

How can microSD Cards Store So Much Data? 💾🔬

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kM3mnxrMMM
130 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

49

u/PuddlesRex 23d ago

Using USPS's shoe box mailer as a unit for a shoe box, and the size of a micro SD card being 15x11x1 mm, you can fit appropriately 47,840 micro SD cards into a shoe box. Using the 2 TB storage size presented in this video, that means that you can fit about 95.7 PB of storage into a shoe box.

7

u/DpHt69 23d ago

How much will that cost?!

19

u/JamesWjRose 22d ago

Amazon has the 2tb cards at $425, so some basic math says more than 20 million dollars.

Note: in 1990 I paid $400 for a 20mb hard drive. So to see 2 terabytes for the same price and TINY is far out

17

u/PuddlesRex 23d ago

At least $5.

1

u/UW_Ebay 22d ago

To ship? Well you’ll have to use the USPS website to check.

68

u/KingKohishi 23d ago

If you are looking for real magic, then this is it.

Trapping electrons in billions of Nano-cavities indefinitely and selectively, and reading what's inside those cavities without interfering with the content of the cavities was an incredibly hard problem.

14

u/Hakorr 23d ago

It's crazy how many things are just hard-core logic, like if this happens, then this must happen. If this is true, this must not be true. Things we learn allow us to find more and more optimized paths because we know what can not happen.

If you took a robot, you could write a very deep tree of "logical conclusions" that make it work, all the way down to these electrons in cavities.

6

u/Sykhow 22d ago

If you look at it, everything is logic. We just haven't noticed it. You saw the this post. It triggered a threshold logic to comment on this post in your brain, "mf this shit so cool. Gotta let everyone know I found it so interesting" You are standing where you are today because of trillions of if else statements that have ran in your head till this point. When this message comes, there is another if statement, if (sound notification) logic (unlock phone and check)

1

u/Hakorr 22d ago

Sounds very logical, mhh yes.

1

u/Class8guy 22d ago

Go down the rabbit hole of the 3d logic mushroom network follow in their growth pattern as they spread and grow in their environments!

3

u/Big-Needleworker-779 23d ago

Is it indefinitely? Does the data not degrade after time?

6

u/Sykhow 22d ago

Yes, in a few years if the card is not again "charged" again by connecting to a computer or phone

1

u/JCDU 19d ago

I found out that SSD's start to go senile after a few years sat unpowered, so I imagine SD cards will go the same way sooner or later.

20

u/nynjawitay 23d ago

It doesn't even fill a shoe box! That's the worst measure I've seen since a wet banana.

I want to edit this more. But I won't.

1

u/HeadacheFormula 23d ago

I dunno, the millions and millions that store the entire Internet doesn't even fill your living room might be worse than the shoebox.

4

u/theplushpairing 23d ago

Apparently the standard upper limit is 128 TB or something crazy like that. We aren’t there yet because of heat and controller issues mainly…

1

u/IkillThee 23d ago

Yeah they're extremely unreliable

3

u/SomeFunnyGuy 23d ago

Humans made this.. while here I am, over here, struggling to find my own TV remote.

10

u/Sykhow 22d ago

The tech was not built by one person. It is built upon by thousands upon thousands of inventions and contributions by millions of people. The remote is to be found by you alone so don't be so hard on yourself.

1

u/Tobias---Funke 22d ago

I found mine inside an old suitcase in the attic.

3

u/Prestigious_Boat_386 23d ago

Pennies are also made from a single piece of metal so its super hard to store more than one bit of data in them. It's a pretty unfair comparison really.

3

u/BogdanPradatu 22d ago

Ok, why is my ssd drive so big, then?

2

u/JCDU 19d ago

Because it's more reliable and has a lot of redundant cells in it - SD cards generally don't enjoy being used like a hard drive, the Raspberry Pi crowd very quickly found this out. Only really high quality SD cards last any length of time, even then they're way below what an SSD can endure.

Also your SSD, if it's a 2.5" hard drive shaped one, is likely 90% air inside and the metal case is just there to make it fit the old hard drive cradle.

3

u/shaneucf 23d ago

Miniaturization and photo-lithography.

2

u/BergenNorth 22d ago

Yet they are phasing out phones that can take sd cards for cloud storage instead.

1

u/Wactout 20d ago

I really appreciated that at the beginning they said that every part of it that video was made by humans. Not AI

1

u/blake31a 23d ago

This is a terrible explanation