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Samsung Unveils 256GB MicroSD Card, Highest Capacity In Its Class (thenextweb.com) 117

Posted by BeauHD from the boost-in-storage dept.
Samsung recently unveiled its EVO Plus 256GB microSD card, capable of storing more than 12 hours of 4K video footage, 33 hours of full HD recording, 55,200 photos or 23,500 MP3s. While you most likely do not need such a large microSD card in your life, you'll probably want one. The card features Samsung's newest V-NAND technology, with read/write speeds of 95MB/s and 90MB/s, respectively. It will be available in June to over 50 countries at a price of $250, which includes a 10 year warranty. Personally, I have no need for such a high-capacity card at this time, but I marvel how far technology has progressed in the last few years, let alone months. SanDisk, for example, revealed a 200GB microSD card back in March, 2015, which was the highest capacity microSD card up until now.
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Samsung Unveils 256GB MicroSD Card, Highest Capacity In Its Class More

Samsung Unveils 256GB MicroSD Card, Highest Capacity In Its Class

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  • Can i... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Get 1000 of them in an iSCSI setup?

  • No, and no (Score:3, Funny)

    by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @05:24PM (#52094443) Homepage

    While you most likely do not need such a large microSD card in your life

    Correct

    you'll probably want one.

    Incorrect.

    I'm not quite the gibbering moron you seem to imagine me to be...

    • Re: No, and no (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Well I am. Gibber gibber!

      But seriously.... Nobody knows when they're going to need a couple hours of video recording capacity.

      Those circumstances can't be predicted... But they do happen. Alien visitations, cops torturing someone, once in a millennia volcanic eruptions, you actually get laid, etc.

      Having excess video capacity is never a bad thing.

      • Re: No, and no (Score:4, Funny)

        by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M ( 4212163 ) on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @07:51PM (#52095149)

        Those circumstances can't be predicted... But they do happen. Alien visitations, cops torturing someone, once in a millennia volcanic eruptions, you actually get laid, etc.

        We all know that three of these events are likely to occur in our lifetime.

        Now if you'll excuse me, I have porn video files to classify.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          once in a millennia volcanic eruptions

          We all know that three of these events are likely to occur in our lifetime.

          Well I guess this is the unlikely one then, works for me. Unless those bastards discover immortality.

      • Just that it seems pretty expensive. If you need it you need it, but I'll stick with $10 cards for now.

      • you actually get laid

        But why would you need multi-hour capacity for a 15 seconds event?

    • In regards to the subject... wouldn't that be "Yes, and no" you gibbering moron?

      • While you most likely do not need such a large microSD card in your life

        This is correct in that no, I do not need such a large microSD card.

    • I'm not quite the gibbering moron you seem to imagine me to be...

      Not a gibbering moron, but I do imagine you're somewhat of a wonkey monkey.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jtgd ( 807477 )
      It might come in handy inside a Rubik's Cube.

  • Crash Kit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @05:35PM (#52094513) Homepage

    The reason I love having extremely large MicroSD cards is because my cell phone is essentially a mobile crash kit. I keep things like OS ISOs, drivers, and repair utilities on my phone, in case I ever walk into a place and need to repair a computer system or server. There is also a samba server on my phone in case I need to quickly distribute files to multiple machines at once over a network, instead of a single machine over USB.

  • I do crapcan endurance racing, the longest race we've run is 36 hours straight. Not having to fiddle with a camera to swap a SD card when you're sleep deprived would be awesome.

    • Most cameras take full-size SD cards, which are available in 512GB now.

      I guess you're using Gopros or similar "action cameras", though? Do they even support microSD cards with this much capacity?

  • 200 GB in March.... 2015 (Score:4, Informative)

    by starless ( 60879 ) on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @05:41PM (#52094561)

    SanDisk, for example, revealed a 200GB microSD card back in March,

    which implies this year, except it was 2015
    https://www.sandisk.com/about/... [sandisk.com]

  • These asshats http://www.androidcentral.com/... [androidcentral.com] were going to do 512GB - and as late as January of this year were saying the just hadn't released them because they hadn't sold their stocked supplies of smaller cards.

    At least Samsung will probably deliver. And just in time for me not to need it as Dropbox introduces Infinity.

  • Isn't 640k enough for anybody? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by spaceyhackerlady ( 462530 ) on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @06:00PM (#52094653)

    While you most likely do not need such a large microSD card in your life...

    At one time I bought an iPad with 16 GB of storage, since the storage was infinite compared with my ability to come up with material to store on it. Then I discovered new applications like ForeFlight for flight planning. I now use a 128 GB iPad mini in the cockpit.

    When I bought my current Mac (admittedly, a few years ago) I figured that 4 GB of RAM and 250 GB of disc space was ample. I bought a GoPro camera earlier this year. Two hundred fifty gigs is now nothing.

    ...laura

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shinobi ( 19308 )

      Heh, yeah, it's always fun to see some of the morons who claim that nobody needs cards like these, just because all they do is tool around with email etc.

      I spent the weekend at the WEC 6 Hours of Spa. I filled 4 128GiB cards with photos and videos, and was also well into the 5th card.

  • Has anybody considered making a NAS out of high capacity MicroSD cards?

  • $1/GB (Score:3)

    by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 ) on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @06:10PM (#52094693)

    And yet another top of the line card comes out at $1/GB more or less. With even the smallest cards going for $10 a Best Buy due to shipping and storage prices... can we find some better way of doing this? How about a box of 10 SD cards like floppies at the signoff price for floppies at $10/box?

    • Re:$1/GB (Score:4, Informative)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday May 12, 2016 @04:16AM (#52096803) Homepage

      And yet another top of the line card comes out at $1/GB more or less. With even the smallest cards going for $10 a Best Buy due to shipping and storage prices... can we find some better way of doing this? How about a box of 10 SD cards like floppies at the signoff price for floppies at $10/box?

      Best Buy? LOL. Ever hear of eBay, grandpa? Here's 10 32GB microSD cards [ebay.com] for $29.99 with free shipping, that works out to $3/card and less than $0.1/GB.

      • Here's 10 32GB microSD cards for $29.99 with free shipping, that works out to $3/card and less than $0.1/GB.

        You're assuming an awful lot there. That they will arrive at all, that they will provide the stated capacity, that they will work at all, that they will work longer than a couple of weeks... if it's not from a name brand with a decent warranty procedure and with at least a five year warranty, it's garbage not fit for ass-wiping (it's not soft and fluffy.)

    • Just go to Micro Center [microcenter.com] and get them at the checkout. They just keep them in bins there and the clerk hands them over to prevent theft. I don't waste my time with best buy as they are over priced, the clerks are dumb as rocks, and if you have to return something it is a pain in the ass even if it is defective. As far as reliability is concerned the micro center branded cards have been pretty reliable as have the USB drives as I still haven't had one fail that wasn't abused*.

      * By abused I don't mean regula

  • Oh sure, I want one (Score:4, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @06:29PM (#52094765) Homepage Journal

    I'd like to have one in an abstract kind of way, but not enough to plunk down even near to that kind of money.

    I actually bought an Evo+ because benchmarks revealed that the Evo and Evo+ are some of the best cards at random I/O, and thus better for running your operating system from than for example a Sandisk Ultra. I bought a 32GB when I could have probably done fine with a 8GB, let alone a 16GB, because apparently the 32GB and larger cards have even better random-access performance. It's annoying that some SD cards should suffer extremely poor performance on random writes, but sure enough, switching out my Sandisk Ultra 32GB for the Evo+ 32GB significantly improved Android performance on my Pine A64+ 2GB.

    Sorry that reads like a fat block of ad copy, as if any advertisers were ever concerned with such trivial matters as random write performance; in fact, no SD card manufacturer of which I'm aware advertises any specs like that whatsoever. It's all just classes, and those only refer to sustained writes.

    So far I am getting nowhere near using up my 32GB card, and don't expect to be in any danger of doing so any time soon. I have a 32GB Sandisk Ultra in my phone just for data, and it's doing that job just fine too — and I've lots of free space.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )

      You can buy the 200GB SanDisk for about USD$80 on Amazon.

      • You can buy the 200GB SanDisk for about USD$80 on Amazon.

        OK, but I got my 32GB for $15 on Amazon, with Prime delivery. That works out to a tolerable price per GB, and provides more space than I actually need. I'm not parking anything on slow flash storage unless it has to be there. My data is mostly still on spinning rust (but high-capacity, relatively) and also on GigE. That way it can live in the closet and not spin on my desk.

    • I have a 32GB Sandisk Ultra in my phone just for data, and it's doing that job just fine too — and I've lots of free space.

      I have a 128GB EVO in my tablet and it's full.

      As with all things storage there will people people who aren't interested because they will never use it, and people who aren't interested because it's still not big enough.

      For a DSLR recording video is limited by memory card not by battery capacity. Recording photos at this point is limited by battery capacity where a typical 64GB card can hold over 1000 RAW files at which point the battery will already have given up unless you go crazy with power saving.

  • Useful for ultracheap win8 tablets (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @06:45PM (#52094811)

    These would be useful on ultra-cheap win8 tablets, like those Nextbook things at walmart.

    They come from the factory neutered with a tiny internal flash storage, typically under 20gb of useful capacity, but feature a microSD slot.

    What you do is format the card as NTFS, but dont provide a drive letter. Instead, you mount it as an NTFS junction at say C:\SDCard, then you create softlinks under there to individual folders in Program Files, and other important places.

    That way C:\Program files remains traversable by the windows update process (and wont break spectacularly) because it is still native to the system volume, but the installed program directories underneath are redirected elsewhere on a per-program basis. (So, eg, the internet explorer subfolder remains native, but the Office 2007 subfolder is a symlink to the sdcard volume, etc.)

    This is pretty easy to do with some freeware like symmover.

    Big honking storage would turn the cheap walmart toy into a somewhat useable low-power tablet.

    The storage would be even friendlier to use on a linux friendly tablet PC, as it could be mounted as /home.

    For people with Linux Deploy set up on their phones, Big honking SDcard storage would let them set up a much more useful linux chroot with much more installed in it.

    Big honking storage like this is really aimed at power users like that.

    The prior suggestion I saw of setting these up in a raid array isnt so hot though. While individually these cards boast an interesting read/write access time, the limiting factor for raid will be bus saturation. Typically, the bus that lots of these would be put on is USB. USB has a limited total bus bandwidth, which IIRC, is 12mbit for 1.1, 400mbit for 2.0, and USB 3.0 is 5gbit. Once you saturate the bus, additional devices in the stripe only add complexity without benefit. For USB 3.0, that works out to about 7 of these cards (assuming the 96MB/sec figure holds, which it probably doesnt.). After that, the USB bus itself is the bottleneck. More cards wont make it go any faster, and the cost would be prohibitive. About the only neat thing about such an array would be the very low power requirements.

    These cards are really best used in devices that SHOULD have had beefy internal storage, but dont, because of cheapness on the OEM's part.

    Things like the afore mentioned tablet PCs.

  • These single level DVDs will hold about 450 GB of data, although not as a single item, not in such a small volume, not erasable, and less convenient to use but for about 1/12 the price. Both may have their place, though.

    • A microSD card weighs less than 1 gram, and requires very little power to run. It has faster access time than those DVDs as well, being solid state.

      Good use cases include:

      Teeny tiny drones, with large integrated map sets and aggressive flight telemetry logging

      Large data store on tiny pocket NAS (like a ZSUN running openwrt). (Aside from corporate espionage, There are some useful situations where a sizeable local file store without a big honking server would be beneficial. Say, hosting the client images for

  • When I was in high school people were looking at the most recent personal computer, which had 64k of ram, and exclaiming "when would you ever need that much ram?" The whole lab shared a 6 MB hard drive, and floppy disks held 360k. In college the computer I bought came with a 256 MB read/write optical drive and eventually a 40 MB hard drive. Everyone still thought those were huge.

    Even a small OS like linux is a 180 MB download, and the USB sticks we use like we used to use floppies are now measured in

  • Ad signature (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @07:18PM (#52094959)

    256GB ... capable of storing more than 12 hours of 4K video footage, 33 hours of full HD recording, 55,200 photos or 23,500 MP3s

    This is where you see it's an ad and not a regular story ; who on slashdot needs to be explained what is 256GB?

  • There's finally been some innovation in the SD / MicroSD arena - with a new standard for cards, they now have backwards compatible, much faster ones, with extra pins.
    https://www.google.com.au/search?q=uhs+2+u3&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwit5b2PrdPMAhXDnaYKHQtUD30Q_AUICCgC&biw=1707&bih=929 [google.com.au]

    I don't believe this one uses the new standard. If you're just using it to play music or videos, it's fine but (IIRC) a high end gopro would like a faster card when recording 4k 60fps for e

  • I just today received a 200 GB card which has dropped sharply in price over the past month. I had wondered why, and now it seems clear.

    Since the death of HDD music devices the capacity of MicroSD has determined their capacity. As somebody who stores their music in FLAC I have had to move music out of my library to fit. The 200 will do for now, but I'm glad to see that there will be an option when I need to upgrade again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jabuzz ( 182671 )

      Yeah I never understood that. They almost all have the physical space to accommodate a full sized SD card and 512GB versions of these have been available for quite sometime and at better GB/$ than microSD too.

      That said 256GB of FLAC is a *LOT* of music, we are talking well in excess of 600 albums. I have 282 in just over 100GB and that includes a whole bunch of multi CD compilation albums.

      • I felt the same way. I have an SD -> MicroSD adapter but that isn't great for something that you carry around. For the last few years the best option I have seen for large capacity players had two MicroSD slots and even that wouldn't build playlists across both of them (it also isn't great for syncing).

        But uh...I was already over-capacity on that 128, so I don't know how long it will be until I need a 256. If you consider that My parent's started collecting CDs in the mid-90s, this is essentially a 20 ye

  • While you most likely do not need such a large microSD card in your life

    In fact, yes, one would be rather convenient. But then I have no life.

    (I have filled four 1TB hard drives with downloaded 720 and 1080p porn, and am starting on a 2TB. It would be nice to bring as much of that with me as possible when traveling.)

  • How else can I put ROMs of every single Nintendo DS game into a R4 card?

    512G would be enough, btw.

  • How many library of congress would fit on this cards?
  • You can't be living in the same universe as me. I have a 128 gig in my 1520 now and considered buying a 200 gig but the reviews were very negative toward the large capacity. But a major manufacturer producing a 256 gig will make me spend my money! I get those pesky notices from Win 10 now telling me I am near full on my 128 gig now. As a matter of fact, I will buy one for my Surface too.

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