I just got a new laptop today and when I saw the ssd it blew my mind. Most of my old drives are like the second from left and it's what I think of as a normal drive, buying a standard ssd still feels small to me. But look at that tiny thing to the right! It's the size of a postage stamp!
Assuming I managed to find the right specs (it is a Microscience hh-1050): The monster on the far left is from 1990, holds 40mb, read/write of 0.625mb/s, and weighs almost exactly 2kg. The baby on the far right I got in the mail today, holds 1tb, read/write of 5150mb/s, and weighs about 2.85 grams.
So we're looking at 25,000 times more storage, 8,240 times faster, and 1/700th the weight! And the one on the right is just 1tb, they make one that same model but 2tb. I can barely believe it exists even though I'm literally holding it in my hands.
Those drives typically have some pretty dreadful read/write speeds (for a computer). Maybe once SD Express is figured out we'll get fast and good Micro SD cards at a high capacity.
And they crap out so quickly. I can't even count the number of SD cards I've had to throw in the trash. I don't think I've ever had a 2.5" or 3.5" drive completely crap out on me (though I have had bad SMART data indicative of a dying drive) and I have been running a media server with dozens of TBs for over a decade now.
Invest in Samsung Pro Endurane SD cards, they last a lot longer. I believe Sandisk has a similar product but I have never used it.
There are way too many counterfeit cards mixed in with the legitimate stock out there for me to bother spending too much on any single card. I typically go for the midrange offerings and roll the dice.
I don't know What everyone does to get counterfeit cards all the time. I never had one. Are they just less prevalent in Europe than in America? Maybe it's because I don't buy them online?
Probably the latter, I doubt any sizable brick and mortar store is likely to be sent a batch of counterfeits from their distributor.
This is why for retro computers, I tend to prefer CompactFlash. IDE->CF adapters are cheap, and the cards are much higher quality. They effectively become an SSD that works on old stuff. (Just because I like retro computing stuff doesn't mean I want the whole experience, like waiting for disk heads to move, or worse, tape drives to finish reading. I'm old enough that I remember dealing with it and I don't need to deal with it again.)
Not a lot of call for them otherwise, though. SD cards have gotten increasingly good bandwidth, which means they're good enough for a lot of higher end cameras. CF is getting squeezed out.
I mean, those work fine and are fast. You mean we'll get those for cheap.
In any case, the image is about physical dimensions, and SD cards are tiny! Considering we're comparing to a 40 MB mechanical drive, I'm gonna say the comparison is valid and they aren't even near the bottom of the specs table.
Of course people like it when ALL the specs get better in these things, but that's because people like simple things more than true things.