Samsung Announces Ultra High Speed-1 MicroSD Cards

[loomis86]

Quadruple the capacity and make it cheap, then we're talking about a serious blue-ray killer. Death to optical media!

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]loomis86[/nom]Quadruple the capacity and make it cheap, then we're talking about a serious blue-ray killer. Death to optical media![/citation]

Flash is an expensive medium. Unless that changes, Blu-Ray disks will be here for a long time. Flash doesn't even only have price per capacity against it, it needs to have high performance while having high capacity for a dirt cheap price. 25GB Blu-Ray disks cost next to nothing, but can transfer data faster than most much more expensive SD cards.These Flash chips here have both capacity and the necessary read performance on their side, but I'd be very surprised if Samsung sells them for less than two dollars per GB.

We would need at least a 32GB (if not 64GB for some very large games because console games aren't nearly as compressed as PC games, if they're compressed at all) version of these cards (or a similarly performing 32+GB card) and it would need to sell for cents per GB. Even low speed (sub class 10) SD/MicroSD cards cost more than $20-30 for 32GB cards and a lot more for 64GB cards (these are the cards that are already far too slow for this too).

Optical media has it's annoyances such as being more prone to damage if they are mishandled and are noisier (optical drives also use more power than a flash card does), but it is dirt cheap and has been for a while now. It's better than the other high capacity for low price tech, hard drives, for what it does. Although Flash is obviously even better (most of the time), it is simply too expensive. Using Flash cards for this could more than double the prices of games up to the triple digits.

Optical disks are also constantly improving. We have multi TB optical disks in the works (with some experimental ones already at hundreds of GB and even over one or two TB, I'd have to check the highest capacities in testing right now because they might be higher) and they are also very fast. Unless Flash can reduce price per GB, increase capacity, and increase performance all at once or the new optical technologies hit a brick wall, it won't become the storage medium of choice for games.

 

[loomis86]

I'll never buy any blue ray disks.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]loomis86[/nom]I'll never buy any blue ray disks.[/citation]

It's Blu-Ray and that you don't want to buy them doesn't make a difference. If you want games and movies to be on Flash, then maybe you'll be given that option... At about $50-80 higher costs (or even more, who knows how Samsung will price these) than the costs of the same media on Blu-Ray disks. Flash is simply too expensive for use as a replacement for optical disks.

It only works for computers because they can benefit from very high speeds offered by 2.5", 3.5", and PCIe SSDs and the price is justified. Replacing optical disks is completely different because not only are the costs for the Blu-Ray media next to nothing, the mobile Flash media is generally too slow.

Blu-Ray disks are barely fast enough now for the consoles (they could use a faster replacement even if it's just faster Blu-Ray disks) and the Flash media that is fast enough is usually as expensive without any data on it (or even more expensive) than the Blu-Ray disk that has the game. As for movies, the problem is greater because I'm pretty sure that they usually don't cost as much as a console game does, so by percentage, they would be more expensive than the games.

 

[alphaalphaalpha3]

[citation][nom]monsta[/nom]If the read speed is increasd I would assume the write speed would be too.[/citation]

Maybe, maybe not. Flash can have huge differences between read and write speed.