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A lifetime of HD video
Nov. 4th, 2022 10:53 pmSo Craig and I were nattering the other day and the topic strayed onto video storage, and just how much could you store in a shoebox of memory cards.
Oddly enough this isn't the first time I've done that particular thought experiment, so I've already got the numbers - a VHS-sized box occupies the same space as 2918 microSD cards. And a quick search on Scan shows that 512GB microSD cards are now a thing, so that's an utterly mindboggling 1.4 petabytes of storage. Craig guesstimated 3Mb/s for HD-quality video (conveniently 4x my previous guesstimate to match the 4x capacity increase since then), which would work out at 120 years worth of non-stop video.
But that's not the most mindboggling part of it - Scan will sell that 512GB microSD card for £50.39. So to buy that much storage costs a little under £150,000 which is, well, a lot of money but not as much as I expected. It's completely impractical - how would you physically read/write that many memory cards - but 2.5" form factor SSDs are cheaper and practical to use in massive disk arrays. It's actually possible these days to build stupidly-high-capacity storage out of SSDs without being the size of Amazon.
xkcd 691: microSD
That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library. Mmmm.
Oddly enough this isn't the first time I've done that particular thought experiment, so I've already got the numbers - a VHS-sized box occupies the same space as 2918 microSD cards. And a quick search on Scan shows that 512GB microSD cards are now a thing, so that's an utterly mindboggling 1.4 petabytes of storage. Craig guesstimated 3Mb/s for HD-quality video (conveniently 4x my previous guesstimate to match the 4x capacity increase since then), which would work out at 120 years worth of non-stop video.
But that's not the most mindboggling part of it - Scan will sell that 512GB microSD card for £50.39. So to buy that much storage costs a little under £150,000 which is, well, a lot of money but not as much as I expected. It's completely impractical - how would you physically read/write that many memory cards - but 2.5" form factor SSDs are cheaper and practical to use in massive disk arrays. It's actually possible these days to build stupidly-high-capacity storage out of SSDs without being the size of Amazon.
xkcd 691: microSD
That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library. Mmmm.
