SD Card capacity

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• Maxatoria Posts: 17,980

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  15/09/14 - 10:52 #2

  have a look for old camera's as they may come with low capacity cards for free and you can also show the evolution of camera's at the same time but i'd imagine most cards below 1gb aint worth the effort of popping on ebay etc as they are worthless at the moment when you can get a 8gb new for a couple of quid

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• oilman Posts: 4,529

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  15/09/14 - 17:14 #3

  The growth in sd card capacity is nowhere near as spectacular as the decease in cost of RAM per megabyte - see last figure on each line.
  
  Figures before 1980 are slightly tenuous as there was so little RAM in the world (and not in modern chip form). Early computers had RAM in order of bytes (not even kilobytes). Of course any moder smart phone is a zillion time more powerful than early computers.
  
  1957 C.C.C. 0.00098 $392 $411,041,792
  1960 E.E.Co. 0.00098 $5 $5,242,880
  1965 IBM 0.00098 $2.52 $2,642,412
  1970 IBM 0.00098 $0.70 $734,003
  1975 MITS 0.25 $103 $421,888
  1980 Interface Age 64 $405 $6,480
  1985 Do Kay BYTE 512 $440 $880
  1990 Unitex BYTE 8,192 $851 $106
  1995 Pacific Coast Micro 16,384 $494 $30.9
  2000 Crucial 65,536 $72 $1.12
  2005 Corsair 1,048,576 $189 $0.185
  2010 Kingston 8,388,608 $99 $0.0122
  2013 Crucial 16,777,216 $88 $0.0054
  2014 Patriot 32,000,000 $294 $0.0091

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• evil c Posts: 7,833

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  16/09/14 - 03:27 #4

  Another long post from me after I spent about 4 hours changing search words in Google, and after some initial success via this partial answer SD Card Road Map in Appendix 7 (page 33) of an INSEAD Faculty project, covering the period 1999 - 2007 8MB - 32GB, I rapidly found myself going round in circles: http://faculty.insead.edu/adner/projects/MayJune04-FINALProjects/Memory%20Stick.pdf.
  
  A bit later on in my search I looked for a list of manufacturers model numbers and dates and found the SanDisk SD Card Product Manual v1.9 from Dec 2003. In Section 1.2 Product Models (page 8) shows a list of 7 SanDisk SD card model numbers and capacities: http://www.circlemud.org/jelson/sdcard/SDCardStandardv1.9.pdf. However looking at v2.2 from Nov 2004 no model numbers were listed at all. SanDisk I’m sure would have the dates and capacities of their entire historical model lineups – see last para below. As will Panasonic and Toshiba.
  
  When I’d finally got fed up searching and learning more than I ever wanted to about the history of flash memory I realised that maybe I couldn’t find a complete list was because of the different families of SD Card, which have evolved considerably since the inception of the original standard.
  
  The 2014 SanDisk 150GB card you cited as an example, is actually an SDHC/SDXC UHS-II card based on the SDA 3.0 spec with a capacity range of 64GB – 2TB and a member of the SDHC and SDXC families, and not an SD card, which has a capacity range now of 128MB - 2GB and is a member of the SDSC family (although from my search, if I’ve remembered correctly, the 1999, introduced 2000 1st gen SD cards had 2 capacities only, 8 and 16MB, which was increased 3 months later with the 32 and 64MB models). The first SDXC card had a capacity of 32GB and was launched in March 2009 by Pretec, followed by 48 and 64GB cards in Jan 2010 by Panasonic.
  
  But what I reckon is that instead of spending hours researching, you contact SanDisk, who were one of the 3 companies who introduced SD cards in 1999, along with Toshiba and Matsushita (Panasonic). Or ask all three. Also you could try sending an email to the SD Association which was started by these 3 companies in 2000 to promote SD cards (email address bottom of page): https://www.sdcard.org/about_sda/contact_us

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• tompayne Posts: 304

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  16/09/14 - 09:43 #5

  Thanks evil c for your amazingly well researched answer! I'll take a look at those links.
  
  Thanks also to Maxatoria and oilman - there are many examples I am sure of exponential growth in technology. I though SD cards would be a very visible example, as they look exactly the same over the past ~14 years but have gone from 8Mb - 512Gb (and potential for 2Tb)! If I am working this out correctly, thats 64,000 times the capacity in 14 years (taking the 512Gb - it would be 250,000 times capacity for 2Tb).
  
  Thanks for the replies

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• evil c Posts: 7,833

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  16/09/14 - 11:31 #6

  Hi Tom, refreshed with some sleep and a couple of ideas I've had another look on Google and found this article from Toshiba written by Douglas Wong, for the Flash Memory Summit 2011 about the past, present and future of SD cards. There's a road map chart on page 8 for the period 2006 to today (predictions from 2011) showing the range of capacities 4GB to 2TB of all 3 cards (SD, SDHC, SDXC), their applications, and roughly when they were introduced into the consumer market: http://www.flashmemorysummit.com/English/Collaterals/Proceedings/2011/20110810_S202_Wong.pdf
  
  Together with the INSEAD chart they both cover the whole period 1999 to today consumer market which roughly answers your OP question. The different applications; consumer, professional and automotive saw the development of different SD cards with varying capacities, speeds and sizes to meet predicted market demands, and there may well be other cards for other applications, military for example, each application having a different capacity growth road map.

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• tompayne Posts: 304

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  16/09/14 - 13:06 #7

  Awesome, thanks! I emailed SanDisk I'll let you know if they reply.

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