128 TB in your phone. Would that be enough?

Roberto Saracco July 8, 2018 Blog 439 Views

Details of the various specs and classifications of different SD cards. Credit: SD Association

The SD Association has issued a press release to inform of the approval of a new standard that can support a new generation of SD (Secure Digital) Cards that can store up to 128 TB. It is the specification 7.0 on SD cards and it is backward compatible, meaning that you can use this SDUC, Ultra Capacity, cards also on devices supporting previous generation.

In the presentation video, see below, they make a point of explaining why one would need such a storage capacity in the future. Interesting to watch. This sort of capacity also begs the question of the time it could take to download all the stuff you have put on the card.

Well, at a download speed of 25MB per second that would require almost 60 days (59 days and 6 hours…). Take your time and have a coffee.

If history teaches us something is that we usually don’t know how to take advantage of technology evolution when it is outlined but over time someone finds a way to use it and after a few more years it might become something you can’t live without. So that might be the case for this huge potential storage in your phone…

Actually, if I have to venture a possible application I would bet on my digital twin. A car generates several GB of data per day, a future self driving car may generate some 300 TB per year.

Now, I am not a car but my senses are collecting 500MB per second and my brain receives some 21 GB per day (the nervous system integrates the data on their way to the brain decreasing their volume by a factor of 1,000: notice that this is not about coding efficiency, it is about computation. Our body/nervous system/brain does not operate like a von Neumann computer with a separation of storage, computation and communication, everything is at the same time computation, storage and communications).

As more and more sensors (contact, wearable, implantable) will become part of my life part of those data harvested by the sensors and more resulting from observing my behaviour at the functional and emotional level, will be harvested and will have to be stored somewhere. It can make sense to store them close to me, sending only a fragment to the cloud. That would preserve privacy and would allow local computation.

All considered my grandchildren will need more storage capacity than just 128TB….