The biggest issue with these small form memory is heat, they heat up a lot, but seem like no one care.
Interesting, I didn't knew about this format. Curious picture selection on the Wikipedia, I didn't knew about this manufacturer until reading the Ars article above.
I'm reminded of XFMEXPRESS, a tech that had some justification to exist as a low profile replaceable and coolable main storage for small devices. But it doesn't look like it went anywhere.
We had a lot of great games even when storage was spinning rust.
UHS-I cards easily go up to 100MB/s. This is the baseline for a modern SD card.
After that you can add more pins for UHS-II. This is used in a bunch of devices and goes up to 300MB/s, but you can't assume anything will have it. And UHS-III was dead on arrival.
Alternatively you can add a different set of more pins for SD Express. It can do gigabytes per second and is probably the future. It's backwards compatible with UHS-I, but not II or III.
And also SanDisk made their own spec for overclocking UHS-I which some things support. It can do about 200MB/s.
The steam deck supports none of those upgrade paths. You get about 100MB/s.
Considering the insane tempuratures the cards reach, and that it destroys brand new SD cards, I don't want them going any faster until it works safely.
So this is basically a smaller NVMe SSD?
And since, underneath, it becomes a standard PCI-E NVME with standard lanes, there is no inherent speed limit from the bus itself, only from the fact that SD cards are tiny and any real controller is going to cook.
If I imported one, the majority of the handsets released before this year wouldn't be able to register on a network, given that the networks have gone and blocked the IMEI TAC associated with most of Sony's handsets.[1]
This is due to Sony not having the correct carrier settings in order to roam onto them for emergency calls, and a ham-fisted direction to have working emergency calls post-3G shutdown.
Their support is garbage: 1 Android version and only 3 years of security updates for a phone that cost nearly $1000. Google and Samsung offer 5+ years on their flagship phones.
The cameras are held back by incompetent software; the camera app does not even rotate for a left handed mode (they only need to rotate text and icons). Their camera app behaves like a point and shoot camera from 2004, and you have to treat it like that or your photos will be a blurry, underexposed mess. The cameras are technically fine, but the software implementation is truly terrible.
Yes, the phone has a headphone jack and micro SD slot, but those aren't worth it when everything else sucks. Sony is far, far behind other major Android manufacturers when it comes to software quality and support.
I gleefully gave Sony money for the 5 IV in late 2022. The phone stops receiving all updates next month (September 2025). Custom ROMs (e.g. LineageOS) are nonexistent because Sony has such an insignificant market share.
I won't be giving Sony any money for a new phone.
Laying is transitive and requires an object.
I don't know the specifics but SD express might be patent/license encumbered so why pay when you can make your own for free?
I'm guessing this drive will eventually percolate down in the form of an SD Express card, and SD express is now in the Switch 2. The Biwin drive is currently too big to fit the SD spec, but that might not be true in the future.
I think Nintendo just sealed the deal against any SD Express competitors. This article is (probably) planted PR to promote this drive to Western buyers interested in maximizing their SD Express slots in a "Hey, why do these Chinese gamers get this amazing card and I'm stuck with this junk?" Now that lights a fire under a lot of people and Biwin can start licensing the technology or selling directly to the Western market.
Storage upgrades in handhelds seems to be a real problem. I was surprised my Steam Deck didn't have an easy to access M2 slot because of Valve's "pro-gamer" reputation. You have to take the entire thing apart to get to the SSD and the plain-jane SD slot you do get will never feel fast enough, especially since its hardware capped at 104 MB/s. Gabe didn't become a billionaire by not being ruthless I suppose, but it is disappointing.
I'm guessing a lot of these devices are sold at a premium for more storage so they don't want to make it easy to upgrade fast storage on your own. Instead we're just forced into the SD card ghetto. Maybe Biwin can change that, or the handheld makers will push against that if it means hurting their margins because the higher storage models are more profitable. Nintendo at least seems to signaling, "Do whatever you want with this fast SD slot," which is a breath of fresh air. What a time in gaming, where Nintendo is more progressive and pro-consumer than Valve.
It's a really weak claim when you frame it properly. If you have a good controller you can use either form factor just fine, at PCIe gen 4 x2 speed.
> maximizing their SD Express slots [...] Now that lights a fire under a lot of people and Biwin can start licensing the technology or selling directly to the Western market.
That would be nice!
Even if not user replaceable without opening the device it would make it possible to have replaceable drives at a tiny fraction of the current minimum size.
Even just for relatability compared to soldered on storage it would be a plus.
The manufacturers don't seem to want that. Even the small Chinese companies which were the last holdouts have gone full forced-obsolescence.
zeroq•3d ago
I think this whole issue shouldn't exist in the first place.
I do understand that full voice over and 4k ready textures comes at a price but some devs are getting lazy and some games are just ridiculous.
We're talking about handhelds like Steam Deck. Even if I plug it in as a console it won't have the juice to run at full resolution.
When I want to quickly grab an episode of a tv series to watch on my mobile I'll be super happy with 300mb 720p version. I don't need a 50gb rip in 4k in HDR with Atmos sound. Same option should be available for games.
Talanes•3d ago
trenchpilgrim•2h ago
NDxTreme•3d ago
I bought the cheapest one, and upgraded the SSD. I also have an SD card. I use this for more than just playing games.
I would love to be able to just upgrade the storage and it be as fast as the internal storage. I could install a Windows install on it, and switch when it makes sense.
* Arch-by-the-way
ThatPlayer•2h ago
Though I also did the SSD upgrade and haven't really been bothered by space, so haven't bothered. I have that setup on a spare parts PC with HDDs instead of microSD, since that's an older 1/2 TB SSD.
Zenst•2h ago
But talking your AAA kind of titles that seem to be the norm, not your chess games, though even then, graphics sure has gained space in those programs. Though I'm sure somebody active in the industry could paint a better picture.
Anybody active in the industry able to offer or point to better breakdown?
codebje•1h ago
Executable code is pretty tiny relative to everything else, including libraries. Libraries only get really big when they include media assets. When it comes to media, even high fidelity audio is relatively small. 44kHz stereo 16-bit sample audio, uncompressed, is 176kb per second of audio. A 1024x1024 texture, at 32bpp, is 4mb, uncompressed. Video depends heavily on codec, but roughly consider that 4k video is something like 4096x2160, so eight times the size of our static texture for a single frame. Encodings don't just store every frame whole, of course, but keyframes add up quick.