Physically Huge SD Card Technically Has Some Benefits

SD cards were developed and released just before the turn of the millenium. Since then, we’ve seen smaller formats, miniSD and microSD, become popular for portable devices. However, sometimes bigger is better. [Useless Mod] dared to dream that dream, and put together a (physically) gigantic SD card.

In card is a full 10x scale reproduction of a SanDisk Extreme Pro SD card,  complete with packaging, too. Built out of layers of laser cut MDF, it’s spray painted and given a high-quality label to complete the effect. The write protect slider instead serves in this case as a latch to open the assembly. Inside, there’s a simple regular SD card slot, wired up to the bigger card’s giant contacts made with copper tape. These interface with an huge 10x scale SD card slot, which acts as an adapter, allowing the giant SD to be used with regular hardware like cameras.

The giant SD might seem silly, but it has plenty of useful features. There’s flashing LEDs behind the label that make it easy to find if you drop it, along with an Apple Watch hidden inside that means it can be located using the Find My iPhone service. We’d have loved if it featured a RAID array full of 10 or more SD cards, as well, just to justify its enormous size. That said, [Useless Mod] points out that it’s big enough to keep a DSLR dry in a rainstorm when fitted to the hotshoe, so there’s that.

It’s a fun build, not a serious one, but one that we enjoyed on its merits. We suspect that, regardless of the card inside, you’ll have little luck recording at 4K with such long wire lengths in play. If you’ve ever had more normal compatability problems with the format, consider that it could be size causing your issues. Video after the break.

27 thoughts on “Physically Huge SD Card Technically Has Some Benefits

      1. Just think though, if you could get 8 of these in a pouch, a pony express rider could take them 15 miles in only an hour, 2 Terabyte transfer, that’s around 555 Megabytes per second, so 4 times as fast as gigabit networking!!! We can call it, IP over Equestrian Carrier.

  1. The downside of this technology is the micro-SD that could look like a speck of dust in a room and be overlooked. I think SD cards shouldn’t be smaller than a credit card and bendable to be kept in pockets and wallets.

    1. You’re not wrong. Micro-SD cards are an amazing technological feat, but they’re *too small* to be convenient for human hands and eyes. They’re too hard to use and too easy to lose.

      1. What all y’all oughta do then, is cut a credit card sized piece of margarine tub lid, and 1/4″ or 5mm in from the edge on the short sides, cut a microSD wide U shape, 2 of, and on the long sides, 3 of, then epoxy glue 10 microSD cards to these tabs such that you can flip them out when you wanna use them. Use good clamping pressure to glue them down though, microSD plus margarine tub lid can squeeze in the hole, but not marge tub lid plus 1mm of epoxy.

      2. I lost a 4 gig micro SD when it flew out of a spring loaded slot when I was removing it from a Bluetooth speaker/MP3 player. Didn’t even bother trying to find it. “Eh. It’s only a 4 gig.”

        1. I once lost a 2GB xD card to the bottom of a lake. I opened the camera to change cards on a canoe, pushed in the card to release it and from what I can remember, the only time a card ever launched itself out of that camera just happened to be in the middle of a lake.

          I’d wager after that, there were infinitely more xD cards in that lake than there were fish!

    2. I’ve always wanted a “MegaSD” card that’s the size of a 3.5″ floppy disk. Something the size and thickness of a credit card would be handy too. At least it would be possible to label that. Someone could go a step further and put an e-ink display on it like what’s on a lot of store shelves now for prices. Then you could label it somehow while copying files to it.

      1. Not just the size of a 3.5″ floppy disk, but with a electro-magnetic transducer located so it could be accessed by a floppy disk drive (in addition to other ways to access the data).

  2. Ha! 10x enlarge in linear sizes gives 1000x times in volume. So card of this size can be 1000Tb just with the today’s chip data density. This is for SD_to_10xSD. The microSD_to_10xSD even more significant.

Leave a Reply to SteveSCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.