Is there any advantage to doing this aside from just maybe getting extra storage if you have an M.2 lying around? I thought their whole thing was that they are directly on the bus, which makes them hella fast. 🤨
But why?
Appart from what the article mentioned, cards corrupt way too much on raspberry pis and similar devices compared to usb or ssd storage for example. This gives an easy option to replace them on some embedded device that you might not have full control over.
Probably easier to switch out for debugging or to flash a SSD from a PC.
Surely a M.2 to USB adapter would be better for that use case?
Yeah, but that adapter ist just a PCB, I’d assume a M.2 to USB Adapter is mofe complicated.
how has microSD not died yet
No real alternatives in that form factor.
The form factor is kind of pointless though, I can think of maybe two devices I own where a full sized sd card wouldn’t fit and be more convenient
Smartphones can’t fit a regular sized SD slot, so microSD is the default (if a smartphone devices even supports memory cards).
I mean I think mine could, but even if it couldn’t I would have no problem with it being the thickness of like a Palm m505 which easily fits a full sized card on a pocket sized device
I am just saying how things are. I am not particularly obsessed about thickness and I have a phone which supports microSD (which is not that common these days).
There are UFS cards. They aren’t as fast as SD Express cards, but 1200 MB/s is still plenty fast for a phone.
Why would anybody adopt a newer standard with no backwards compatibility and slower speeds?
What could even warrant “high speeds” from a damned phone? I can’t think of a single thing that would tax an SD card that I’d be doing on a phone.
They are still a lot faster than normal SD cards. I’ve never seen any phone that works with SD Express cards, but there were a few that worked with UFS cards.
If you are a phone manufacturer you can either choose MicroSD cards which are the most common and the cheapest, MicroSD Express Cards which are more expensive but faster and backwards compatible or UFS which nobody has ever heard of.