Xiaomi is against microSD cards in phones .. Here's why!

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Lord Nemesis said:
Sorry, not believable and even if they state that is the case, its nothing short of utter nonsense. I don't see either Apple of Xiaomi discontinuing their cloud storage options because of much bigger whiplash they had on account of security, reliability, performance and accessibility.

Of course, its their product and its their prerogative what they support and what they don't, but one has to be naive to believe the rubbish they are throwing for not having SD card support.

They simply stand to gain by not having SD card support by forcing users to go for their costlier versions with more storage and they can also push their cloud storage options. Do you remember how Apple after they release their cloud storage option, deliberately reduced the amount of internal storage available to the user through artificial means.
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It is - Try using one, esp a large capacity one in a sustained R/W use for a few months
To your second point, yes, they do stand to gain by not having exp storage but thats the nature of the beast - Have an entry level device at lower margins and derive more than incremental profits from step up versions

As for deliberate reduction of internal storage, don't think I have seen anything on it - Let me googlesh it
 
superczar said:
The one I faced problems on was the one running my home automation software - All the logging from the temp/humidity/motion/power sensors took its toll
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I consider no one a noob, just personal experiences make them believe what they have read. With just one scenario it is tough to generalize isn't it? That particular card might be a dud? If you have lost a few of them in short span then it would be right to generalize.

I have implemented a temp/humidity monitor ( 3 of them) for a friend who has a small time mushroom culture farm. It has been almost a year and they are still running fine, of course on a battery backup just in case of power failures.

Yes agreed these solid state devices are prone to failure with limited write cycles, but having them on a phone doesn't cause it fail and malfunction on every other phone the company manufactures. Xiaomi was not complaining about the sd card but rather about fake cards which causes the issues to creep in.
 
As I said earlier, I have had a 64GB Micro SDHC card in my Galaxy S3 since 3 years. Part of this card was used for content like videos and e-books which was only read from. But I also often used my phone as a wireless storage drive. I regularly transferred files or deleted from it using Air Droid. After I upgraded to Vibe Z2 Pro which does not have sd card slot in the version available in India, I put the card into my tablet and its still going strong. I have several other Micro SDHC cards as well all of which have been used fairly well and still going strong.

Only a couple of no name bundled cards have failed on me so far and they failed fast. SD cards may not be reliable enough to run an OS from or for heavy I/O, but for the typical phone usage, they are not so bad. They are at least better than cloud storage options for most people
 
Ranjith Sai said:
I consider no one a noob, just personal experiences make them believe what they have read. With just one scenario it is tough to generalize isn't it? That particular card might be a dud? If you have lost a few of them in short span then it would be right to generalize.
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Possibly, but what if

a) There are enough and more stories of SD card corruption for scenarios with regular r/w if you just do a search
b) Most customized embedded OS distributions do recommend moving the OS (other than boot record ) to a USB drive (which is far less prone to corruption)
c) If not the above, most users suggest moving at least the sustained write folders (like /var/log) to a RAM drive so that writes can be minimized

Now with all the above anecdotal evidence , you get 2 cases of card corruption, you are bound to deduce that there is indeed a significant probability of card corruption in a production environment and in fact hypothesize that people who have long production runs without a failure are in fact the lucky ones who somehow got a card from a good batch
 
Regarding the above comments.
Everything including the mobile phone are prone to fail at some time or the other. It is true for all mechanical or electrical products that exist today which includes sd cards too. Saying that they shouldn't be used because they fail ultimately is not the right way to see these products.

Secondly, The reasoning that that the company like xiomi or apple would have to answer or have bad reputation because of sd card failure is absolutely wrong until or unless that have been provided by them or a problem in there software might have caused the problem.

Think yourself, would you blame apple for your sandisk card going kaput?

Using sd cards is not about failure at the first place. It is about the freedom or option for additional storage in case anyone needs it at less price. It's completely up to the user to decide. The company have nothing to do in that. There are people who dont need more than 4gb. But at the same time, the ones who are having the latest mobile with fullhd or even 4k capable camera would definitely need the additional space as even 16GB is gets used in less than 30mins.

If anybody is extremely worried about failures then he must take backups at regular intervals. As everything fails ultimately.
Your hardisk, ssd, sdcards, pendrives, cds, dvds etc, all will fail. Take backups.
 
phone's internal memory, pendrive, memory card , ssd are all based on nand type so they all are prone to failure

if memory card are prone to failure so is internal memory
we can easily replace memory cards but it will be hard to buy a new phone ( iphone 6 128GB problem )

and no one buy a phone to perform 24x7 write ops in it, their is no swap or page file in stock android. Copied our favourite songs, wallpapers , movies to memory card and we are good to go, and then we will only use it mostly for reads ( movie watching, music listening etc ) and very few writes ( new songs, photo and video clicking etc ).

my first smart phone, karbon a5 had dual sim slot, replacable battery, memory card slot too, and all this under 3.5" screen so under 5" screen we have plenty of space left, so space issue is nonsense

and performance issue due to sdcard , does mi3 beats s5 in performance with a huge margin ? no , so it is also a lame statement just to support their marketing of not providing memory card slot.

so its just marketing statement, they don't give micro sd support because they want customer to spend more to get more storage
 
Download torrents 24/7 on my 32gb class 10 SD card, to avoid writes on my SSD. Been more than a year, no problem yet. Wonder whats all the fuss about. Sure maybe someone got a lemon.
 
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superczar said:
Nopes, In any case, the R/W from a torrent will probably be insignificant compared to the # of R/Ws made by the OS
The point being that expandable memory will work fine under light write cycles
However, if the OS (say android) uses the storage for activities like say indexing, the life /reliability of the storage will be subject to too many variables

For any large scale manufacturer, variability will be a pain area since it will shoot up the service/return rates


You guys take me for a n00b :)
If using for XBMC or similar, the SD card will run well because Rpi distros for XBMC are optimized for reduced writes
I have one Rpi running as a file server with Debian optimized for a SD card (storage on USB) and another running XBMC - These two will in all likelihood never develop a problem within the finite life of such hardware
The one I faced problems on was the one running my home automation software - All the logging from the temp/humidity/motion/power sensors took its toll

In any case, the point being that it is hard for a company to guess what usage will the end user put it to - With a RPI, the target crowd is the enthusiast crowd and they will try figure out a solution rather than claiming warranty/cryiing foul about poor hardware from the RPI foundation
A regular consumer oriented device (read phone) on the other hand cannot take these chances[DOUBLEPOST=1430993941][/DOUBLEPOST]
Ha, misinterpeted your post and spoke too soon
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I asked you the question regarding torrents on RPi since I just started using the RPi for torrent downloading. So I was checking from experienced users if it is okay to download torrents to SD card or will the card fail quickly because of it.

From your comment, it looks like running torrent from SD card isn't too much of an issue!

About RAM disk, are you running the whole OS from RAM disk?
 
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9146/the-samsung-galaxy-s6-and-s6-edge-review/7

Even mid-range to flagships offer 100MBps+ read speeds and the current typical Class 6 or Class 10 dont offer more than 20-40 MBps IINM. These cost Rs.500-Rs.600 for 16GB and bought by majority of the users. Why do you want to spoil user experience?

Want a higher capacity phone then buy one with an expandable storage or get phones with 32GB/64GB storage. Apple is selling phones with 8GB storage and no SD card slot. You will get low storage space of ~5GB and there are people who still feel its sufficient and buy it.

I am not agreeing to all of his points but I do agree that if you have a fast internal storage then its better to not allow user to add much lower speed ones and spoil the user exp. Xiaomi/OPO etc... charge Rs.3k-4k for 16GB->64GB jump which is not too much to ask for the good quality storage you get. Apple charges 9k for the same jump in storage.

Google had a similar explanation for not having microSD support from GNex onwards. It does affect User exp for most users.

P.S: I have a Moto G 1st gen 16GB (non-expandable) Paid 1.5k more for this version as I knew 8GB is not enough for me. People are mature enough to know how much storage they require.
 
logistopath said:
Unfortunately, not true. Most people still do not know why a 16GB card does not really add up to 16GB in the true sense. And, very few know how much space the OS is gonna occupy or how much is the real usable memory capacity.
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I feel most of the younger crowd who have already owned a smartphone would know by now that 8GB is actually ~4-5GB of usable space and 16GB is ~11-12GB of usable space. That is the target audience of Xiaomi anyways with their flash sale/online sale model (For most of their phone and ~90%+ of their sales)
 
hotshot05 said:
I asked you the question regarding torrents on RPi since I just started using the RPi for torrent downloading. So I was checking from experienced users if it is okay to download torrents to SD card or will the card fail quickly because of it.

From your comment, it looks like running torrent from SD card isn't too much of an issue!

About RAM disk, are you running the whole OS from RAM disk?
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Better mount an usb pen drive..
 
hotshot05 said:
Any particular advantage that a pen drive has over an SD card?
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lower chances of corruption (supposedly)
Your best bet is however to use a regular USB hard drive plugged into the RPI for storage
RPI handles large storage devices (ideally formatted ext4) very well
I moved from a small server running NAS4Free handling ~7TB to a Debian RPI handling the same and running Samba, NFS and torrents as the primary file server for my home- Significantly more efficient with minimal performance drop

About RAM disk, are you running the whole OS from RAM disk?
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No, its only certain locations that get to see a lot of R/W and retain only non critical information (/tmp, /var/log etc)
If you run the whole OS from the RAM disk, all of your settings would be lost when you reboot


DarkAngel said:
Even mid-range to flagships offer 100MBps+ read speeds and the current typical Class 6 or Class 10 dont offer more than 20-40 MBps IINM. These cost Rs.500-Rs.600 for 16GB and bought by majority of the users. Why do you want to spoil user experience?
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+1 to that,
slow R/W speeds + chances of corruption
Add to it the fact that a poor user experience would translate into bad word of mouth (and not really a deep dive into the underlying causes) - Apple anyway has always been about a standardised hardware platform to deliver a reasonably seamless user experience and they have had immense success following that script
Xiaomi is trying to broadly emulate the same albeit at the fraction of the prices
In any case, Xiaomi hardware is almost at bill-of-materials cost so I am not even sure why folks are complaining about Mi trying to fleece their user base by charging more incremental cost (for extra NAND memory i.e. expensive ) vs a user plugged class iv or 6 micro SD (slower and cheaper)
 
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i have been downloading torrents on 8gb card(Transcend) for more than 5 years now that too 24/7 and it is yet to fail.
 
It is just limiting consumer customization. Which is bad and conniving. That is why Apple is a bad company. And their products are eco-system locked. They force a certain paradigm and nomenclature on their consumers.
 
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Jambumali said:
I do that!



Removes an additional component - the reader/writer - from the equation. That's my reason for going for el cheapo pen drive.
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Pen drive and SD card are same. In pen drive, the "reader/writer" IC is present inside which is not visible to the eye because of the cover.
 
asingh said:
It is just limiting consumer customization. Which is bad and conniving. That is why Apple is a bad company. And their products are eco-system locked. They force a certain paradigm and nomenclature on their consumers.
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... and that's why they are so successful ... ?
Perhaps we should sit back and take a look at how the majority uses the system. And then pass judgement over what customer needs and wants and what he will pay for. There has to be a reason that Apple's ecosystem is working so successfully till now (even though Android has quite matured and caught up in user friendliness and technology, and most phones also allow SD cards)
 
Party Monger said:
Download torrents 24/7 on my 32gb class 10 SD card, to avoid writes on my SSD. Been more than a year, no problem yet. Wonder whats all the fuss about. Sure maybe someone got a lemon.
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+1 I download all my torrents on my phone too! I own several micro sd cards (3*32gb, 2*64gb) and the one I download on mostly is the oldest 32gb one, a class 4 card. Have been using it well over 2 years now and have had absolutely no problems.
 
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