I had one in my old 2017 Intel MBA and had no issues. Occasionally it would unmount itself but it was easy to get it to remount again. It did not cause any issues with the wearing out the pins and I had it in there 24/7 for probably 3-4 years.
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Using 1TB SDXC Card as permanent storage ?
- Thread starter anjanesh
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Update to my microSD experiment
I started getting weird read errors in January 2025 and moved my music library back to internal SSD drive. I don't know if it's the SD slot or the microSD card, but I consider the experiment failure.
I have about 866 GB internal storage free after cleaning up a lot of files, so I'm good for now.
A couple notes about using an SD card for "permanent storage":
SD cards are available in really fast varieties (UHS-II or even SD Express,) in really high capacities (up to 2 TB now,) and they're available in "high wear tolerance" (made for constant rewriting,) but I don't know of any that are even two of the three. The "high wear tolerance" are made for things like security cameras where they constantly write over itself - but those are made for "minimum viable speed". The ones made for speed tend to be not made for constant use, and lower-capacity. The highest capacity tend to be neither "high wear" nor fast.
I have a 2 TB microSD card. It gets about 170 MB/s read, 120 MB/s write. It's not rated for constant use.
I have a 1 TB "high endurance" microSD card. It gets about 90 MB/s read, 30 MB/s write.
I have an SD Express card that can sustain over 700 MB/s read, 400 MB/s write. It's only 256 GB, not rated for high-wear (its speed slows down significantly after only 1x capacity use, requiring a reformat to regain full speed, and it requires special reader, using the built-in SD readers on Macs it only operates at about 100 MB/s.)
My best UHS-II card sustains about 300 MB/s read and write, but it's only 32 GB. (And annoyingly, my Macs built-in UHS-II readers don't have it work at full speed. I have to use an external reader to get full speed. It does get above UHS-I speed, though.)
(UHS-I is now the "base SD card" interface, in theory capable of up to about 100 MB/s. UHS-II has the extra row of pins, and is capable of up to a little over 300 MB/s. SD Express uses the same set of pins, but is basically NVMe/PCIe connection, up to about 4 GB/s. Of course, those are just the interface maximums, actual card speeds are almost universally far lower. Recent Macs with SD card slots are UHS-II. The standards are backward-compatible, a UHS-I reader will read an SD Express card, just at much lower speeds.)
Lastly, the SD interface isn't the most reliable - I frequently have SD cards in my Macs' internal readers glitch and dismount without warning. Usually they remount immediately, and it is rare; but that's something you definitely don't want in a boot drive.
Side note - Apple doesn't support the full security measures macOS supports on external storage. If you want to use an encrypted boot drive with full possible security on an Apple Silicon or Intel with T2, it must be the internal drive.
SD cards are available in really fast varieties (UHS-II or even SD Express,) in really high capacities (up to 2 TB now,) and they're available in "high wear tolerance" (made for constant rewriting,) but I don't know of any that are even two of the three. The "high wear tolerance" are made for things like security cameras where they constantly write over itself - but those are made for "minimum viable speed". The ones made for speed tend to be not made for constant use, and lower-capacity. The highest capacity tend to be neither "high wear" nor fast.
I have a 2 TB microSD card. It gets about 170 MB/s read, 120 MB/s write. It's not rated for constant use.
I have a 1 TB "high endurance" microSD card. It gets about 90 MB/s read, 30 MB/s write.
I have an SD Express card that can sustain over 700 MB/s read, 400 MB/s write. It's only 256 GB, not rated for high-wear (its speed slows down significantly after only 1x capacity use, requiring a reformat to regain full speed, and it requires special reader, using the built-in SD readers on Macs it only operates at about 100 MB/s.)
My best UHS-II card sustains about 300 MB/s read and write, but it's only 32 GB. (And annoyingly, my Macs built-in UHS-II readers don't have it work at full speed. I have to use an external reader to get full speed. It does get above UHS-I speed, though.)
(UHS-I is now the "base SD card" interface, in theory capable of up to about 100 MB/s. UHS-II has the extra row of pins, and is capable of up to a little over 300 MB/s. SD Express uses the same set of pins, but is basically NVMe/PCIe connection, up to about 4 GB/s. Of course, those are just the interface maximums, actual card speeds are almost universally far lower. Recent Macs with SD card slots are UHS-II. The standards are backward-compatible, a UHS-I reader will read an SD Express card, just at much lower speeds.)
Lastly, the SD interface isn't the most reliable - I frequently have SD cards in my Macs' internal readers glitch and dismount without warning. Usually they remount immediately, and it is rare; but that's something you definitely don't want in a boot drive.
Side note - Apple doesn't support the full security measures macOS supports on external storage. If you want to use an encrypted boot drive with full possible security on an Apple Silicon or Intel with T2, it must be the internal drive.
This 1TB SDXC Card doesn't seem to be that reliable is it (when it comes to data loss due to wear and tear) ?
I have no use for storing music or videos but my iPhone's photo album gets synced to my MacBook. My main requirements are for software code and MySQL and Postgres databases for which I though storing them on a 1TB SDXC would be reliable.
I am now thinking of investing heavily in an M5 PRO @ 128GB RAM and 8TB SSD say next year. This is going to take a toll on payments but I need this to run ollama kinda of stuff locally.
I have no use for storing music or videos but my iPhone's photo album gets synced to my MacBook. My main requirements are for software code and MySQL and Postgres databases for which I though storing them on a 1TB SDXC would be reliable.
I am now thinking of investing heavily in an M5 PRO @ 128GB RAM and 8TB SSD say next year. This is going to take a toll on payments but I need this to run ollama kinda of stuff locally.