A few years back we all marvelled at just how much storage you could have at your disposal when 1GB SD Cards came on the market. Never again would we need any more memory for our cameras, and indeed for our phones when they caught onto the trend and started utilising micro SD cards. And yet, today, we are easily filling 8GB, 16GB and even 32GB cards without a second thought. It seems like Moore’s Law doesn’t simply refer to technology’s rapid advancement, but also our own ever increasing need for such advancements.
So, do we actually need all this storage, or do we simply utilise it because we can? Is it the same old thing we see day in and day out with people always wanting to live just slightly above their means? A poor man may just want some food, but once he has regular food, he will want his house to be nicer. And then the house gets nicer and his desires are focussed elsewhere. Is this the same with our storage needs?
In some ways, it possibly is, but it is also somewhat dictated by the type of technology we have available to us. The easier it is to download movies onto our phones, the more storage we will suddenly need to store all of these. Likewise, with music and photographs – as technology makes them easier and more accessible, our needs (or more correctly, our desires) to store more will be vastly increased.
So, when it comes to buying SD cards, you need to make careful consideration into just how much space you will need. Whether you already have a memory card for your phone, camera, or any other piece of technology and are looking for extra storage, or whether you simply want to get one for the first time, the considerations are very much the same. A good rule of thumb is that if you are thinking something ‘should’ be enough, then it may well be worth you going for the next size up.
The reason for this is simple. Whatever space we are likely to need at present will almost certainly increase over time as the potential for our hardware grows. Therefore, whilst you may only need micro SD cards that store up to 8GB on your phone at the moment, the chances are that, as time goes on, new technological advancements will come along that mean you want to store far more. As you swap these cards into bigger and better pieces of technology, you will almost certainly need far more storage space to deal with this new scope of possibility, and if you buy a smaller storage card now, you will simply have to waste money buying a new one just a short way down the line.
So, when you are looking to buy storage for any device, don’t just think about the space you need now, think ahead and give yourself plenty of space to play with. After all, remember that just a few years ago we were happy with almost no space at all, so who knows just how much you might need in a very short space of time.