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I need help on designing a handheld storage based on micro SD Card + QSPI interface + Wi-Fi data transfer

HKPhysicist

Hello Fellow Engineers and Experts,

I want to design a device to replace the super expensive iCloud or Gcloud digital monopoly.  So you can download your beloved digital contents from your phone any time through Wi-Fi.  Then, stack them up one by one infinitely under your desk.

It is my basic components:

  1. micro SD Card
  2. SQPI interface and controller
  3. a MCU with SQPI peripheral, with SoC Wi-Fi
  4. a built-in Li+ battery
  5. Li+ charger chip
  6. any more
  7. There are already many USB storages for this purpose.  So this method will not be my goal.

Please share your opinions.  Perhaps, we can work together.  Wink

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  • 0

    You could use a Pi for this, I think that covers many of the listed items, at least for a proof of concept.

    You may find issues such as Bluetooth throughout bottleneck, or micro SD card reliability. You may want to back up on more than one device (e.g. plug more than one USB to microSD adapter into the Pi. Anyway I think it will quickly allow you to evaluate things and fine-tune your requirements.

    The current way people have local storage without USB connected, is to use a NAS (which usually doesn't primarily rely on microSD), and doesn't require Bluetooth.

  • 0 in reply to shabaz

    Thanks for your opinions.

    Yes, people use local NAS nowadays.

    I hope that my new device will be a portable on-the-go device.  The user just take his phone, my device and a large stack of SD Cards.

    When he returns home or office, he will store his digital data, picture or video to NAS.

    Also, BLE is quite a bottleneck.  WiFi transfer between my device and phone is also possible.

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  • 0 in reply to shabaz

    Thanks for your opinions.

    Yes, people use local NAS nowadays.

    I hope that my new device will be a portable on-the-go device.  The user just take his phone, my device and a large stack of SD Cards.

    When he returns home or office, he will store his digital data, picture or video to NAS.

    Also, BLE is quite a bottleneck.  WiFi transfer between my device and phone is also possible.

Children
  • 0 in reply to shabaz

    Cloud storage is insecure.  They scan your contents.  If Google or apple find something that they do not like, they will lock your account for as long as they want.

  • 0 in reply to BigG

    A couple of interesting USB drives (on top of portable CDROM drive that doesn't work with mobile devices : (

    The foreground one is "EX400U Survivor", which would be overkill if connected to an iPhone, but is very useful with a laptop, because it is speedy.. it's possible to run software directly from it (40 Gbit/sec connection!). 

    The blue one might have made more sense pre-cloud era.. supposedly ultra secure. However Cloud has the advantage of not being so easy to lose, and still ultra-secure. 

    image

  • 0 in reply to HKPhysicist

    iPhone users are a more complex demographic I reckon. I think more than anything, a big subset of them prefer simplicity, hence cloud is probably attractive, because it is one less thing to manage, carry, keep safe, upgrade, charge, and so on. 

  • 0 in reply to HKPhysicist

    An AI comparison... basically a cut n paste from Google. I can vouch about the thermal dissipation issue. I updated an old laptop with Linux using a USB 3 memory stick. It got rather hot!

    So essentially USB Drives are faster. Maybe worth looking at USB host drivers combined with wireless.

    ---

    The performance gap between USB flash drives and microSD cards comes down to physical space, which dictates the complexity of their internal architecture. While a standard microSD card maxes out around 10–12 MB/s if it uses older Class 10 protocols, premium microSD cards can go faster. However, high-speed USB sticks sustain blistering speeds much more easily due to several structural advantages. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
    1. Multi-Channel Flash Controllers
    • USB Drives: The larger housing allows for complex, multi-channel memory controllers. Similar to a solid-state drive (SSD), these controllers can write data across multiple flash memory chips simultaneously (striping data), multiplying the write speed. [1, 2, 3]
    • microSD Cards: A microSD card contains a single, microscopic controller die squeezed next to the flash storage. It generally operates on a single channel, meaning it must process data sequentially rather than in parallel. [1, 2]
    2. High-Speed Bus Interfaces
    • USB Protocol: Modern flash drives use the USB 3.0 (or newer) standard, providing a massive interface bandwidth bottleneck of 5 Gbps (~500 MB/s) to 10 Gbps. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
    • SD Bus Protocol: Standard microSD cards rely on the UHS-I bus interface, which tops out theoretically at 104 MB/s. The cheaper, basic cards max out much lower (around 12.5 MB/s to 25 MB/s) because of hardware limitations. [1, 2, 3]
    3. Thermal Dissipation
    • USB Drives: Writing data at 130 MB/s generates substantial heat. The larger plastic or metal body of a USB drive acts as a heatsink to dissipate thermal energy, preventing the drive from thermal throttling. [1, 2]
    • microSD Cards: Squeezing heavy data transfers into a tiny fingernail-sized plastic form factor traps heat. Slower speeds prevent the card from melting or corrupting your data. [1, 2, 3, 4]
  • 0 in reply to HKPhysicist
    HKPhysicist said:
    They pay big money every month to icloud for storage.

    I am sure there will be market for iPhone users (or even Android users who have support for Magsafe accessories ) who wants a high class completely wireless storage setup. The current Magsafe SSD model still use USB C port for data transmission.

  • 0 in reply to BigG

    iPhone users are very rich.

    Their phones do not have SD Card slots.  They pay big money every month to icloud for storage.

    USB sticks might be regarded as low class by them.  So,a separate high class portable storage fit their taste.  They take video along their trips and my device inside their pocket or bag stores their video through wifi.

    Very nice scenario.  Kissing closed eyes

  • 0 in reply to HKPhysicist

    What's wrong with a USB stick. Less likely to get damaged, lost and it's at a similar price to SD card... www.sandisk.com/.../sandisk-ultra-usb-3-0