Theory crafting a system for 1000 simultaneous micro SD card ingests
16 comments
·March 14, 2025PaulKeeble
The physical interface itself is going to be a big deal, people are going to be just swapping cards constantly and you'll need multiple people just doing this. Status of read is a big part of this as well so some amount of custom LEDs and such for status of ingress will be required. What a horrible job being in a room with 100s of thousands of SD cards just feeding them into slots and then into an empty bin!
Its possible from a PCI-E bandwidth point of view but its going to require some seriously specialist USB interfaces. I am tempted by the same solution others suggest, smaller amounts per machine less expensive and extreme solutions into normal switches and then out across fibre.
What a crazy thing to be doing, the mad situations companies get themselves into when they should just have networked cameras and VPNs or at the very least distributed ingress machines!
snypher
Would be a straightforward job for a pick and place style robot, if you had cycle time to budget for it.
nullpoint420
I was not expecting that thread to go in that direction. At first my nerd brain kicked in and I started doing the PCIe napkin math - but then I got to the post asking "why?" and found myself asking the same question.
I am also a bit perplexed on why they'd need to ingest 1,000 micro-SD cards at once. If they are such a large org, why not investigate alternative solutions?
qingcharles
I saw that Beast Games used 1100 simultaneous cameras in the opening days to record every contestant, so I could see something wild like that, where you have 1000 GoPros out in the field all day.
Kirby64
> I am also a bit perplexed on why they'd need to ingest 1,000 micro-SD cards at once. If they are such a large org, why not investigate alternative solutions?
Action cameras use microSD cards as their main storage medium. You could connect them via WiFi on some models, but that would be painfully slow compared to dumping the SD cards directly.
kalleboo
One of the comments in the linked thread also suggested a fleet of dash cams which also sounds plausible, I could totally see some manager saying "we need to archive all the dash cam video for legal liability reasons!" and now someone is stuck with this job.
Kirby64
From the poster in a reply:
> we record hundreds of hours of footage a week onto hundreds of cameras a that all record onto micro sd card.
Dashcams don’t seem to fit this description. Seems like production film to me. As I mentioned in another post, it sounds like this is someone from MrBeast’s production crew.
nomel
When only reading the title, my first assumption was that it's a micro-SD card hardware validation test engineer trying to outsource their test station design.
RockRobotRock
"i can provide more details if needed but some things i am under an NDA so i may not be able to answer specifics"
LOL why are these people helping this guy for free?
jackvalentine
It’s an interesting problem, that’s why.
RockRobotRock
It is an interesting problem, but that annoyed me a bit because it's so brazen.
cedel2k1
Maybe because they like Mr. Beast?
tristor
There is only one scenario that remotely makes sense for why this would be even necessary and that's fleet vehicles with dash cams. Even in that case, there are way better approaches because there are dashcams designed for fleet usage that upload to central servers over WiFi.
Basically this scenario only makes sense if there is something horribly wrong elsewhere to the point that the only reasonable thing to do is fix things to involve a network, not to try to figure out how to scale a sneakernet operation.
Kirby64
> There is only one scenario that remotely makes sense for why this would be even necessary and that's fleet vehicles with dash cams.
Or, 1000 action cameras (GoPro or equivalent). I only know of one outfit that currently does that, and they definitely would need to dump all 1000 at once to keep production rolling.
I’m pretty sure, although not certain, this is an employee of MrBeast or an affiliate.
qingcharles
Agreed. They've stated they used 1100 cams for Beast Games simultaneously.
I know it sounds boring, but did anyone suggest a second computer if this is an actual problem and not just a for fun challenge?