I imagine myself being to get so much use out of SD cards, only to see them end up sitting around in a drawer for years at a time. But the world hasn’t fully abandoned memory cards, and there are still various ways to have fun with them.
6
Get Back into Photography
If you ever pick up a dedicated camera, you’re going to need an SD card (unless you’re plopping down a couple thousand for the Sigma BF). Most cameras outsource storage to a memory card and don’t come with any accessible internal memory at all!
Unlike phones (those relatively few that still take a microSD card), cameras want a full-sized SD card, but virtually all microSD cards come with full-sized SD card adapters. So while I’m going to exclusively refer to full-sized cards from here on out, know that microSD cards inside an adapter will also work most of the time.
5
Install a Security Camera
Security cameras have become increasingly common, and you no longer need to sign up for an expensive contract or set aside a special room for a monitoring system in order to record what happens around your home. You can get cameras that store data on an SD card and are accessible from a mobile app. Many security cameras prefer microSD cards nowadays, but some will take a full-sized SD card.
These cameras are a smart investment, because they don’t come with the privacy issues that stem from automatically uploading your recordings to someone else’s servers, allowing that information to be harvested for marketing, AI training, or unconsensual use by law enforcement.
4
Start a Raspberry Pi Project
Single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi are the perfect brains for many DIY projects. They’re tiny, cheap, and absolutely sip power. But they often don’t come with any sort of storage. The least intrusive option is often to install an operating system to an SD card and use that as the brains for your PC.
There are no shortage of weekend DIY Raspberry Pi projects. They can run Nextcloud to power your own personal cloud storage. They can run a Plex media server or a smart home platform like Home Assistant. You’ll often want to add an external SSD to store your files on, but if you’re working on a large 512GB or 1TB SD card, maybe not.
3
Make Tiny Backups of Your Files
Before cloud storage and automatic syncing, it was considered good computer hygiene to plug in some form of external storage to your PC and make regular backups of your data. That practice is still viable today. An SD card may not be the most long-lasting type of external storage nor offer the fastest backup speeds, but an extra local backup is still better than no backup, as long as you aren’t storing the only copy of a file you have on a single card.
As a good rule of thumb, it’s handy to have at least three copies of your files spread across two places, with one copy somewhere outside your phone. That said, SD cards are small enough to carry around in your wallet. If you have to leave home in a hurry, you already have one backup with you. Just make sure the data is encrypted or not sensitive to begin with.
2
Expand the Storage on Your Laptop
Some laptops can be opened up, allowing you to replace most of the components you care about like the SSD and RAM. Others are soldered shut. On a laptop with an SD slot, an SD card can be a way to expand your storage without needing to deal with replacing your SSD or trading in your PC for a model with more storage.
1
Have a Shareable Offline Family Library
I have a large collection of DRM-free eBooks, comics, and music on my phone. There is no nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on here—this is all media that I’ve legally purchased. There are enough places selling DRM-free ebooks and comics alike to quickly build up a collection.
I’ve thought about the hassles of building a home media server to share these files with my family, but honestly, an SD card is much cheaper and easier. We already have them lying around. Is it the same experience? No. Does it get the files from A to B? Yes.
I like fun tech projects as much as the next geek, but I’m also a dad on a budget. SD cards are the kind of thing we naturally accumulate over the course of our time as tech nerds, and it’s great to give those memory cards a second life. Often enough, the best tech solution isn’t something to be found online, but something you already have sitting around in a drawer. And if you do feel inspired to go out and buy one, an SD card from a reputable brand is a relatively cheap investment that’s sure to last you for years to come.