Why is external hardware limited by virtual sizes?

[FahmidChowdhury]

I'm one hell of a curious lad.

So, I have a 1GB SD card. All right...

Why is this limited anyway? I've seen ones with bigger sizes and they aren't actually... bigger. Physically.

The same applies to RAM. Mine's 4GB, but couldn't you just be a bit sneaky, change codes in, say, Powershell, and up it to about 2TB (if you were running Windows 10 Pro, but you're crazy if you run that)?

Just sneakily change the properties and up it ever so slightly (or not) to fit your demands, right? What stops you?!

[iomare · Accepted solution]

Hi,

The size is a standard set so that components from different manufacturers can be used. Now, the capacity is different. It also has to do with chip size and the density of fabrication of the chips. So older SD cards for example might be fabricated with 40nm technology and newer ones with 10nm technology which dramatically increases the possible capacity of the sd card (chip). 

Naturally this fabrication has a cost which lowers over time. There is also a commercial reason (having more product on the market) and being able to charge more or less.

In the past CPUs have been made where the dual core version had 2 cores disabled to be cheaper than the same quad core processor. This also happens with GPUs etc...

David