Slashdot Mirror
Flash Memory And Its future
NETHED writes "C|NET News is running an article about Flash Memory's future. Here is a How Stuff Works link about Flash memory. An interesting read especially considering how small these things are currently. Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?"
volkswagons are small, right?
Blarf.
Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?"
less than 6 inches?
"Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?"
LoC \ cm^2 ?
Make it small enough to power a gameboy sized device and run GLQuake and then get back to me. I've already lost my current cellphone in my pocket. Anyone ever seen that show "Trigger Happy TV" with the guy with the overly ginormous phone? THATS the phone for me.
"Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?" "
Yeah, and the FLAMEBAIT worked like a charm Mr. Editor.
*Insert umpteenth penis joke here*
it's how you use it!
You know, after I pushed submit to the story, I wondered, "will this get posted because it is an interesting read" or "will this get posted because the Slashdot crowd wants to talk about thier penis size". 6 comments down, and I've got my answer.
--sig fault--
Oh, howstuffworks.com, not The Way Things Work. I was looking forward to a good explanation involving mammoths.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Next on Ask Slashdot: How small is your 'Library of Congress'? Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge.
We wish not to consort with the likes of you and your ilk.
Until all these companies find a standard that they can agree upon, we'll never see the supposed benefits of the advances in this technology. Just look at compact flash/memory stick/ MMC/SD/ whatever else is out there to plug into your camera/phone/palm. There's too many for any of them to have any real universal utility.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
I used to like SmartMedia. Until I folded one in a backpack accidentally. It's too thin. The SD chits are almost too small for convenient use. There's a useful size for media, and not everyone can deal with fragile postage-stamp parts that need to get handled occasionally.
I like CompactFlash. It's virtually indestructable, big enough to see on a messy desk, small enough to fit in a PDA nicely, and just the right form-factor for carrying a few with me on a digicam expedition. Replacing a flash card with a hard drive in the same form factor and bus connection, now that's cool. There are multiple vendors, each trying to push the boundaries of access speed and capacity. I know the addressing space is nearing a limit.
And principally, it's not peppered with pounds of private proprietary protected patented perversions.
[
What, like "1/4 fingernail sized"?
-twb
128mb is now officially small. 256mb is now minimum I'll buy in CF.
I freaking LOVE that guy.
I *had* to change my ringtone back to the default nokia tone after viewing, much to the annoyance of those around me....
Is flash memory the same stuff they'd use to allow you to save your games in old console cartridges such as Zelda for the NES or NBA Jam (TE) for Sega Gamegear etc in the same way the article mentions "memory cards for video game consoles"?
Billions of dollars ride on the challenge. Industry estimates forecast that flash revenue will hit $13 billion this year, up from $7.7 billion in 2002, according to Jim Handy, a memory services executive with Semico Research. By 2007, flash memory is expected to be a $43 billion industry.
Despite the limitations of Flash memory that the article states, it appears that there will still be room for a lot of money in this industry. Given the current amount of products with flash memory, I doubt we'll see a big shift to a new technology. I'm guessing it'll be more like DVD-Rs. CDrs are still good, but in a few years I'm sure we'll all be burning on DVDs.
--------
Free your mind.
The flash mentioned here is NOR flash. The rising star in Flash is NAND flash which is cheaper (30c per MB), more dense (256MB in a single chip) and is faster for file system usage than NOR flash. NAND is used in SmartMedia etc storage devices and is supported in Linux by journaling file systems (JFFS2 and YAFFS).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well the article does seem to be slighly out of date since CF is now available in 4 GIG sizes.
Pretty amazing, and when i think about it probably the best contender to actually replacing the floppy standard.
Hard to belive that a few years ago the huge and easily destructible jaz disks were the alternative at 1 gig and slooooow speeds.
What the article didn't mention is the write times which are also improving, but cost slighly more. And lastly the newbigg cards require devices (ie cameras) that support a 32 bit file system, most consumer digi cams can't write on those cards (2 gig and up although one of lareger ones is still 16 bit)
Maciek
I don't spell check and i can't type
Why not use a small 20GB 1.8" hard-drive like the iPod does? I have a 3 Megapixel digital camera that uses a 64 MegaByte flash memory card. I'd much rather have a 20GB hard-drive in the the thing even if it did add 2 oz. of weight. Not an option for cell phones though obviously.
Mine...
oh... hmm wait... scratch that... arg! I mean nevermind..
Definitely CompactFlash for me, ever since I accidentally put one in the washing machine on hot and it not only survived but didn't seem to be damaged in any way.
It's small enough to fit into cameras and the like, yet big enough to be a "sensible size". It's only common sense that a slightly larger form factor will (in the future) allow greater storage than the smaller ones, at a lower price, with higher reliability.
Furthermore, it doesn't seem to be as bogged down with patents as the other formats, different companies can make CompactFlash cards, while things like the Sony Memory Stick are made by... well... Sony.
Oh, and lastly, unlike Secure-Digital and another one which I've temporarily forgotten the name of - it has no built-in Digital Rights Management - at least not that I've come across. I avoid anything to do with DRM on principle, even if I'm missing out by doing so.
Imagine a Library of Congress in your pocket without the backache.
It's not the size that matters! ;)
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
IEEE Spectrum also has an article dealing with the future flash technologies in the current issue
I recently bought a Fuji FinePix 2650 digital camera, which uses xD picture cards. They are the smallest standard on the market (i think). Here's a picture of all the different types... xD is on the right. Its small, but unlike smartmedia it is not thin. Its rigid and feels durable. I think capacities can scale up to 1GB with the architecture. The only drawback is that the standard was created by Fuji and Olympus, and I don't know if it will be offered by other manufacturers.
"Maciek
I don't spell check and i can't type"
Congradulations! You're hired, you start work on Monday.
I would say that the application will dictate the size needed. For mp3s you will need larger sized flash memory (with this I went with a 20Gb Hard Drive mp3 play because all the flash memory ones were to small). With a PDA that is used only as an organizer, you can get away with a cheaper smaller one. (Here I have only 32Mb total storage on my pda, but I also use it for a bit more then just an organizer, I also have a map, ebooks on it[see below] and internet applications on it[web, email and aim] ). For an ebook reader you probably can get way with 8Mb (I use my palm pilot for my ebook reader, but still prefer a paper book much better then an ebook, The only books I have are books that I don't read as a book but are there for reference, and use only 5Mb) So I would say the function will dictate what size will be needed.
If your equipment is small enough...
You start a war to compensate...
AMD has a nice flash presentation on how conventional, MLC, and Mirrorbit flash works. It's actually an presentation for their MirrorBit flash technology, but it has a good description of the basics.
Currently Flash memory in CompactFlash Form-Factor is available up to 4 GB. The article discusses the future of flash memory mainly in regards to Cell Phones. If we can easily fit 4 GB of flash RAM into a cell phone today, and can keep miniaturizing flash technology until at least 2005, then what is the problem? Cell phones will be limited to 12 GB of flash RAM? That's 3,000 4MB MP3s, or at least 24 full-length movies at a cell phone-ish resolution (say 320x240 pixels by 2005).
One thing of interest is that for decades both the storage capacity of computers has grown along with the amount of information we need to store. However we are reaching the threshold where the amount of information we need to store will plateau. A perfect example is audio files. We are now storing audio data at a high enough quality that any additional improvement will not be discernable by a person with normal hearing. Thus in the future the storage required for a typical song will not be any larger. On the contrary, assuming that compression algorithms keep advancing, we may actually need less storage in the future for audio data. We will eventually see video reach a similar plateau, where a high enough resolution will be achieved to satisfy even the most devoted technophiles.
Finally, all aspects of networking are improving (wireless, broadband home internet access, etc). The greater the bandwidth and connectivity, the less information required to be cached on the device ahead of time. Think about it - the carriers would much rather you have a cell phone with limited storage capacity if it means you have to consume more bandwidth accessing information from the network.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
If the megs to square cm ratio for flash is on par with current (or even yesteryear) hard drive platter megs to square cm ratio, then its great.
Hard drives will eventually reach a limit due to the laws of physics, and I think flash is a much better infrastructure than hard drives. In other words, I believe that a 3.5" HD which has reached the limits of the laws of physics will have much less capacity than a block of flash with the same cubic cm (reaching the limits of the laws of physics).
Is it anything like this flash?
I happen to find Flash Memory handy to make backups - am I the only one here? They're better than floppies, CD-RWs, CD-Rs and zip disks. They're quick, convienient, reliable, and reuseable.
I write a lot of documents and I find using a flash key chain drive practical. I pop the drive in at school and upload the documents via USB to the keychain drive. I do the same at home to have mulitple backups. I'm paranoid - but - I also haven't lost anything.
I don't know about failure rates on these things but I have enough backups not to worry.
Well, personally I could care less if flash dissapears. Why is that? Because the ONLY way it can is if something better comes along. Flash is far too important, not only because it makes it convenient to store pics from our digital cams but also because of the lower level applications. Most importantly program memory in microcontrollers and configuration memories for FPGAs etc. Without that you could kiss the idea of updating firmware in your router/MP3 player/camera or whatever else goodbye.
"Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?""
We... don't like to talk about it. Oh... oh you mean the memory thing...
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
There are already a couple of devices around right now that can read most memory card formats (like SD and CF) and copy them to a small HD.
I think a really great product would be at attachment for the iPod to transfer CF card contents onto the iPod - or better yet, let me hook up a camera with a firewire connection and transfer pictures over to the iPod HD just like iPhoto on a Mac would.
Even though the iPod life is not great, it would be fine for several dumps of a 512mb CF card...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Let's talk about something that really matters. My ancestors were forced into slavery and spent a lifetime tilling the soil and working for the white man. My enslaved ancestors and brothers spent a lifetime of work without pay all for the profit of the white man. It is about time that we, the African-Americans, that built this country, receive reparations for our hard work. The government, businesses, and the white man owe us trillions of dollars in unpaid reparations..."
A perfect example of why exclusive rights (read: copyright) should die with the person. Since Mickey's copyright is and will be held by (multiple) generations of descendents, shouldn't the right to compensation for a great (x2?) grandfather's work be held by some random black guy in front of a computer?
A lesson in today's politics. Reminds me a little of the "breaking windows is good for the economy because it creates jobs" philosophy.
the flame war that you're trying to start?
So I guess what you are trying to say is that Bush and you lack. At least Bush is getting some satisfaction.
Make it small enough to power a gameboy sized device and run GLQuake and then get back to me.
A proof of concept (2 fps) port of Quake has been ported to Game Park's GP32 handheld. The author claims that integerization of the arithmetic would bring it up to full frame rate.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Flash memory will not be useful until it can store 100 terabytes per square inch. Only then can you store 10 libraries of congress in your wristwatch.
I have an SD (Secure Digital) card and it's just a bit bigger than a dime! They currently go up to 256, and will probably get even more space crammed into them... but if they actually get any smaller? Has anyone seen my hard drive? I think it fell into the couch...
I noticed in the article it mentioned:
"So why don't we just use Flash memory for everything? Because the cost per megabyte for a hard disk is drastically cheaper, and the capacity is substantially more. You can buy a 40-gigabyte (40,000-MB) hard drive for less than $200, while a 192-MB CompactFlash card will generally cost you more. "
Notice how they make no mention of long term use, which would seem to support that you can rewrite flash memory to your heart's content, but I've heard otherwise. I've been told that the FM card would only last so long, as it couldn't handle all the writing (like swapping for virtual memory)... anyone have any such experience to back this up? And if so, why would this happen? Do the gates or oxide layer simply wear out? Or is it 'this brand only' problem, such as maybe a problem with the CF micro-contoller?
install some cf in your system using an ide-cfa adaptor (http://www.acscontrol.com or similar, there is at least one model with a drive bezel for front-panel access) and double-stick tape. use it to boot a kernel that assembles raid volumes from devices it finds. for extra points, do this in a pci sun system (eg, the ultra5) which won't boot from non-openfirmware pci cards like the generic adaptec 2940 or qlogic 1040 -- the bootprom will happily load a bsd kernel from flashdisk, then find a rootfs in RAID_AUTOCONFIG. to avoid needless writes to compactflash, add some boot logic to create mfs /var and /tmp, to be invoked if the rootfs is the cf device (freebsd has this feature, iirc).
Wow, I can remember watching a documentary about the world's first magnetic hard drive. It was 5MB in capacity, and was about the size of my bedroom...but don't try putting your favourite MP3 on it, because the data access speed was slower than a 300 baud modem!
.1% of the size and weight. One of these days, we'll have solid state flash cards small enough to fit up your nose that hold a terrabyte of full-quality movies and audio (RIAA willing). That'll be neat, yeah?
My first hard drive was a 25 megabyte hard drive for an IBM compatible. It was about 20 pounds, and at the time I thought "wow, I'll never fill this thing up!". All the text files I could ever want, and even a few images and 1-second WAVs! Suddenly, though, I realized it was ludicrously cramped when windows made its appearance.
Now today I was holding in my hand a 1 square inch piece of plastic that was holding 128MB of pictures. A barely postage stamp-sized object was holding more than 5 times what my first hard drive held, and at
Mmmmm, nose-media.
-- Bandit450...If-Else-Do-*TWITCH*!
Moving parts.
Hard-drives are not as robust as solid state memory devices. Usually the first thing to go on any computer is the hard-drive because the mechanical parts fail, causing data loss. This is especially true for portable devices that may be dropped.
...interesting if true.
"(Flash) shouldn't work," said Stefan Lai, a vice president in the technology and manufacturing group at Intel.
What the hell is this? There's no physical reason that voltage can't be stored for years. And flash obviously does work, so to say it 'shouldn't' is stupid.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
So are you saying that 4 gigs ought to be enough for anyone?
Mini SD.
when come back bring pie
I remember when i got my first digital camera, an HP 215 and came with a 4mb CF card. It introduced me to flash memory from the get go as a "digital film" medium.
.10 cents per disk.
:)
I also write a fair amount documents myself. I used to put them in a folder on my hard drive because there's a lot of space there to begin with, and I don't really have a need to transport my docs anywhere other than at home. If you upgrade regularly or do a lot of "house cleaning" on your HDD, (as in remove junk stuff you don't need anymore), or if you move files around a lot on your computer, or partition..things start to disappear over time.
My biggest problem was moving files around trying to organize them, and saving documents in different locations on my hard drive. I wound up forgetting where i put certian docs. When i clean up my HDD and remove stuff i don't need anymore, I wound up deleting some documents I wish I still had.
This is where CompactFlash came in for me. I was never a fan of floppy disks to begin with because the data capacity is so small by today's standards. That, and their really horrible with holding data for a extended period of time. Bad sectors are a royal nightmare if you store anything of value on a floppy.
So i got myself a 64meg CF card, a PCMCIA card reader, and a USB card reader, and it's a true lifesaver and a great replacement for floppies. The pendrives are awesome for portability and transporting things from PC to PC, I plan to get one of those as well.
I was never a fan of zip disks etc, either. It's still the same basic idea of a floppy only more modernized. It's not solid-state, and aren't nearly as reliable as other mediums.
CD-Rs are still my main method of backing up data. Their capacity/cost/reliability ratio is great for things like mp3s and video files. However, documents aren't all that big to begin wtih unless you have hordes of them to backup. That and it's read only once you burn. So i find it wasteful to burn a CD-R for a few megs worth of documents, even if CD-Rs are under
CD-RWs are too cumbersome for me to really be worthwhile. If you want to store data at work, school, a friend's house, etc, they have to have a CD-RW burner as well. Not exactly an efficient way to store data on the go like flash is.
So Compactflash was the sweet-spot for me. Good storage compacty for what i want to use it for. Great reliablity, durable, reuseable, portable, and comes in a nice array of capacities from 8MB to 1GB.
The new XD flash cards are way too small for me. Something nearly as small as a dime isn't something i want to store my data on. Odds are I'd lose the card before I got my money's worth of use out of it. SD/SM/MMC cards are too thin and tend to break easy. Compact flash is big enough where you don't have to worry so much about it breaking or losing it, big enough to hold in your hand comfortabily, yet small enough for use in PDAs and cameras. Their great!
To answer your question about failure rates:
If kept in a dry and cool place, and if you take care of it (as in not dropping it on hard surfaces, etc) The average lifespan of a CF card is about *1 million* reads and writes. However, another thing to take into consideration is data retention. A lot of CF cards and pen drives specify data retention up to 10 years.
So they're pretty damn reliable for as small as they are.
***Figure source: http://www.memorywizards.com/pd_flash_usb_drv.cfm
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?"
Yup, cmdrtaco's cock
Flash and it's "million rewrite" really has me pained. It is soooo restricted to storage, but nothing else. Especially considering that NOR flash is the only dense one, they are not even that good compared to, say, CD (well, smaller, but the dense ones have slow read speed - random read speed, anyhow).
I am seriously hoping for the time when MRAM (try RAMTRON, which I think is one of the only manufactures of it) ramps up in density; DRAM speed, unlimited rewrite, AND stores after power off to boot.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Although I can see that it has the same pinouts, how do you connect it exactly? I mean, the connector on the CF card is smaller than the connector on a regular IDE cable and I am not sure where should the power go and what voltage. :)
But connecting my CFs to the IDE bus sounds cool, so I would be glad if you could give some details
Real life is overrated.
I recently bought a Fuji 3800 after reading many reviews and especially Steve's site that you mention. The xD cards are very small indeed. I just measured it (no not comparing it to my penis) 2.5 cm X 2.0 cm. It is thin, but yet rigid. There is signicant amount of contacts space on one side, in fact about half the size of the card on one side is electrical contact space. I have 2 of these cards, one 16mb and another 64mb. I too am led to believe that they can scale to very large sizes considering the size. On the non-contact side it has the fujinon imprint, logo, tm, etc, however, on the contact side in very hard to read embosed letters it has "Japan" "by Toshiba" along with extremely small seems to be computerized, or laser printed serial number. All this extremely close inspection of my card has revealed that the contacts actually have scuff marks to where they make contact inside the camera.
Show us the true way.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Well, we can do the standard media benchmark and relate every component to the size of a human hair...
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
So why not put some normal *fast* ram in a compact flash that acts as a cache? All the downsides of flash are then negated: reading & writing are really fast and there is no 1 million writes limitation. When the cf is removed from the machine, the data in the ram should be copied to the flash, using a small battery (that gets reloaded when in the machine). Simple. Fast. It'll cost only a bit more.
Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?
Sure: the library of Alexandria on a thumbnail.
Plus, in a flame-retardent case, please.
yes, we have no bananas
I propose the nano-pinhead - one billionth the area of a pinhead (the sewing kind, not the AC kind - the AC kind is the basis for the new unit of stupidity, the morone).
This can be combined with the LOC for a new unit of areal density - the LOC/nano-pinhead.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I don't think the incumbent flash vendors have anything to worry about... all they have to do is lobby their favorite Senator to preserve their oligopoly & make any new solid-state non-volatile data storage medim illegal. Come to think of it, Fritz Hollings would probably be up to the task as that would suit the entertainment lobby well- if you can't buy dense solid-state media, it's tougher to transport those pesky "fair use" music & movie files.
FWIW, I remember this same sort of nay-saying a couple of years ago when pundits claimed that sub- 100 nm lithography was impossible. Looks like those hurdles have been cleared so I'm sure someone will come up with some way to improve memory density.
It comes bundled with a CF reader so it can do just that. It also has a built in color screen and video output so it can be used to show a slide show, and it plays DivX/XviD movies, in addition to being an MP3 player.
I'd have to say a Quarter is an ideal benchmark (From a US-Centric POV).
The size is good and manageable for most sized hands. Its's small enough and compact enough as well.
Flash mmem cards should be about as sturdy as a quarter as well. Solid and not flimsy. Take a hammer to it and maybe the housing gets a little scuffed.
Well, anyway, that's my take on it.
Dang, that is like 30 pictures a day every day for three years (assuming you take weekends off.) What do you do to take that many pictures, and have you calculated how much you have saved by going digital instead of regular film over the years?
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
JPEG was introduced in 1992.
...
Still 11 years running on that format
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
porn
or in fact, any kind of picture-oriented professional activity (photo-reporter, photographer, real-estate agent, digital ID photography, etc.)
IMHO, audio compression (mp3, ogg etc.) has a lot to do with network transmission, not simply storage. Broadband connection speeds have not improved by anything comparable to storage capacities. I just bought a 120 GB HD, but for my Net connection I can't get much better than cable, which gives about 1Mbps down and 300 kbps up. I live in a small town in Finland, and the only better option would be ADSL which only improves upstream rate, for about double the price.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...doesn't anyone remember the original Men in Black? Compact Discs the size of a fingernail! Probably not R/W media like CF, but still pretty dang cool.
I guess it means I'll have to buy the White Album again
-Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones)
http://www.walkingtaco.com
Remember its not the size that matters, but how you use it.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
Is that it's USB 2.0, not firewire - so when you eventually read the fiiles back to your computer you need to have an adaptor cable for a Mac (f all you have is firewire).
However, that dd look like the best of the bunch that I could find.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem is with form factor. How many different (incompatible) options --
Compact Flash (standard in high end cameras or devices where you need the most space. 512 Meg and 1 Gig+ available now)
Smartmedia (standard in items that do not require much space -- or where they did not "know any better" -- Lot's of camera's and Mp3 players)
MMC Expensive and caps out about 128 Meg)
SD Being used more and more -- getting bigger and bigger -- but did not all of us already have about $10,000 dollars worth of media in other formats by the time this broke the "64 meg" barrier?
Memory Stick Die Sony die...Why did we need this?
Xd (sic)? picture cards New cards being used by the new cameras. Small as a finger nail. But why? why? why? Why so many form factors?
Anybody on the bleeding edge will have aquired a variety of the above types of memory. I for one am always holding out for a device that supports CF -- since my first camera was CF, and I have the most cards in that factor -- and it makes me sick to my stomache to buy a new device that uses a type of memory that serves no purpose other than to make all of my existing memory useless.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
"We think we can achieve the same density with half the area,"
Same density....half the area....half the storage!!
Back to your lab, bozo!
When most people say standard ram, they mean DRAM (Dynamic RAM) meaning the memory must be updated many times per second. This would require a significant current draw from the battery. I imaging these early cartridges used SRAM (Static RAM). This would mean the memory could be maintained by simply maintaining the voltage (with theoretically no current draw). I wonder if SRAM is used for much of anything any more, but at any rate, I just felt like being pedantic today. Sorry.
I'm a fan of SD and so I think the postage stamp is a good size to benchmark from. Who-da thunk that a postage stamp would be the solution to all of your photo/music/emulation/daily-planner/boa/SQL/ssh/VN C needs?
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
This article posted today at Silicon Strategies is probably just a rehashed press release pointing out that Motorola has made some nifty new nano-crystal flash with its 90-nm process technology. But if anyone's interested in it, it's those of you who've read this far.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
DataPlay, anyone?
My Palm Pilot has flash memory that makes it instant-on. My camera has flash memory that allows me to take a picture, then pop out the card and bring it in to a photo lab for printing. (In fact, when the package from Amazon.com arrives, my camera will have substantially more RAM than my PC here at work.) My laptop has a PCMCIA slot that I can plug a CF card into. By comparison, my desktop has a card reader that I'm always plugging and unplugging and losing on my desk.
Why not better integration of CompactFlash with desktop computers? A dozen dedicated slots for different cards. Instant-on by loading startup apps and drivers from flash memory. Transportable settings by saving bookmarks, themes, frequently used documents, etc. to a CF card that can be popped into any machine I work on.
Does the slashdot crowd have a new size benchmark for small sizes?
How about how many can fit inside the pysical building of the Library of Congress? Then, for information density, we can even do the Libraries-of-Congress-per-Libraries-of-Congress measurement!
Instead of that USELESS Gb/in^2 measurement that we get sometimes, we can have a drive that holds 2.4e^73 LoC/LoC!
± 29 dB
In Soviet Russia, Compact Flash stores YOU!