4Gb CF Card Announced

An anonymous reader writes "Lexar has today announced that it now shipping a 4 GB 40x Compact Flash card. The card's claim to fame is the ability to store 600 RAW images taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera. This card also features Lexar's WA (Write Acceleration) technology which can improve performance further with WA enabled cameras. Because this card is larger than 2 GB, you will need a camera which is FAT32 compliant. This card is available now at the heady price of $1,499 ($0.37/MB). It looks like Lexar has managed to be faster then Hitachi (Former IBM storage division) with their 4Gb Microdrive."

Comments

Is 40x worth it?

[tackaberry]

I've been toying with the idea of getting a Lexar Pro (40x) CF card.

Has anyone had any experience using the Pro cards versus the standard, and whether or not the numbers translate into noticible performance gains???

Nevertheless, this particular card is well outside of my range/needs, but a 256 or 512 for my 4.0 megapix is do-able.

Re:Is 40x worth it?

[Glyndwr]

DPReview did a comprehensive review of a bunch of flash cards here but it's rather out of date now. Time to bug them to update it, I think...

Re:Is 40x worth it?

[cetan]

CompactFlash Performance Database http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?ci d=6007

Re:Is 40x worth it?

[tackaberry]

Thanks! Looks like an informative site...bookmarked!

Re:Is 40x worth it?

[topham]

As I understand it, I was looking into it for a SD card for my handheld, the 'faster' memory cards are really on faster for reading. Not writing, they may be a few percent faster, or slower for writing depending on the specifics. (in some cases the larger capacity seems to take longer, in others it's less.. no idea why).

But the net result is, the faster cards are only really faster at being read. Usefull for a PDA, not very usefull for a camera.
(I expect the write-faster capability of this new card is based on some temporary ram storage on the card, the buffer gets dumped while the camera can be used to snap another picture or two.).

$1500?

[Sheetrock]

Flash is getting expensive nowadays. I thought IBM had a tiny harddrive that (at the time) stored 1GB of data on it; couldn't something like this be incorporated into a 'memory card' design for cameras and the like? That seemed to be the whole point of it, anyway.

Re:$1500?

[Mindwarp]

IBM has been producing Compact Flash Type 2 form-factor micro drives for some time now.

Here's one:

Clicky!

Re:$1500?

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

I thought IBM had a tiny harddrive

You mean like that one refered to in the article?

Re:$1500?

[Keighvin]

It's called an IBM MicroDrive, though it's also resold and branded through Iomega (without any different under the hood). They are mostly CF compatible, though the voltage requirements are a little different so the device needs to be MicroDrive compatible and not just CD.

The 1GB CF form factor drive runs for ~$260 on eBay including PCMCIA adapter for laptiops. Buying 4 of these at that price would save you $460 on the cost of a single 4GB CF.

Re:$1500?

[afidel]

That is what the submitter was talking about with Hitachi, Hitachi bought IBM's HDD assets including the Microdrive line. Hitachi is supposed to unveil a 4GB Microdrive this fall. The Microdrive is less shock resistant, eats up to 4X the battery life, and has slower transfer rates than the high speed flash products out there, initially the 4GB Microdrive may be cheaper, but within probably 9-18 months the flash will almost certainly be cheaper, that's the way it happened with the origional Microdrive (actually there wasn't any 1GB CF card at the time that I could find, but there was soon after).

Re:$1500?

[Anonymous Coward]

1GB CompactFlash costs only $190.

Re:$1500?

[Wesley Felter]

Don't you mean flash is getting cheap these days? Not long ago it cost over $1/MB.

Re:$1500?

[addaon]

Maybe it's changed since then, but when Iomega started selling Microdrives, they had lower power usage, a lower rotation rate, higher latency, and lower transfer speed.

Re:$1500?

[jester]

worth pointing out the additional power consumption of a Microdrive. For example in a NEX IIe MP3 player the Microdrive would give 4 or 5 times less battery life than use of a Compact Flash.

Re:$1500?

[NormalVisual]

However, the Microdrive is more appropriate in situations where there will be a lot of writing to the media - I'd much rather have a Microdrive mounted as a swap partition than a CF card on my CerfCube. :-)

For pretty much all other uses, I'd agree that CF is probably the better choice.

Re:$1500?

[luzrek]

You could save even more money by buying 4 1GB compact flash cards. Those run slightly more than $200 each (depending on how much you believe pricewatch). The major reason for going with Flash memory over harddrives or optical media is that there are no moving parts. This should (I don't know if it does) mean lower power consumption, greater durability, and better tollerance of jolts and jiggles (like when you go jogging). It definitely means that flash media produce less audible noise than harddrives, CDs and DVDs.

On the other hand Flash media isn't exactly cheap yet, so I don't see it being used for anything that doesn't require long battery life, no fans, and jiggle-tollerance (no boob jokes).

4Gb or 4GB

[insulator]

The title says 4 gigabits, but the text says 4 giga bytes. 4 GB is impressive, 4Gb is not (512 MB).

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[Anonymous Coward]

you sir are a moron

of course we are speaking of a 4 gigaBYTES CF card... if not, this article wouldn't have been posted on /.

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot, don't concern us with small details like facts.

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[UWC]

The mention of the need for FAT32 to access the card seems to indicate that it's larger than 2 gigabytes. It would be nice to see some consistency, though, rather than having to guess based on context.

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[Anonymous Coward]

you sir are a moron

Actually, you are the moron, because the parent is correct.

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[Anonymous Coward]

fact : grand grand parent is a karma whore!

w00t for karma whores!! hehheh

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, take a guess, genius.

(since 512 MB cards have been available for quite some time)

How the fsck is this "insightful"?

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[Anonymous Coward]

That's truly pathetic.

Sir, you are even MORE pathetic !

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[schmink182]

Before further bashing the Slashdot editorial staff, you may wish to note that editors rarely submit the stories. Slashdot readers submit the stories, along with the headlines.

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[stratjakt]

But they accepted it, didn't they?

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[AKnightCowboy]

Before further bashing the Slashdot editorial staff, you may wish to note that editors rarely submit the stories. Slashdot readers submit the stories, along with the headlines.

Before calling them "editorial staff" note that by not proofreading the submissions they are not editors, merely approvers.

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[Anonymous Coward]

But they accepted it, didn't they?

well, that doesn't mean anyone actually read it.

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[NanoGator]

"It's 4GB you pedantic nerd. It was fairly obvious to anyone who has the slightest capacity for understanding the context of what they are reading."

Pedantic nerds shouldn't live in glass houses.

Who needs this space?

[Sir Haxalot]

Who needs this kind of space for pictures? I guess this is probably aimed at professional photographers...

Re:Who needs this space?

[redfenix]

(from article) The 4GB memory card is designed to meet the insatiable demand of professional photographers for high-capacity storage.

Yup, you're right.

Re:Who needs this space?

[Yaruar]

not even just pros.

I can't count myself as a pro photographer, but I do quite a lot of work when I have time. Minimum digital kit these days for anyone serious about digital photography is a half decent digital slr (i'm picking up my EOS 10D on wednesday)
If I go to a club or a gig to shoot I can easily shoot 100+ pictures a night. I used to do 120+ with film which cost a fortune)
With digital it's easier to take more as TBH it's easier to deal with the pictures and more immediate when you gt home. I can easily envisige taking 1.5gb's worth of pictures a night with my new camera...
In terms of cost though I'm sticking with a 1gb microdrive and that will limit me. when the larger flash memory cards come down in price they will be must haves.
Although tbh the best bet for a photographer is to bring an ultraportable with them for downloading and viewing.......

Re:Who needs this space?

[afidel]

1GB CF cards are already cheaper than or as cheap as Microsdrives. They also suck WAY less power and will transfer the data faster if the device supports it (or if you use an external USB2 or Firewire reader). The Microdrive is also considerably less shock resistant (I saw pictures from 9/11 that were pulled off of a camera that had been under one of the collapsed office buildings around the two towers, the camera looked decimated but all but one pic came off the card, don't think a microdrive would have fared as well)

Re:Who needs this space?

[Anonymous Coward]

ya think?

Re:Who needs this space?

[Eric Ass Raymond]

If I go to a club or a gig to shoot I can easily shoot 100+ pictures a night

Just out of interest, how do you get stable pictures with a digital camera? I've taken quite a lot of photos with film and I've never had had trouble with blurred photos. With digital cameras, however, I never seem to get a good photo as just pressing the trigger seems to shake the camera enough to blur the picture.

I know that the digital cameras I've played with have not been in the high-end range but they have not been economy models either.

Re:Who needs this space?

[Glonoinha]

Hell I want one of these to put into my laptop to replace the hard drive (they make adapters.) The hard drive is the part that is most fragile in a laptop, most likely to fail when laptops get moved around while being used ... and sucks the life out of your laptop battery.

Replace the HD with a solid state drive and all of a sudden you have a no moving parts computer sucking down way less battery, pretty much a PDA with a decent keyboard, display, connectivity, running an OS that you like.

Re:Who needs this space?

[mrycar]

I have a digicam that has that annoying button latency problem (Nikon 5000). The secret to using that camaera is to use the LCD, and keep your finger hovering over first button pressing it down the first stop, vs the second, thus keeping the camera energized and focused.

With my canon 10D it has a lesser latency and the ability to change the iso so I can keep the shutter speed between 1/30-1/4000 so it becomes easier to capture a shot then 1-1/30.
I can do the same with the Nikon cp5000, but the latency seems to be more of a problem then the shutter speed.

Re:Who needs this space?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the screen that really eats your laptop battery, but anyway, putting one of these into your laptop would be a good way to destroy it. After you swap to the CF card for a few weeks, it won't hold data anymore - you'll exhaust the write cycles before you know it.

Re:Who needs this space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the LCD is the most (mechanically) fragile part on a laptop. The battery is the part that you are most likely to replace at least once.

Re:Who needs this space?

[SmackCrackandPot]

One use for a digital camera is time-lapse photography. Given that you want a sequence to play back at 30 frames/second, and you want a sequence that runs for at least 1 minute, if not more, you want to take at least 1800 frames. For digital video purposes, you want a resolution of at least 640x480x24 uncompressed. That's just under 2 Gigabytes. Sure you can use a webcam, but that requires taking a PC along with you. So really, there isn't any limit on how much memory a camera could use.

But the chokepoint...

[kmak]

is still the time it takes for a camera to transfer from on-memory to the card... no matter how big the card is, until this time is reduced, it'll still be hard for some applications ..

But it's definitely good.. I use a CF-Reader on my laptop instead of a diskdrive, and obviously, a 4 GB CF card would definitely be nice.. now I can easily transfer data between machines!

Of course, again, though, bandwidth is still an issue..

Re:But the chokepoint...

[joe_bruin]

obviously, you've missed the point of the "pro" cards. they have some sort of system (built in cache, or parallel writing, or some such thing) that accelerates the writing process, so that you can take pictures rapidly (or whatever other data you're writing, i suppose).

Re:But the chokepoint...

[kmak]

rapidly is not fast enough... when can we expect a full non-DV 4MP camcorder?

I'm not saying they're not making progress.. it's just still not up to par.. or rather, that the lag is definitely not catching up with the size.. sure, you have a 4 Gig CF, but how long will it take for me to, say, back up a chunk of my HD on it?

Re:But the chokepoint...

[zero2k]

You sir are behind the times - Dalsa Origin 8MP Digital Video Camera. http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2003/07_jul/fea tures/cw_dalsa_origin.htm

Re:Is the word "than" dying?

[hyperstation]

mod parent up. slashbots are modding people down for pointing out failings in the editoral staff.

if you wanna be accepted as a "real" news source, get used to criticism.

Why?

[afidel]

You are never going to be able to take that many pic's without changing batteries so why not have a couple of cheaper 1GB cards and swap em out with the batteries? 1GB CF cards are as cheap as $228 you are paying a more than 50% premium for the denser storage.

Re:Why?

[krisp]

Not true. The Nikon D2H (mentioned in this previous story) can take 1000-1200 pictures on a single charge. For 1200 pictures, one might need two of these cards, assuming raw 6megapixel photographs.

Re:Why?

[foxtrot]

You are never going to be able to take that many pic's without changing batteries so why not have a couple of cheaper 1GB cards and swap em out with the batteries? 1GB CF cards are as cheap as $228 you are paying a more than 50% premium for the denser storage.

Won't I? I already can almost fill my 1GB microdrive using just one BP-511 battery pack on my Canon G1.

The new SLR Canon cameras have an optional side-grip that holds two more BP-511s. And they're shooting much larger images. And when you're a professional (or semi-professional), which is what this product is aimed at, you're probably not shooting .jpg anymore. Plus, since this thing is CF and not a Microdrive, it sucks less power, as well. I'd bet you can darned near fill one of these things easily.

Add in the fact that this thing has some new technology write-to-it-faster-stuff, and there's plenty of reason for this product to exist.

-JDF

Re:Why?

[interiot]

• And when you're a professional (or semi-professional), which is what this product is aimed at, you're probably not shooting .jpg anymore.

There's really no reason to use raws over jpegs.

Re:Why?

[eakerin]

It says so Right in the last part of that page you linked to:

Repeatedly saving and resaving a JPEG file can cause the image degradation to accumulate. Too much of a good thing can be a problem...use a lossless format such as TIFF to save working copies of files before saving a final version.

It's called loosing a generation, if your trying to have the highest quality, you're gonna go uncompressed all the way to the end, where you finally make a compressed version.

Re:Why?

[Cyno]

Could store lots and lots of small ogg files in my PDA, when these things cost reasonable prices. They'll probably have 16+ GB cards by then.

Re:Why?

[NMerriam]

The page is nice, but professional image editors save files over and over and over. That's why we don't use lossless compression. Nobody is saying that JPEG sucks, only that it isn't good as an initial format for an image that will possibly have a long lifetime.

Re:Why?

[trout_fish]

Perhaps the experiment could be repeated with an image with a large amount of almost solid colour.

Re:Why?

[afidel]

Very wrong, at least for Canon cameras, Canon's raw format captures the data as it is coming off the image censor. By saving this information post processing can be done on the raw data rather than the interpretation of the processing chip and the JPEG engine. For instance I have seen images had contrast improved without upsetting the shadow details which just isn't possible with normal post processing on a regular image, if you've ever see it you will know how superior to dumb Photoshop filters it is.

Re:Why?

[jonathan_ingram]

No, it's called *losing* a generation.

Re:Why?

[useosx]

The rest of the replies to this post are excellent, but I found a more detailed, objective link in about 2 seconds searching Google (don't mean to sound flame-y, I just think it's useful to be inherently suspicious of "definitive" one-sided stories, especially when it takes little effort to find something that's more balanced):

http://www.wfu.edu/~matthews/misc/jpg_vs_gif/JpgCo mpTest/ (Warning: 1.5 MB worth of images)

Then there's this link that's embedded in the link above: http://www.wfu.edu/~matthews/misc/jpg_vs_gif/JpgCo mpTest/JpgForArchive.html

Re:Why?

[eakerin]

That will teach me to not use preview.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it will teach you to use preview.

*snigger*

Re:Why?

[echucker]

Ask anyone shooting underwater photos why they don't want to change cards - it means more surface time, and less time actually shooting.

Re:Why?

[Mozo]

The "Real Story" link on JPEGs is quite amusing, to say the least. Saying "look at these images in your web browser -- you can't tell the difference" hardly leads to the conclusion "people never need to use uncompressed images, since there never are visible differences."

I *do* work for a professional imaging company, and here are some of my opinions on "the real story":

- JPEG is designed to compress images in ways that degrade the visibility of compression artifacts as much as possible. It works particularly well for photographic images, since that's what it's designed for.
- JPEG compression is often very appropriate for web images. Uncompressed images are often inappropriate for web images, due to their size.
- JPEG does produce artifacts, and many are objectionable at high compression levels.
- Even mild JPEG compression does visible damage to things like crisp text or sharp lines. This is a function of the compression scheme's photographic emphasis. (And, specifically, a function of the 8x8 pixel blocks and discrete cosine transforms used....)
- JPEG2000 (.JP2 or .JPX) is a more sophisticated technique employing wavelets. To my eyes, the artifacts (especially localized ones) are significantly less noticable than standard JPEG at similar compression levels. A technology to watch...
- Digital SLR "RAW" files are different than standard uncompressed tiff's. Usually, they represent raw sensor data at higher than 8-bit color depth. As such, they are the digital equivalent of the negative, and various different kinds of post-processing is often applied to the same image, based on situation.
- Compression isn't free (as in clock cycles). It takes a lot less time to write the larger RAW file from a DSLR to a CF card than it does to compress it in-camera to a smaller JPG file. This effects burst rate image capture as well as battery life.

Phew. That was long. The conclusion that "there's really no reason to use raws over jpegs" was wrong on so many levels that I had to clear some misconceptions up, I suppose!

Re:Why?

[mozumder]

RAW is much more useful than JPEG. For example, you can get about 1 to 1.5 EV additional latitude with RAW files on a good camera. What this means is that after you record the image, you can change the brightness/contrast to bring out details in shadows or highlights.

If I took a picture of a room with a dark area, I see that dark area as a black blob. With that image recorded as a JPEG, if I adjust the contrast/brightness/levels, that black blob becomes a gray blob. With a RAW file, if I adjust the levels, that black blob now becomes a recognizable person sitting in the shadow. RAW can represent the higher dynamic range reality, whereas JPEG represents the more limited dynamic range of what you perceive. Reality has a much higher dynamic range than what your brain can perceive. It's more important to represent reality in case you screw up on your shots, that way you can post-process it later.

Re:Why?

[egomaniac]

You are never going to be able to take that many pic's without changing batteries so why not have a couple of cheaper 1GB cards and swap em out with the batteries?

My wife is a professional photographer who shoots with a Nikon D1x, and I frequently function as her assistant, so I'm intimately familiar with this subject. She can easily take few gigs of pictures without draining the battery -- the D1x has remarkably good battery life, and takes pretty damned big pictures.

This is obviously a high-end pro card, so don't use your experience with consumer cameras as a grade of how useful this is. Nobody but a serious pro should even be considering something like this. Trust me, it's not always as simple as "just change the card when it fills up" -- having to do that can mean the difference between getting the critical shot and missing it. That alone can justify the price premium to a pro.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Batteries can be recharged. [song]If I were a rich man[/song], I'd love to be able to store an entire vacation's worth of pictures on one card. No more shuffling multiple, small (easily lost), expensive cards on the run. One card = no switching. No switching = no chance of getting misplaced. My camera can easily fill half a gig on a charge and that's about as many pictures as I take in a day. A 4 gig card would be perfect for a week long vacation. No need to drag along the laptop for nightly image dumps.

Too bad it's so expensive.

Hooray

[stratjakt]

How long until solid state technology replaces hard drives outright, or at least supplements them?

And, only slightly offtopic, why must PCs have pagefiles created on a hard drive? Why not have a bunch of SDRAM slots, even on a PCI card, and have 4 gigs of uber-cheap PC133, then create a 4 gig swap file in RAM (if not natively supported).

I hate having to swap to HDD, and my only option being super-pricey DDR or RDRAM upgrades.

A machine would do just fine with 256 Megs of Dual-DDR400, and 4 gigs or so of PC133. Then HDD as an absolute last resort. It plugs right in to the tiered-memory architecture, so why would this not work?

Re:Hooray

[khaine]

There is already a solid state hard drive for PCs called the QikDrive:

http://www.platypus.net/products/qikdrive.asp

Its based on standard RAM and luckily it has its own UPS connection :-)

Re:Hooray

[silas_moeckel]

People have been doing this for years in a variety of ways. You dont even need PC133 unless it's going into something with PCI-X. Unfortunaly it's the cost of aquiring these drives that turns people off to using them the way you have described. The RAM may be cheap to sonk costs from your last box but the PCI cards generaly run more than your average PC same goes for the SCSI based ones (A little slower but it dosent take up a PCI slot by itself)

Re:Hooray

[Anonymous Coward]

1. SDRAM isn't "uber-cheap". 512MB module costs $38. 8 modules would cost $304 and would take a lot of room.

2. PCI has only 133MB/s of bandwidth. Thus it won't be much faster than using HDD.

Re:Hooray

[stratjakt]

But why the high costs and niche market? I envision a product that costs say 200 bucks and gives you a couple gigs of lower-performance high-latency RAM.

But now instead of 1 or 2 gigs of high-performance RAM, you only need 256 megs or so, so you wind up saving money in the long run, and having a much peppier, and more robust PC to show for it.

I just dont understand why this isnt happening. It seems like a sure-hit product that would sell like hotcakes.

Re:Hooray

[larien]

From another point of view, the swap area on Solaris is also used for kernel crash dumps, so you generally want it to be persistant across reboots.

From a PC perspective, it would require a motherboard redesign and the price differential between SDRAM & DDR isn't that great; you can probably get 256MB DDR dimms for the same price as 512MB SDRAM DIMMs and get a boost without (a) complex hardware and (b) the CPU overhead of swapping & associated load on I/O.

Re:Hooray

[stratjakt]

1) SDRAM was, and still would be, uber cheap if it was still in mass production. It's been relegated to the legacy and niche markets, so the price is climbing again. That's how memory prices work, they start out high, bottom out, get replaced by a newer tech, then rise again (look how much EDO costs these days).

2) RAM can actually saturate that 133MB/s, while no (consumer level) HDD even comes remotely close. Not to mention the fact that, compared to HDD, there is virtually no latency when you hit RAM.

Re:Hooray

[stratjakt]

Duh.

PC133 runs at 133mhz, and has an 800MB/s maximum throughput.

Re:Hooray

[Lumpy]

And, only slightly offtopic, why must PCs have pagefiles created on a hard drive? Why not have a bunch of SDRAM slots, even on a PCI card, and have 4 gigs of uber-cheap PC133, then create a 4 gig swap file in RAM (if not natively supported).


Do it this way like you say? Already is here for linux users.

8 gigs of ram in the server, on boot the kernel set's up a 4gb ramdrive, format's it, and set's it as swap.

Otherwise, instead ow wasting ram with a swap file... simply allow the OS to use it and to hell with even using a sawp.

Re:Hooray

[AlecC]

People have been predicting that solid state will replace hard drives for at least a decade now, probably more. But HDDs have kept ahead in large capacity throughout that time, and manufacturers still hav3e quite a lot of technology up their sleeves. The only way that flash is going to catch up with HDD in the nect 5 years (I predict no futher) is if the need for space is satisfied. And when you have got video and broadbabd, people will carry on filling HDD space with downloads, or more software or... This gadget said $0.37/Mbyte. The last disk I bought ran about $0.015/Mbyte, and that was a while back.

And using flash for a swap drive... Remeber that flash as a limited number of write cycles - perhaps 1 million. For picture storasge - no problem. For file storage - not likely to be a problem, becauss eht file space will eventually find its way into a long-lived firl. But for swap space, you might run out of write cycles sooner than you hope.

Re:Hooray

[cK-Gunslinger]

Here's a review of a "Rocket Drive" (PCI card with SDRAM)

OC Addiction

I have no idea why it's so expensive, except maybe because it has power backup.

Re:Hooray

[innosent]

But why would you want to? You seem to be forgetting that the only time your system will swap is when it runs out of memory. If you have more memory, you won't swap as much. Why not have it be the fastest you can get?

There's always a tradeoff, but I really don't see a large market for lower-performance high-latency (Flash) RAM. It is used in embedded systems, and small devices (like cameras, etc..), but it's just too slow, has a limited life, (you can only rewrite a spot a set amount of time, not good for swap/OS use) and is too expensive to use anywhere you don't need to.

If you ask me, we need faster high-performance RAM, and CPU's with bigger, faster caches. CPU's are in the 3+ GHz range, yet the fastest RAM available is RDRAM 1066MHz, and has a 2 cycle column latency. May seem fast to you, but try emulating a VAX, or any other real work that requires heavy access to different areas of memory. It's slow as hell.

Re:Hooray

[cgleba]

I did a lot of hobby-type research on this issue and I have often wondered the same thing. PCI cards with DIMM slots should be very cheap to manufacture in mass quantities but unfortunatly it is still a niche market and they are a lot of money.

It would be fairly easy to implement -- all you really need is a memory controller, a PCI chip and a DMA controller. Then you can map the memory directly to the processor's address space and use it as swap that is an order of magnitude faster then disk but significantly slower then RAM. In fact, you can do that right now indirectly under Linux -- if you have a video card with loads of RAM you can use it as swap.

Now, back on topic, you can use a compact flash card as a hard disk -- in fact, it has the same pinout as IDE and will be detected by the BIOS. Under Linux I use one as my boot/rescue partition. There are a few caveats, though:

1) CF is slower then hard disks -- HDs do about 20MB/s transfer while CFs do about 6MB/s

2) Writes on CF are very slow -- about 2MB/s

3) The "1 million writes" issue -- if you write too many times to CF it will start getting data errors. If you put swap on CF you'll kill it pretty quickly.

4) You can not hot-swap CF used as a disk like you can not hot-swap IDE disks.

There are advantages, also:

1) CFs suck up little power
2) Seeks are fast
3) CFs do not suffer mechanical failures

Thus, if as you mentioned, there were cheap PCI boards with DIMM slots one could set up a massive amount of fast swap and abate problems #1, some of #2 and all of #3 with CF. Now with a 4GB CF card, one can store the entire OS, utilities and then some on a CF card -- thus the reality of cheap solid-state computers is here -- all we need is as you mentioned, tons of cheap, fast swap to make up for CF's deficiencies.

I was thinking of making these PCI boards, but I neither have the experience, knowledge nor tools to do so. . .

Re:Hooray

[silas_moeckel]

They make them people dont buy them for home PC's. Lets look at the numbers:

A 1 Gig Stick of DDR400 is $166 today on pricewatch in 512 sitcks it's a little cheaper per gig like 148 a gig but thats 2 sticks.

Why would you get a 200 card + ram if you dont have it (not everybody have 10 or 20 gigs of older ram floating around) and 2 gigs of slower memory is about 150 again making the total cost of this solution not counting that paltry 256 is more expensive and slower than just getting 2 gigs of DDR400. If you bring the cost of the card down to 150 it's break even but slower overall than just throwing 2 gigs of DDR in the box. Granted when you have a system maxed out at 3.5 gigs (I know you can go higher but that is an ugly hack I've done it under Windows and Linux it's just not pretty.) SO realy you more and more looking at a server niche market.

Re:Hooray

[Glonoinha]

-How long until solid state technology replaces hard drives outright, or at least supplements them?

The day I can afford a 4G CF card to replace the drive in my laptop, it is going to happen.

How long? Maybe when a 4G drive replacement CF doesn't cost $1,500.

-And, only slightly offtopic, why must PCs have pagefiles created on a hard drive? Why not have a bunch of SDRAM slots, even on a PCI card, and have 4 gigs of uber-cheap PC133, then create a 4 gig swap file in RAM (if not natively supported).

You should look into the RocketDrive - lets you stick PC133 SDRAMs onto a PCI card, up to four 1G chips for a 4G virtual drive, and you can put in more than one card and span the drives to make a larger drive.

http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdriveDL.cfm - add your own RAM
http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cf m - preloaded with RAM

Re:Hooray

[RevAaron]

Solid state drives have existed for a while, this QikDrive is nothing new. You've been able to get solid states which connect via IDE for a while- some use RAM like this product and some various types of flash.

The question the poster asked isn't when it'll be possible to do this, it's been possible for a long time; rather, when will most people just have a solid state drive rather than a regular hd?

Re:Hooray

[RevAaron]

As others have mentioned, getting RAM beats paging at all.

What I don't know if others have mentioned is the write limitation of flash. Most flash chips have a limitation on how many times they can be written- oftentimes, only 100k writes can be done. With a swap system designed to read and write as much as it wants, not considering this problem specific to flash, your flash swap drive could die relatively quickly...

A RAM-based solid state drive is another story, of course- but I imagine this 4 GB card is flash, not some UPS'd RAM module.

Re:Hooray

[yarbo]

Rambus isn't made for low latency, it's meant to be high bandwidth, maybe you'd be better off with some low latency DDR?

Re:Hooray

[SuperDuG]

$1K for 1GB this isn't really as "cost effective" as the poster was thinking.

Considering pricewatch sets a GB of ram at $86.00 for PC 133 and $307.00 for DDR4000 ... are you really paying $900 for a mounting kit that makes the ram look like a harddrive?

Prices are in USD, please multiply by 20 for Canadian prices, thank you.

Re:Hooray

[mixmasta]

Creating a page file on a ramdisk is absurd.

Turn off virtual memory if you have enough ram, and save yourself the trouble.

Re:Hooray

[Anonymous Coward]

Showoff. Some of us still use PC133 as our main memory... (sure, lots of it, but still)

Of course that makes your suggestion all the more alluring when I go to upgrade.

Re:Hooray

[innosent]

"low latency DDR" is still CAS2, which even at the fastest DDR rate "533Mhz" means it's damn slow. My home system is an Athlon 2500, with 400Mhz DDR. On the VAX simulation I mentioned, I've compared VAX MIPS (where VAX 11/780 = 1)results between my machine in Linux, and the simulated VAX running NetBSD/VAX 1.6.1 under Linux. VAX MIPS for the Athlon is about 2560. VAX MIPS for the simulated VAX is about 10.5. Considering that it takes an average case 10 Athlon instructions to simulate the VAX (I've reduced most of simh's decode and simulation steps to O(1)), you would expect about 256 VAX MIPS for the simulator, but: (1) The simulator can't all fit in cache like the benchmark can, (2) There will be a branch (depending on instruction), and it will have to return to the main loop, which makes pipelining more difficult. and (3) With CAS2, the memory can only read at about 100-133Mhz (since it's about 3-4 steps to strobe, read, etc, counting the fact that only a few ops are read before the branch/return). In other words, those 10 steps that the processor could practically fly through, end up getting held up by the memory system, and the simulator hits the limits of the memory system, 25 times lower than the processor limit. That's the point, we have fast processors, but commonly available memory hasn't made a significant improvement in a long time.

Oh, and Rambus can be low latency, but it depends largely on the design of the motherboard, since each bank has to be traversed in series, vs. Parallel access for DDR.

Re:Hooray

[rlk]

I think that power requirement is soon going to be more of an issue than storage capacity for these things, since battery technology just isn't advancing that fast. I've thought for a while that the ideal digital camera would use an 80 GB laptop drive, but that the problem there is the power requirement. If CF uses a lot less power (and I don't know if it does), that could be the real advantage, even if the storage is somewhat less.

An EOS 1Ds is 11 Mpixels; that works out to somewhere between 33 and 66 Mbytes/image (for raw images), depending upon the bit depth. A 4 GB card works out to roughly 64 or 128 images, which isn't even close to a day's shooting. For the (current) price, that probably doesn't yield enough of an advantage over film capacity per roll for most cases, although for underwater photography (where you can't change the roll) that might be enough to matter.

If you're going to use lower resolution, though (and most purposes don't require the full 11 Mpixels), then this kind of capacity makes a big difference. I suspect this would make a lot of sense for sports photographers and other journalists, who typically don't need absolute top quality but who would love to shoot hundreds of shots without having to reload. Event photographers (wedding photographers) could use this for candids (which is really a kind of journalism in a lot of cases), where getting the shot is more important than absolute resolution.

I still like the idea of an 80 GB laptop drive for this purpose, but it does have practicality issues -- power, and to some extent size. Journalists could carry around a couple of these 4 GB things, and swap one out to the laptop to unload while using the second one. For my preferred shooting style (landscape photography), though, this isn't enough capacity, although 80 GB would be.

Re:Hooray

[toddestan]

While a single computer harddrive cannot saturate 133 MB/s, you can get that with RAID & fast hard drives. And I would trust RAID 0 before some RAM drive, even with backup batteries.

Re:Hooray

[Gordo_1]

I'm not sure about other solid state technologies, however most Compact Flash that I've seen tends to have a very limited number of erase cycles (300k - 1M), before bits can no longer be stored reliably.

While a million write cycles might last digital camera users for many years, I'd be willing to bet that a hefty Linux or Windows user would reach that cycle limit on parts of the disk(particularly virtual memory) in just a few weeks.

Re:Hooray

[rodgerd]

How long until solid state technology replaces hard drives outright, or at least supplements them?

When solid state devices that retain state are faster than hard drives?

Current CF units have much lower throughput than a decent hard drive. They also die after far fewer write cycles than a typical hard drive.

Thier main virtues are that they're (a) compact and (b) harder to damage than a hard drive.

Al though

[frodo from middle ea]

This is good news for most professional photographers, Use amatures would rather have a cheaper portable 20GB+ backup OPtion.
Plus what is a typical life of a CF card ? I sure hope its more than 5 years If I am putting 1000$+ in it.

Plus the very though of loosing those 600 RAW images , if i loose the CF card is disturbing.

I would rather have a portable labtop with 20GB+ memory and a 1GB flash card.

Re:Al though

[Ominous Coward]

Then don't loose the card. Besides, even if you open its cage, a card's not going to go very far. It's not nearly the same as loosing dogs, lions, or some other animal.

Wait, you meant "lose", didn't you?

Re:Al though

[phallstrom]

Never used them, but xs-drive's seem to do what you want.

http://www.xs-drive.com/index.htm

Re:Al though

[Anonymous Coward]

"I sure hope its more than 5 years If I am putting 1000$+ in it."

Why? In 5 years you will be able to replace it for $100. Or spend another $1,000 for a 100GB card for your 20MP camera.

Cool, but...

[LordYUK]

a quick google search reveals that a 1 GB version is about 170... 170 * 4 = 680. At 1500 bucks, I think I'd rather just keep three other 1 gb sticks in my pocket/camera bag/whatever... granted, if you're a professional photgrapher you might think otherwise, but I recall something that we used a few years back that had to be changed every X number of pictures, what was it, oh yes... film.

I'd say it has to be easier to pop a flash card in and out of a digital camera as opposed to a roll of film... but thats just me.

Re:Cool, but...

[91degrees]

Professional photographers often use extremely long reels of film. I guess some of them want to take two photos a second in bursts of about 20-40, and changing cards every few sets would be more hassle than the photographer really wants.

Re:Cool, but...

[LordYUK]

It has nothing to do with "progress"... if each 1 GB stick is 170, then you can get 8 sticks for 1500 bucks (almost 9, really) which is 2 times the storage, or in case you cant put 2 and 2 together, is 2 times the amount of pictures taken before clearing the photos from the card.

Its not like this is a hard drive where you are limited by case size or free IDE spots or whatever... you can carry as many of these as you care to, thus, 8 GB of space on 8 cards is better than 4 GB of space on one card.

unless you're rich or your company will front the bill, that is... in that case, hey, go for it... :P

Re:Cool, but...

[Eric Ass Raymond]

two photos a second in bursts of about 20-40

Whoa! Talk about fully automatic...

Re:Cool, but...

[BostonPilot]

I fly aerial photographers. Most of them are still shooting film. We spend more time on site while they fumble to change film, than we actually do taking pictures. It's especially bad when the doors are off and the cockpit is being buffeted by wind. In my mind, digital, with a storage module big enough to hold the entire shoot, is the way to go. I had one guy with a Canon digital, using a 1 GB drive. He had to reload during the middle of the shoot. Simultaneously, Logan tower is hinting that we better finish up soon i.e. we had about 1 more minute before we got kicked out of the airspace. Bigger drive would have been much better in this case.

I'm also a semi-pro with a Nikon D1X. I currently have the 1Gb IBM Microdrive. Shooting raw NEF pictures (which is all I ever shoot) I get about 130 pictures on a drive. I hate opening the camera up in the field, so bigger is defintely better. Using jpeg that same drive holds 400 pictures, but I NEVER use jpeg. When you're printing large, you can definitely see the artifacts.

BTW, the battery use in a pro camera like the D1X is very good. Since you can shoot lots of pictures without using the battery draining LCD, you can literally shoot all day on a single battery. I usually carry 1 spare. So, "film" not battery is defintely the limitation in this case.

Re:Cool, but...

[plover]

An employee at the photo store told me that since the IBM microdrives use air bearings that they should not be spun up above 10 000 feet (without additional pressure such as an airline cabin.) Have you experienced any problems at altitudes like this, or do you not ever need to take photographers that high?

Re:Cool, but...

[BostonPilot]

Nope. We generally operate between 100 ft to 3,000 ft. From my work on avionics in the past, the limitation on hard drives to 10,000 ft isn't an 'air bearing' it's that as you have less atmosphere, the heads of the drive fly lower and lower. Above 10,000 ft there is a good chance of a head crash...

Excellent!

[Supero100]

Now I can have more storage on my digital camera than I can on my laptop!

I wonder if I can run a Kazaa node from my Canon D60...

Re:Excellent!

[johnny0101]

Now I can have more storage on my digital camera than I can on my laptop!

Except that the storage will cost you at least as much as a low to mid range laptop.

which then?

[Anonymous Coward]

so Hemos, is it a CF card (as it says at the start of the quote) or a uDrive (as it says at the end of the quote)?

Re:which then?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're comparing the CF card at the start of the quote against the microdrive at the end of the quote. Read it again.

Just get 4 1GB Microdrives

[BoomerSooner]

That takes care of a single point of failure and it's $500 cheaper.

Re:Just get 4 1GB Microdrives

[BobTheLawyer]

and less reliable
and slower
and eats up batteries a zillion times faster (that's a real statistic)

Re:Just get 4 1GB Microdrives

[pHDNgell]

That takes care of a single point of failure

Only if your camera has built-in RAID support and will take more than one of them at a time.

Re:Just get 4 1GB Microdrives

[wirelessbuzzers]

... or you're willing to swap drives mid-photo-spree. And this shouldn't be too much of a problem; who takes 150 RAW 6MPixel images in a row?

Re:Just get 4 1GB Microdrives

[CracktownHts]

Except Microdrives are susceptible to environmental issues (e.g. altitude) and are more fragile. 4 1GB CF cards would be the way to go if you're paranoid.

Re:Just get 4 1GB Microdrives

[Anonymous Coward]

Who takes 150 RAW 6MP files in a row? A professional -- probably an event, wedding, or school portrait photographer.

Imagine being a photographer shooting kids getting their diplomas at graduation. They're not going to stop while you wait for your camera to clear its buffer and reload your CF card. Right now somebody in this situation has to shoot at lower resolution or lower quality.

best quote

[paradesign]

"It would be refreshing to see someone talk about something other than the pursuit of big numbers. " in reference to the expanding storage of CF cards and mega pixel ratings. Seems to apply to more than just cameras. I took it to mean that there should be more of a focus on cost/performance ratio, rather than bleeding edge.

unrelated note... I wish all PCs would come with CF slots on them standard. i think its the best alternative to the floppy. ive even started carrying arround a card reader so i can use CF to replace my stacks of zip disks.

Re:best quote

[Tyler Eaves]

But you see, that's EXACTLY what happens. When new high-end kit comes out, the FORMER cutting edge stuff really drops in price.

Re:best quote

[tinrobot]

unrelated note... I wish all PCs would come with CF slots on them standard. i think its the best alternative to the floppy.

I use those USB pen drives. Very handy, and a similar concept. They're about the same price as CF, and most PCs have USB slots.

Re:best quote

[paradesign]

Two problems with those...

1. Inconsistant form factor. This is bad for storage and portability. CF are small and stackable.

and 2. I already have several old CF cards of various sizes.

but maybe ill get one of those just to play with.

Re:best quote

[cheekyboy]

I use a USB CF slot adaptor, but you can buy IDE CF adaptors for like $10 bucks so do it your self

Sounds like Gates in the 80's

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen to Bill Gates over here

CF

[dodell]

As far as I can tell, this thing is only useful for professional photographers. When getting my picture taken for the cover of Pro. PHP4 MM Programming, I saw that the photographer had several 1GB CF cards strewn over his desk. Digital photos are becoming more popular because people can get them reprinted and such. There's not really a loss in quality either, since the photos are 5-7 megapixels. But you end up getting 27MB TIFF files (in B/W)! I'm sure there are other uses for this sort of storage, but this is the best example I could think of.

I think that the price to pay for CF is way too heavy for this card to fit into general use. CF cards don't have the longest lifespan in the world either. Until these prices go down, I don't think CF will become a really hot item. I mean, look at iPods. 20GB of storage at less than half the price (and it'll play your MP3s).

The other disappointment regarding the price is that it's too high to push the prices down on 1GB models, so we won't see these being shoved into consumer electronics anytime soon either.

I think that by the time CF gets to be reasonably priced, other devices of similar size and much higher capacity will be available. I don't have a good feeling about the lifespan of CF.

On the other hand, I'd like to know some of the uses that this card may see. I may be completely oblivious to its practical usage. Feel free to enlighten me as to where this could be used, what it will replace, and whether or not the price is right for that application.

Re:CF

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm where you have been for the last five years?

CompactFlash is most popular type of flash cards. It's very reasonable priced, 256MB CF card costs only $48 and it's enough for ordinary use. There are also smaller densities available.

"I mean, look at iPods. 20GB of storage at less than half the price (and it'll play your MP3s)."

You can't connect your iPod to your camera.

Re:CF

[Glonoinha]

Additionally :

Drop a iPod down a flight of stairs (or more directly, a hard drive).
Drop a compact flash card down a flight of stairs.

Guess which is going to still work.

Granted this is an extreme to point out the stress handling capabilities of the media, but in a hostile environment CF has merits over hard drives.

Re:CF

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell, this thing is only useful for professional photographers

Who cares about cameras? This much memory on a compact flash format can be far more useful as storage for PocketPCs.

On the other hand, I'd like to know some of the uses that this card may see. I may be completely oblivious to its practical usage.

Yes, you are. Such memory capacity would allow pocket PCs to finally really be useful in some medical applications (physicians' charting, for example, where a single patient record can get as big as 40 meg or greater, and a doctor needs the records for several patients). It also means more MP3s, more voice recording (again, vital for medical applications), more data capture, and a dozen other uses. When it comes to PDAs, think of this as a hard drive; and ask yourself if you think you could find a use for a 4 gig hard drive. If the answer is yes (if the answer is no, then you're just not thinking), then that's the same reasons for having a 4 gig CF card, because for Pocket PCs the compact flash is pretty much the same thing.

Re:CF

[appleLaserWriter]

Drop a iPod down a flight of stairs (or more directly, a hard drive).
Drop a compact flash card down a flight of stairs.

Guess which is going to still work.

Sounds like an offshore gambling opportunity!

Re:CF

[falloutboy]

Excellent point.

IAAPP (I Am A Professional Photographer), and have been shooting almost exclusively digital for almost a year now. I have a Canon D60, which gives me about 6.1 megapixels, a 1 gig IBM microdrive, and two Lexar 256 meg CF cards. The microdrive must have bad sectors or something, because the write speed after a year is abysmal. The Lexar cards still work perfectly.

On a related topic, every so often someone will tell me that the digital SLRs don't give you a qualitatively "better" image than a point-and-shoot. Judge for yourself: fotki gallery.

Re:CF

[The Zody]

I have actualy left a compact flash card in my pants while washing them, and i was still able to read the files after i discovered it.

Re:CF

[wolftrap]

sorry but your digital photos do not have the color depth of film. however, this is not a reflection of your skills as a photographer

another few years and the story may be different

Re:CF

[falloutboy]

"sorry but your digital photos do not have the color depth of film. however, this is not a reflection of your skills as a photographer"

I guess that depends on how you define "color depth." but more important is the medium on which you observe the image. You looked at my pictures on your monitor, which is an RBG device displaying 72 dpi. If you compare a print from color film (slide or negative) next to a print from a digital SLR, each one can be tweaked so that the prints look nearly indistinguishable*.

Two things I've noticed about the D60 that could stand to be improved are that photos are generally overexposed by about a half stop, and reds tend to get blown out (endemic to the CMOS sensor, I once read).

* Assumes the same lens or comparable lenses were used for each shot.

Re:CF

[Anonymous Coward]

When getting my picture taken for the cover of Pro. PHP4 MM Programming,

WOW. YOU ARE FUCKING FAMOUS!!!

Too big

[nbarr]

Experts say you should never use a card bigger than 512Kb. Why? Imagine loosing one card? You'll loose 2Gb of image information. If you use 4 cards of 512Kb, and you loose one, you will not be loosing that much info. Dont put all the eggs on the same basket.

Re:Too big

[mekkab]

But if you only have 1 card- its in your camera. If you lose that card, you have FAR greater problems on your hands!

Conversely- if you are juggling 4 different little pieces of plastic, the ability to lose one is a lot easier!

Re:Too big

[nbarr]

Loosing a card does not imply loosing it fisically. Imagine it gets corrupt...

Re:Too big

[Anonymous Coward]

Even assuming you meant to use a large "B", meaning "byte", instead of the small "b", meaning "bit", you still don't make any sense. If I was restricted to 512KB cards, my camera would be pretty useless, since the file size of the individual pictures is between 1,000-2,000KB. Perhaps you meant MB instead of Kb? Is it really that hard to get these units right?

Re:Too big

[Anonymous Coward]

Experts? What experts out of curiosity? The experts that live inside your butt and look oddly similar to those nasty flying creatures in "The Wizard of Oz"? And learn to spell...it's physical, not fisicklasdghehu or however the hell you spelled it.

Re:Too big

[m.dillon]

I suppose it's always a worry but compact flash is far more robust then a microdrive. Even if the filesystem gets corrupted you can still stick the CF card into a computer and probably recover most of the data. I don't even consider microdrives any more because of the horror stories I've read on their fragility, but I've never lost data from a (flash based) CF card.

Still, the entry point price of the 4GB card is far too expensive relative to the price of 1GB cards. People with 11Mpix+ cameras might buy them, but the price performance curve is still squarely in the 512M-1GB range.

-Matt

Re:Too big

[nbarr]

sorry, I meant to say MB, not KB

Re:Too big

[nbarr]

Well, I'm portuguese. Its normal for me to make mistakes in english. So what? But thanks for poiniting that to me anyway.

Re:Too big

[mekkab]

If it gets corrupt you rescue the data from the card (plenty of tools to do that now) and re-format. Ta-da!

Its still the same problem if you have 4 CF cards and one (or all!) get corrupted- rescue the data, reformat.

Re:Too big

[nbarr]

of course, those tools are 100% reliable, right? Well, lets suppose they are. What if it happens that the card is unrecovable? You loose 4Gb worth of photos...

The problem is also that people tend to leave their photos in the card if it is big enough. Now imagine you didnt put a copy of the photos in you harddrive because you had plenty of space in the card? You would loose it all.

If you use smaller cards, you'll feel the need to backup more frequently.

Re:Too big

[nbarr]

I would like to had something more. If you have one big 4Gb card, you'll feel inclined to leave the photos there. Why copy them to my pc? plenty of room left...

So, if you loose a 4Gb card, you'll probably loose months worth of pictures... forever!

Re:Too big

[stratjakt]

One advantage of all the space is you dont have to worry about how much space is left when you take a shot.

Imagine, say, a sports photographer. "Gosh it sure looks like a great play, but I've only got 3 shots left and dont want to miss the shot-of-the-century because I'm switching cards. I better save them."

Not to mention that in the olden days, with film, you wound up having to pay to develop those crappy shots along with the good ones.

You can just shoot everything, throw out the crap later. Your chances of getting the "perfect shot" go up tremendously.

Re:Too big

[tinrobot]

If I was restricted to 512KB cards, my camera would be pretty useless, since the file size of the individual pictures is between 1,000-2,000KB.

Doing the math puts the storage somewhere between 256 and 512 pictures per card. Considering that a roll of 35mm film only holds 36 pictures, I say it's somewhat better than "useless." A lot better, IMHO.

Re:Too big

[afidel]

For the ultimate story of CF rugidness you have to see This link.

Re:Too big

[schmink182]

Unfortunately, if you *need* to store 4 GB on flash, then, sticking to your advice, one would need 8,000 cards. You may want to note that these cards would cost at least $1 each, so you may as well just buy a few 4 GB cards and keep redundant data.

Re:Too big

[nbarr]

I meant to say 512 MB, not KB.

Re:Too big

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was restricted to 512KB cards, my camera would be pretty useless, since the file size of the individual pictures is between 1,000-2,000KB.

Doing the math puts the storage somewhere between 256 and 512 pictures per card

And what kind of math would that be? dividing by zero? you can't fit ANY pictures bigger than 512KB on 512KB card

Re:Too big

[tinrobot]

"Gosh it sure looks like a great play, but I've only got 3 shots left and dont want to miss the shot-of-the-century because I'm switching cards. I better save them."

Hopefully, most professional photographers are smart enough to swap cards when they hit 80-90% capacity between plays rather than 99.9% during a play.

Re:Too big

[Chanc_Gorkon]

That article was incredible. Those film camera's were toast. It's amazing how close this guy got to the thing. One can only imagine what happened seconds after the last frame was shot. This is a testament to the man as well as the technology. Bill Biggart, you were an incredible man. Thanks for posting that link.

Re:Too big

[mekkab]

If you use smaller cards, you'll feel the need to backup more frequently.


Don't bank on it.
Lets assume you are not a professional photographer (if you are and you forget to back up your stuff, you are "stupid" (I beleive that's an industry term ;) )

IF you are like me, you have 3-4 CF cards floating around. If you are a causual user, you are going to forget what is on each card. So you use one about half way, think you are going to take a lot of photographs, swap in a fresh card. Then you only fill that one half way. You then repeat.
So you now have 3 cards, only half full, which doesn't justify the time it takes to sit in front of your machine to down load them.
So you don't feel the need to back up more frequently, becuase your cards have "soo much room left on them"- as such, they languish.

Now your argument The problem is also that people tend to leave their photos in the card if it is big enough. Now imagine you didnt put a copy of the photos in you harddrive because you had plenty of space in the card? You would loose it all.

assumes that "age" is a factor for corruption. An equally likely candidate for some cameras is improper formatting and byte alignment. In that case, time isn't your enemy at all- picture order is.

I think in the end, it just comes down to what is easier- monolithic is simple- because there is only 1. If it makes sense for you to juggle around a lot of little cards, then by all means.
I think the corruption argument is tenuous, given the different types of CF corruption (based upon my limited google researching) and the lack of accurate failure rates- regardless of you spanning your luck over 4 cards, if you lose that 1 picture that you wanted, you've still lost it.

Re:Too big

[thinkninja]

Yeah, that's insightful considering that a single high-quality shot on my camera is over 2MB (4MP compressed, 11MB TIFF). Never mind 6MP images as mentioned in the article.

We all know no one will ever need more than 640K of RAM, either.

Re:Too big

[nbarr]

I meant MB, not KB. I think this is the 3rd time I say this

Re:Too big

[m.dillon]

Unbelievable. I am glad his wife and friends were able to recover his legacy!

Re:Too big

[jridley]

Is it really that hard to get these units right?

Possibly, since it seems to be difficult for him to spell "lose" properly, as well; he's using the completely different word "loose" instead.

Re:Too big

[tinrobot]

They don't even make 512KB cards, so your point is even more obscure. I was assuming there was a typo and meant to say 512MB.

Past that, I got nothing.

Re:Too big

[mekkab]

My god.

In light of recent evidence, your advice SUCKS. R.I.P. Bill Biggart.

You'd pay $1,500 for that?

[BTWR]

Why would someone pay $1,500 for this when 1 Gigabyte cards have now dipped below $100? Besides the fact that these 4GB cards will be $500 or less in a year (ok, maybe 18 months), what possible advantage is there over four 1GB cards at a fraction of the cost (despite the convinience, which is certainly not worth $1000)?

Re:You'd pay $1,500 for that?

[Anonymous Coward]

i call BS. provide, please, any link to a 1 GB card under $100.

Re:You'd pay $1,500 for that?

[utmecheng]

not only is the under $100 stuff bs there are plenty of applications where the storage could be useful. There are applications that are just really being developed for automated camera use as well as recording digital movies in one card. its pricey but there are definitly uses for it.

Re:You'd pay $1,500 for that?

[m.dillon]

I can find 1GB cards in the $200-$250 range, but not under a $100. 18 months for the price to drop that much is possible, but not very likely because the demand curve isn't going to be there for several years. Vendors have been playing around with 11Mpix cameras but 11Mpix is massive overkill for 95% of the photographers out there. Even with a 6Mpix camera the lenses you use and the quality of the CCD/CMOS sensor are far more important then the number of pixels. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the next big improvement is going to be a move towards 16 bits per pixel, which when coupled with further improvements on digital noise issues will yield film-like contrast and exposure capabilities.

Re:You'd pay $1,500 for that?

[Anonymous Coward]

1GB cards for under $100?

Yeah Right!

Show me where, and I'll buy you a dozen!

Re:You'd pay $1,500 for that?

[BTWR]

Sorry, my bad. Not $100 - $171.99 after $40 mail in rebate. Huge difference. Oh and on ebay they've gone for $150 or less.

Unlimited storage support by using FORTH!

[Rares Marian]

You don't need a different camera. Just pretend it's a filesystem when the computer connects.

Forth uses numbered blocks. I have yet to understand why the camera should need a file allocation table.

Morons.

Re:Unlimited storage support by using FORTH!

[arkanes]

CF cards are used for more than cameras. If you want anything else to be able to read your pictures, you need to have a standard way of representing the files on the card. Suprisingly, we call this a "filesystem". If you want every camera to have it's own proprietary storage that only that camera can use, and can only be read by a special hardware adapter with special software, then by all means, then by all means, keep pushing the use of Forth(!?) as way of writing files.

How about Manufacturers

[agent dero]

What I would like to see is smarter cameras that make use of that cheaper 256MB of CF memory, instead of me having to spend a bundle on 512MB or 1GB+

I think it would just be a great feature to be able to Zip or Tar my older pictures on a camera, say everytime I take 100 pictures on my 2MP camera, it asks me if it can compact the last 50 to save disk space. That would be really awesome, then I could take more pictures per card.

Re:How about Manufacturers

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtually all cameras offer various levels of compression for pictures.

Compressing already compressed JPEGs with Zip (Tar doesn't compress anything) won't make a noticable difference.

Re:How about Manufacturers

[m.dillon]

Well, zip and gzip don't do a very good job on JPEGs, since JPEGs are already highly compressed. You can already 'save' CF space simply by telling the camera to take a lower quality or lower resolution shot. I can put 300-500 high resolution JPGs on a 1GB CF card with my EOS-10D (6Mpix) but if I drop the resolution and/or quality down that number increases beyond 2000. Of course, nobody in their right mind actually takes pictures at less then full quality when one has that kind of storage, but it's still an option.

In a few years all high grade consumer cameras are going to have automatic WIFI upload capabilities anyway, which will limit how much in-camera CF capacity you actually need in a professional setting. At the moment the new Nikon has it but it isn't worth the price premium. Or, alternatively, there will be CF format cards with WIFI. NFS anyone?

Re:How about Manufacturers

[flahiker]

This card is targeted to high end users with 6 and 12 Mpixel cameras. They shoot raw images (lossless compression). Very high file sizes are created. It is not geared to the 2 Mpixel consumer camera which is using jpeg compression. Tarring or zipping jpeg compressed immages would be pointless since the images are ALREADY compressed far beyond what normal compression can do.

Re:How about Manufacturers

[afidel]

Actually at least on the D30 there IS a step like zip to compress the RAW image (in fact it even puts a little 2/3rds size low quality JPEG in as a thumbnail =) Of course zip can't compare to JPEG, but JPEG's don't have the information necessary to do post processing like the RAW images do.

Re:How about Manufacturers

[m.dillon]

True, which is why RAW images are more then twice as large as a high quality JPEG but still not as large as a TIFF. But RAW images don't compress either. If I try to gzip a JPEG I get a file that is basically the same size as the original JPEG. If I try to gzip a (canon) RAW file from my EOS-10D, I get a file that is basically the same size as the original as well. In otherwords, standard compression will not work. JPEG compression on the otherhand works wonderfully but of course it is lossy.

Canon at least is very conservative when you tell it to produce a high quality JPEG. The only thing you lose is contrast from the 12bpp->8bpp conversion. This is important, of course, but it depends on the type of shot being taken.

If I take the high quality JPEG output from the Canon EOS-10D and run it through a JPEG->JPEG converter with the quality set to 80% the original 2.5MB JPEG turns into a 654MB JPEG and I am hard pressed to see any difference in quality between the two.

What this tells me is that we need a new JPEG standard which operates on 16bpp instead of 8bpp, and once we have it there won't be much of a reason for even professionals to use RAW any more.

Re:How about Manufacturers

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed my point, the reason the RAW images won't compress anymore is that they are ALREADY zipped, it's like trying to gzip an already zipped file, you aren't likely to find much of anything to compress.

Re:How about Manufacturers

[pHDNgell]

Of course, nobody in their right mind actually takes pictures at less then full quality when one has that kind of storage, but it's still an option.

I think my Fuji got it right. When I start running low on space, I can scale down some of the images that I've already taken but am less excited about.

Re:How about Manufacturers

[m.dillon]

Hmm. Well, remember that zip/gzip basically use the LZH algorithm, which is good at finding and compressing duplicate substrings. These algorithms will *NEVER* do a good job on high resolution images due to pixel flicker in the lower bits, even from a high quality camera. It is certainly possible to compress these images far more then you get with the RAW output, with little or no loss in quality, but you aren't going to get it zip/gzip.

I'll use it for sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself. My 1GB microdrives fill up long before my batteries die. I usually have 3 full microdrives before I change batteries in my Nikon D1x and twice that with the D100.

For certain assignments, like covering large events where I may shoot several thousand images, I use an external DCB (digital camera battery) on my belt and can shoot over 20GB before needing a fresh battery.

So yes, this 4GB CF card is a good thing to me.

Of course, the new Nikon D2H accessory to constantly upload image files via WiFi as I shoot, looks like a nice toy too (it writes to the CF card and uploads from there, so if WiFi is down, you never lose images.)

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your own advice and RTFA you twat. These cards are solid state flash memory. They're being compared against non-solid-state microdrives.

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I will be able to store 600 RAW images taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera! If its also true that Lexar's WA (Write Acceleration) technology can improve performance further with WA enabled cameras, then this is great because it will be even faster without eating CPU (like SCSI). Unfortunatelly, because the card is larger than 2 GB I will need at least camera which is FAT32 compliant. I heard the other day that such a card was available at about $1,499 ($0.47/MB).
Doh! It looks like Lexar has managed to be faster then Hitachi this time (IBM storage division? dunno I'm confused) with the 4Gb Microdrive they made. I think...

Posting anonymous cos I've lost my password.

6GB CF from Pretec

[Eugene]

A while ago Pretec announced 3GB and 6GB CF card, while 3GB is out, 6GB capacity CF is still no where in sight yet. but the competition from 4GB card surely will start driving the price down.

Why paging is necessary

[dodell]

Paging is implemented in most main-stream operating systems to support legacy environments (even now some computers, namely laptops, come with 128MB RAM -- WinXP is the market OS... see below). There are several good reasons for this for every operating system.

• Windows is RAM-intensive. I have XP and 256MB RAM. 128MB was definitely not enough, and 512 would be the lowest amount that would cut it without paging on my box. Problem is, my laptop doesn't support that much (it's an older Dell Latitude model). I would rather have paging turned on here than not be able to execute more applications/type more text/move my mouse to free an application.
• UNIX and Linux systems obviously are used in many server environments. Without paging, it's not useful in stressful server environments.

Many hobby OSes are not using paging in their development. While it is a well documented part of OS design and development, most new hobby OS makers are simply leaving it out with the reason that, if their OS ever did evolve to take up that much RAM, it's so cheap that one could easily buy more.

For the multi-tiered model to work, there would need to be specific slots for swapping memory, which would cost space on the motherboard. Then OS developers would have to start supporting this model.

While this is a fun idea, it isn't practical because:

a) Memory is *CHEAP* and if you run out of it, you can always page to the hard drive,

b) All modern systems and OSes support 1-4GB RAM, which is definitely enough for most (any?) consumer (at the moment),

c) If you have 4GB of RAM being used, you should be upgrading to a more powerful computer, not adding 256MB swap. Chances are you're going to need a lot more swap space than that if you're doing work requiring more than 4GB RAM.
d) Finally, if you use this extra 256MB RAM, you're still swapping anyway. So why not just make systems support more RAM in the first place?

I hope I adequately answered your question :).

Re:Why paging is necessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux 2.4 (the kernel, to avoid argument) on i386 only supports (by default) 960 MB. (It can be compiled specially for 4 GB or even 64 GB, but the latter requires PAE (i686 only) and even the former might result in inefficient usage of memory - if for instance a full 4 GB were installed on a system, every (?) byte of virtual memory would be mapped by a byte of physical memory, even rarely used tables or never used chunks of memory, which might lead to some complications.)

No idea as to how far glibc goes. I suspect 4 GB only, possibly even only 2 GB. Anything beyond that requires 64 bits. (I suppose a 36-bit computer (with 9-bit bytes) could be built, but it wouldn't run Unix or any Unix-like system. It could be used for C. The same goes for any other byte length, and I imagine odd word lengths (for example, six 8-bit bytes) would be inefficient though possible.)

Re:Why paging is necessary

[11223]

The Pentium 4 already does do 36-bit addressing, and the OS could be modified to take advantage of this by setting a 4GB (more realistically, 2GB) virtual address space for each process but allowing the VM to address the entire 16GB range. This is approximately what Apple is doing for the G5 under Jaguar; user processes will still have a 32-bit virtual address space but the VM will be capable of addressing the full 64-bit (rather, 48-bit external address space) space. What they do under Panther is unknown for now.

Re:Why paging is necessary

[Fweeky]

Uhm, paging actually improves memory efficiency when implemented properly (see: FreeBSD) by keeping rarely used pages out of limited physical memory (or more accurately by preemtively writing out rarely hit dirty pages to swap and leaving the pages in memory until something else wants more memory, at which point the already swapped pages can be dropped immediately).

Even Windows understands this to some extent; by aggressively swapping unused things out it can ensure physical memory is available for running applications and caching. It's implementation and tuning may leave something to be desired, of course :)

Re:Why paging is necessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, you're (deliberately, I hope) misunderstanding the context. Swapping anytime is never, ever an improvement over never swapping. FreeBSD swaps out pages early and makes them available for other uses so it doesn't have to swap when it's under load. That's better than swapping when load hits the system, but far slower than just not swapping, i.e. having enough RAM in the first place.

Re:Why paging is necessary

[r55man]

I hope I adequately answered your question :).

This shouldn't have been modded up so high. It didn't answer the question at all.

The original poster wasn't asking why we don't do away with paging, he was asking why does the paging have to be done on the hard drive.

High-end RAM, the kind you want sitting on the motherboard, is still expensive compared to yesterdays cheap PC100/PC133. But the older RAM is still *way* faster than the hard drive.

So what he was asking was: Why can't we figure out a way to use this old, cheap RAM for swap space instead of the hard drive. In other words, he wants stick a bunch of old PC100/PC133 modules together, and make it look like a swap partition to the OS.

He's not the only one either. A $50 PCI card, or an extra $30 tacked onto the cost of the motherboard would pay for itself many times over if you could load it up with a few GB of RAM on the cheap. For big applications, servers, or users who run many apps at once, you could get away with buying a lot less of the expensive RAM if the swap penalty wasn't so great.

Now, there *are* people making PCI cards that can be loaded up with RAM and treated as a disk by the OS, but they are not common, and last I checked they certainly weren't cheap. But that's probably just because there's not much demand and little competition.

Re:Why paging is necessary

[Fweeky]

Obviously, having enough memory is preferable to *having* to swap (I have half a gig in this machine, it has 160k of swap in use; a similar 2G system has 116k in use), but that doesn't make swapping a bad idea, and it doesn't reduce performance in the way you suggest. Preemptively swapping doesn't reduce performance, and being able to reuse clean pages straight away because of that is *massively* preferable to the system simply running out of memory and having to nuke tasks at random to satisfy requests.

Re:Why paging is necessary

[yakovlev]

NOTE: for the duration of this response I use the definition of "swap" used in the windows "swap space" description, and recognize that the term "page" might be more appropriate. As this didn't appear to be a semantics argument, this seems appropriate.

Uhm, you're (deliberately, I hope) misunderstanding the context. Swapping anytime is never, ever an improvement over never swapping. FreeBSD swaps out pages early and makes them available for other uses so it doesn't have to swap when it's under load. That's better than swapping when load hits the system, but far slower than just not swapping, i.e. having enough RAM in the first place.

That's true, if you're willing to accept that the definition of "having enough RAM in the first place" is the sum of the memory requirements of all typically running applications as well as enough memory to store all filesystem data used by those applications. That's probably more than 4GB.

Otherwise, there often is "a little bit" of almost totally unused program data that could efficiently replaced with disk cache. Things like `login` may always be running, but they're almost never actually doing anything on a server as they spend most of their time waiting on input or network connections. During that wait time, a little bit of swap would allow those programs to be moved off of memory to make more efficient use of that space.

The easiest way to look at this is to think of a database server. If you've got a database with thousands of TB of data in it, then there is no way that you can fit the entire database in memory, even with several GB of memory. Sure, adding 256MB of memory is better than adding 256MB of swap, but the cost of adding 256MB of swap to such a system is basically zero, and allows the OS to make efficient use of existing memory resources. Adding more than that probably won't improve performance because most of memory will be disk cache anyways, but why have no swap space and deny the OS of the chance to make such optimizations?

What it comes down to is: moving an active (CPU or disk bound) program to disk to make room for another active program is bad; get more memory in this case. Moving an inactive program to disk to make room for an active program's disk cache is good; this is just using existing resources more efficiently.

I overstate my case somewhat, as there are reliability, development cost, and minor performance tradeoffs to implementing swap space, but saying it is NEVER a benefit is just not true.

Re:Why paging is necessary

[Kris_J]

Now, there *are* people making PCI cards that can be loaded up with RAM and treated as a disk by the OS, but they are not common, and last I checked they certainly weren't cheap. But that's probably just because there's not much demand and little competition.

One of the major disadvantages with this is that there isn't a huge glut of cheap old RAM, at least not for a few generations of computer back and the sizes are so small that it's not worth considering. As PCs get old the main way to boost the speed is to add more RAM. I've been keeping some PIII 700MHz PCs in active service by increasing the RAM and installing XP. I've maxxed-out three PCs at 384MBytes, the rest are now typically somwhere between 640MBytes and 1Gig. As each one of these PCs die the RAM goes into the others. I suppose that in a couple of years I might have 512MBytes of PC100 RAM with no home, but after spare PCs for our sessional staff the next project is a batch of kiosks for students to use during orientation (particularly useful for the new ones that can't get into the labs).

Do the math...

[Kjella]

600 RAW * 6M pixels = 3,6G pixels or 3,6gigabit. At a minimum of 8 bits color resolution per pixel, it'll be 3,6 gigabytes.

Kjella

Re:Do the math...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, 256 Colours ought to be enough for anybody. ;)

Re:Do the math...

[plastik55]

Well, it's actually how CCD sensors work. Each pixel senses only one color, and they are usually laid out like

GRGRGRGRGRGR
BGBGBGBGBGBG
GRGRGRGRGRGR
BGBGBG BGBGBG
GRGRGRGRGRGR
BGBGBGBGBGBG

The red, green and blue channels are later interpolated by software.

When a camera manufacturer says their sensor is "6 megapixels" it usually means 6 million sensors, not 6 million RGB triplets.

When The Price Drops

[mustangsal66]

Think about it... 6 Divx movies in the palm of your hand...

Now to create a card reader/decoder for my DVD player...

Re:When The Price Drops

[stratjakt]

And whats in the palm of your other hand?

These things rock!

[slewfo0t]

I am currently using one of the Lexar 2GB cards for a Hard Drive on an embedded box that I put together. It's faster than IDE flash drives and costs MUCH less. A 512mb IDE flash drive costs about the same as a 2GB Compact Flash card. I have also tried using the 2GB Compact Flash cards by Pretc. I do not recommend using these cards for a drive. They proved to be extremely slow and some applications would not function with them. Lexar has really come out with a nice poroduct here!

Sandisk is working on a 4GB card as well, but it is not yet released.

- Slew -

Re:These things rock!

[Lumpy]

I am currently using one of the Lexar 2GB cards for a Hard Drive on an embedded box that I put together.

what the hell for? 2GB is way too much storage needed for an embedded device. Hell I can fit my OS apps and about 12 days worth of data and logs on a 8meg CF card.

Also you need to be using the correct filesystem, anything but a Flash filesystem will hose that card within days, you need to spread out the writes to keep from wearing out the flash in an address range.

2GB flash in an embedded system... What the heck for??

Re:These things rock!

[jridley]

Hope you don't have your swap file on there, or it's probably going to be dead quickly. You can't write to CF an unlimited number of times.

Re:These things rock!

[slewfo0t]

I needed a device that would work in an industrial environment where I would not have to worry about moving parts and failures. I'm using embedded XP as an OS and the applications that I use require all of that space. These are custom built boxes for our customer that provide industrial network bridging capabilities, Remote troubleshooting and diagnostics, and file storage.

- Slew -

Re:These things rock!

[Anonymous Coward]

you do realize that changing to a non microsoft OS will decrease the needed system overhead by at least 90%?

and if your company wrote the app, simple to port to the new OS, otherwise remote troubleshoot/admin is still just as easy.

i certianly do NOT reccomend any file storage on these devices.CF is NOT reliable for multiple rapid read-write-read. just run an ethernet cable in the office and drop the files there.

Re:These things rock!

[slewfo0t]

I would change to a non-microsoft OS, but the applications won't port. They aren't written by our company and I have no control over them. As for file X-fer, it is VERY limited. I would only use it 1 or 2 times per year max. This box is only used during situations where we have to drill into the facility from a support standpoint and help the end user find and repair a problem that they are unable to fix otherwise.

- Slew -

Re:These things rock!

[AdamInParadise]

Well, technically an IDE flash drive and a CF card are exactly the same thing, since a CF card uses IDE to communicate with everything else. I bet you already have one of those, but an IDE adapter for CF card can be had for less than $10. It's just a a few plugs and resistors.

I guess that IDE flash drive are more expensive because people don't know this and because CF is pretty much a commodity item by now. It probably outsell IDE flash drives 1 to 100.

Re:These things rock!

[tdrury]

2GB flash in an embedded system... What the heck for??

How about 4 hours of engine telemetry - most of which is high bandwidth? How about video? I'm putting a hell of a lot more than 2GB in there.

Not all embedded systems are toasters.

Re:These things rock!

[Anonymous Coward]

why do you need 4 hours of engine telemetry? please give REAL reasons.

Video... stor it outside the system.

you are talking portable not EMBEDDED.

Re:These things rock!

[meowsqueak]

Actually, compact flash cards usually contain an embedded controller that manages the internal flash for you, including wear leveling (spreading the writes over the entire flash). These CF devices usually look like an IDE disk drive from the outside, complete with CHS/LBA addressing.

Flash filesystems such as JFFS are designed for RAW flash, and NOT for compact flash. You have little, if any, control over how the internal controller manages the flash inside the CF card, so you might as well run FAT or ext2 on it.

For example, you cannot say with any certainty (just by looking/prodding it) whether two adjacent sectors in the IDE space are actually adjacent in the flash space - they might be at completely different 'ends' of the flash. Only the controller knows the mapping.

And assuming you do work it out, it will be different on the next variant or manufacturers CF card.

You would be better off, in my opinion, booting the kernel and mounting a read-only filesystem from compact flash. If you need to write persistent data, you can copy the root filesystem to a ramdisk and periodically write the data back to the flash. Here we calculated that a write every 15 minutes would allow the CF we are using in our microwave radios to last 30 years. The tradeoff is, you can lose up to 15 minutes of data (usually logs) if the power cuts out.

Re:These things rock!

[tdrury]

Why 4 hours of engine telemtry? Because races often last this long. And storing outside the system is not easy. First you can have 2 or more video channels in addition to the data. That a huge amount a bandwidth and teams are not given enough bandwidth to push that much data through. In addition, most race tracks do not have 100% coverage line-of-sight to transmit the data back to the pits.

Television companies get their own bandwith (and a lot of it) but they can't put cameras on every car and often only have one. To get around line-of-sight they often relay the transmission off a helicopter or the Goodyear blimp.

Real enough for you?

So "portable" and "embedded" are mutually exclusive? I've build systems with battery powered 8-bit microcontrollers and 19" racks filled with dozens of transputers and test equipment. Both are embedded systems.

"Than" vs "Then" and "GB" vs "Gb"

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense, but "Editor" the editing seems to be getting worse...

1. "It looks like Lexar has managed to be faster then Hitachi (Former IBM storage division) with their 4Gb Microdrive. "

Then \Then\, conj.
In that case; in consequence; as a consequence; therefore; for this reason.

Than: A particle expressing comparison, used after certain adjectives and adverbs which express comparison or diversity, as more, better, other, otherwise, and the like. It is usually followed by the object compared in the nominative case. Sometimes, however, the object compared is placed in the objective case, and than is then considered by some grammarians as a preposition. Sometimes the object is expressed in a sentence, usually introduced by that; as, I would rather suffer than that you should want.

2. It is giga BYTES, not giga BITS. GB vs Gb.

Failure rates and mirrored arrays

[tinrobot]

What's the MTBF on these things? I've had CF cards go bad on me before, and it's always a bummer when you lose photos. I personally think it's best to go with several mid-sized cards rather than one gargantuan one. That way, if a single card goes bad, you don't lose everything. Even for pro-tographers who take zillions of pictures, it's a good idea. Changing a CF card takes less time than changing a roll of film, so it won't interrupt the workflow all that much. Plus it might save you a major headache should you lose everything.

On the same lines, I think someone should come out with a redundant flash card. Instead of a single 4GB card, perhaps two 2GB cards in one, with the storage mirrored as in a RAID. I know some people might pay extra for the added security/redundancy.

Re:Failure rates and mirrored arrays

[timeOday]

Might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd imagine the MTBF for a card simply sitting in a camera is an awful lot longer than for a card that's constantly handled, plugged in and out, dropped, gets dirty, etc...

w00t!

[Tuxinatorium]

I believe I speak for all the nerds around here when I say it's always great to have more removable pr0n storage space!! w00t! That's almost as good as DVD+RW!

Re:So fucking what

[demastri]

that $1500 could feed a lot of starving children.

Or better yet, store the pictures of up to 600 of them without having to change memory sticks!

All the eggs in one basket

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? That's what we do with the Windoze registry!

The *real* boon in high-capacity CF (etc.) cards

[tambo]

...will be the elimination of the MP3 player market.

It frustrates me to no end that I carry around a rather remarkably-specced PDA that could handily play MP3s... but I'm hampered by limited storage. It's like being unable to drive your Corvette because you can't buy enough gas.

The high-capacity portable-medium format will obsolesce one device from my gadget arsenal. One less battery to recharge; one less file store to maintain; one less device for firmware, driver updates, and connectors.

David Stein, Esq.

yes, but probably not in a 4GB chunk

[alexander m]

in retrospect there are some advantages to getting two 40x 1GB cards, but i went for the 2GB for convenience' sake - off on a long holiday soon, want to shoot RAW, don't want to have too many bits to lose! :)

according to the numbers, speed-wise, the transfer rate is 1.5 - 2x faster. however, this doesn't take into account the faster instant response - my camera (eos d60) feels noticeably more responsive compared to the 1GB microdrive i've been using (though i'm sure this improvement is true of most solid-state cards). so, yes, a 32x or 40x does seem a good step-up from the microdrive.

other good investment - a USB2 multi-card reader (LaCie Universal Media Drive) for dumping the images off the camera. when you fill up one of those cards you really DON'T want to have to dump all the RAW images off the camera over USB 1! it's pretty much hours vs minutes for a large card like that...

maybe a 1Ds user will see the point in a 4GB drive, but even then you're better off getting 2GB cards instead. as the other posterd mentions, a single point of failure isn't a great idea if you're professional...

No, that's precisely what you want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine loosing one card? You'll loose 2Gb of image information.

The card has to be somewhat loose. If the card is too tight, you'll never get it in the slot in the first place, rendering it useless.

Wow! Closing In On Mechanical HDs

[istartedi]

My primary drive is 8 GB. Windows uses only half of it (other half is BSD). Yes, I have another drive in there too. Obviously, I don't store a lot of music and video. The point is, it's looking more and more realistic for at least some users like myself to have totally solid-state PCs. Quiet PC nirvanna; just around the corner.

Re:Is the word "than" dying?

[istartedi]

No. The prefix thanato is for words pertaining to death.

Oh yes there is.

[Kjella]

One word: postprocessing

Sure if you get *everything* right the first time, like white balance, saturation, brightness, contrast, no cutting, adding logo/copyright notice (most online places to do prevent ripoffs), no retouching (most "pro" pics have been retouched) and so on and so on.

There's not much point in *distributing* it as RAW over jpg, no. But taking a jpg from your camera, editing it, and then saving to jpg again *is* visible. Do try it. And if you say that you still can't see it, then you have a much more expensive camera than you need.....

Kjella

Oh, oh idea!

[tomstdenis]

Why not just use a high quality/lossless image compressor? Storing raw images is just plain stupid.

It is fairly trivial to mod the DCT to get a DCT like lossless transform [look for bindct in citeseer]. These transforms don't have as much coding gain but are better than raw storage. Even if you get 2:1 to 3:1 that lets you store 3GB of raw photos on a cheaper 1GB cart... math man!

Also [i dunno for sure] but doesn't JPEG2000 have a lossless mode? If the camera people [and software developers] chose to use that over the older JPEG standard it probably would be a tad better.

Tom

Re:Oh, oh idea!

[jrkotrla]

raw images aren't 'stupid'. They allow the photographer much more latitude in the post-production process in a digital darkroom. By recording everything the camera senses, you are allowed a greater range of exposure compensation than even the newer jpeg formats.

Re:Oh, oh idea!

[tomstdenis]

Hence the lossless compression step.

A raw truecolour 2048x1536 image is 9MB. So on a 1GB cart you could store 112 images. Add a simple lossless compression step and you could probably fit 200 or more images on the same cart.

Of course this is just a symptom of mankind. Want more and more and find less use for things. Sure a 1GB cart can only hold 1024MB of raw data, but instead of being wasteful by storing raw images actually put some work into it and store them properly.

Tom

Re:Oh, oh idea!

[red_gnom]

I think, that an image in the raw format preserves information about alignment of RGB cells in every pixel of the camera. This is a sub-pixel data. It allows you to produce more accurate end picture after processing.
There are many configurations for camera sensors. For example:

GRGRGR
BGBGBG
GRGRGR

RGBRGB
RGBRGB
RGBRGB

R-G-B-R-G
-B-R-G-B-
R-G-B-R-G
-B-R-G-B-

Re:Oh, oh idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes yes fine, but you can still retain this info and still be able to compress it. Hence the term "lossless compression".

-ChrisXS

Re:Oh, oh idea!

[red_gnom]

You are right it can be compressed, but the reality seems to be different.

In the ordinary RGB "loss less compression" there is only one value for green color for each pixel. Look at the first example of pattern on CCD There are two green sensors for each pixel (marked in bold).

GRGRGR
BGBGBG
GRGRGR

This is additional data stored in raw file. Proper "loss less compression" should preserve such information.

Also a placement of each color sensor inside a pixel is additional data, which is not included in the ordinary "loss less compression". This is sub-pixel information. The third example shows that.

R-G-B-R-G
-B-R-G-B-
R-G-B-R-G
-B-R-G-B-

Re:Oh, oh idea!

[meta-monkey]

RAW image formats store much more than just picture information and EXIF data. Essentially, the RAW format is everything that comes out of the sensor, which is a lot more than just the values of each red/green/blue element. With this information, you can edit your photo in either your camera maker's RAW file editing software (like Canon File Viewer) or using Adobe's RAW Photoshop plug-in ($99 upgrade to PS 7.01, but it'll come bundled with 8.0 in Q1 2004).

When you work on the RAW sensor data, you can perform operations you can't do with a an image extracted from the RAW sensor data. For example, you can adjust the color temperature/white balance, which is a setting you'd have to lock-in at the time you take the photo if you're using JPEG. That's pretty vital, as colors are completely different under different types of light (sunlight, tungsten, flourescent, flash, etc). Digital exposure compenstation is a big deal, too, and don't forget color space assignment. If you're using something that actually creates an image, instead of preserving the RAW sensor data, you have to go ahead and pick a color space, like Adobe RGB or sRGB, and those descisions have very big implications for the quality and the gamut of the color in your photo.

I'm sure these aren't big deals to you, as you're not a professional photographer. This card, though, is designed for professional photographers like myself. I use RAW formats for portraits and wedding formals, and it gives me a lot more room for error, and I need all the help I can get :) Still, I'd rather have four 1GB microdrives for $200 each. Candids and news photos I shoot JPEG, anyway, so I don't need the faster write speed of CF, and they're small enough I don't need the high capacity. During portrait shoots where I use RAW I just don't shoot fast enough for the increased write speed to make any difference, as I spend the time between shots reposing the subject or trying to make sure grandma doesn't make a break for the reception early :)

Re:Oh, oh idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, oh, here's an idea, tom! Why don't you rush out and buy one of these cards so you can fully document your manham canning and mangoo bottling endevours? Huh, huh?! Good idea, yeah! and you can make a scrapbook and show it to all your friends oh what a wonderful time it'll be!!!

Re:Oh, oh idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another advantage of lossless compression is that it would allow you to can even MORE manham into the same space. Think of the possibilities!

Re:Oh, oh idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

But he doesn't have any friends...

Re:Oh, oh idea!

[SuiteSisterMary]

Having the RAW file is like having the film. Having the JPEG is like having a print.

Sure, you can take the print, copy it, alter it, change the colouring, blah blah blah, but it all works SO MUCH BETTER when you have the original negatives to work from.

NONONONO

[imsabbel]

There is a HUGE difference between png/tiff vs jpeg and raw vs jpeg.
Raw isnt just lossless compression, but rather using the direct output of the image sensor. This preserves a higher dynamic range (like 12bit per pixel) and you can later set a white balance ect in your computer.
Just make a underexposed picture with jpeg and try to salvage anything with photoshop. All formerly dark areas will be a happy 8x8 macroblock land...

600 RAW images?

[Lxy]

What am I supposed to do with a number like that? I can't relate to it or determine how this would suit my needs. Put it into terms I recognize, like Libraries of Congress. How many Volkswagons fit in one of these? Is this still Slashdot?

There's a chipper solution with more GB.

[red_gnom]

That's great, but there's a chipper solution with more storage.

Digital Wallet - 30GB $399.99, or 10GB $259.25

FlashTrax 30GB digital storage - 30GB $499

Re: You need to fix your brain

[maxume]

Loose means not attached firmly. You can wear loose clothing, it would probably be somewhat baggy. Or perhaps you have a screw loose.

Lose means to no longer possess. You lost something, like 'How could you lose the keys to my car!?"

It is quite clear that you don't know the difference, you did it like eight times in four posts...

Thank you for trying harder.

Wouldn't it die very fast?

[vadim_t]

I've heard that FAT32 is very bad to have on Flash because it keeps updating the disk space counter almost with every write. If this effect happens on a card of this size it might not last for more than a month if you fill it often.

40x?

[hendrix69]

What's the deal with measuring speed as multiples of ancient cdroms? How long is this gonna go on? Am I supposed to walk around with a pocket calculator in order to figure out what the actally speed of merchandise is? Quick: how many MBps in 48x?
It's like measuring the power of a space shuttle's lunch rockets using horse power. "Oh, you mean if we tie down 1 million and a half horses to the shuttle we'd be able to get it off the ground? Impressive..."

Re:40x?

[Anonymous Coward]

no ponies in my "lunch rockets" please!

sorry, just horsing around...

Re:40x?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you tied 1 million and a half horses to the shuttle it'd only move as fast as the slowest horse can run with a weight on it's back equivalent to the weight of the shuttle divided by 1.5 million.

Shit man, didn't you watch Back to the Future Part III? That was important stuff.

Re:Who needs this space? I DO!

[mrycar]

As a 10D user, shooting raw. I currently consume about 4 512MB cards during a shoot.

After the first two cards, I find myself slowing down in the picture taking, which is not necessarily a good thing.

If I had 4GB, I would use it.

I also use these cards to transfer data between work and home, or between friends computers and mine. The size of the data transferred frequently exceeds my capacity.

Now all we need to do, is to have them work on the price. If that price was for 40Gb then I may consider it, but as it is, I'll buy 4 1GB cards and save a few bucks.

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

A CF card I can install Windows on.

[rim shot]

Re: You need to fix your brain

[nbarr]

thanks for the insight. I am portuguese, so, my english is not that good. Allways learning...

I'd be nervous to LOSE it

[leeet]

Losing a $50 256M card ain't so bad, but a $1500 card that is worth 3x the price of a camera is another thing. Personally, I have a 128M card and I can store about 120 pics @ 3.3MP. It's more than enough for me.

I'm concerned about data corruption and I would rather transfer the pictures to (a backed up) disk ASAP. I wouldn't feel like having my entire picture collection in a backpack and lose it.

On the other hand, I do see a use for my Zaurus. I could put a lot of DivX for long flights... I'm limited to about 1:30 movies on my 256M CF right now...

Re:I'd be nervous to LOSE it

[zfalcon]

For the purposes of digital SLR cameras, $1500 is not 3x the price of a camera.

Digital SLRs _start_ at $1500 and go up to $8000 for the current models.

Good lenses range from $300 to several thousand. The price of a $1500 CF card is not going to deter any professional photographer that needs the storage.

Re:I'd be nervous to LOSE it

[Alan Shutko]

Cards this big are targetted at people with Digital SLRs which output big files. NEF files come out of my camera 7.8MiB each. I could fit about 15 pics on your card, and I have an older camera!

Goddam image censors...

[kotj.mf]

Very wrong, at least for Canon cameras, Canon's raw format captures the data as it is coming off the image censor.

Too true. When my SO and I tried to take some nekkid pictures, all the naughty bits were blurred out.

Speaking of iPods

[spagiola]

What I'd like to see is a convenient way to download pix from a digital camera directly to an iPod, from where I could then transfer them to a laptop or desktop. There needn't be a way to actually see the pix on the iPod, just a way to get them in and out so that I can clear (or back up) the pix on a CF card while travelling without having to have a laptop with me at all times.

It's all in the bees man.

[Anonymous Coward]

4GB? Byte
4Gb? bit

please B consistent.
there is quite a difference.

There ya go guys....

[TheHawke]

There's your cheap solid-state hard disk storage thats readily available, and portable too!

Certain card readers under Win2k and macs are read as actual hard drives, so there you go.. 4GB of archival storage that can be tucked into a safe spot and transported easily.

I know that Macs can create RAID arrays of multiple flash cards, now what if someone codes a program for windows or *nix to do the same?

FAT32?

[Gothmolly]

Why use a crappy FS like (V)FAT(32) when you can just do "mke2fs -m1 /dev/mmcda1" ? Oh wait, this isn't about the Zaurus or IPaq.

Still not a little hard drive replacement

[DeathB]

I've seen two misstatements repeated over and over again in this discussion. Folks have been suggesting that flash cards like this might represent the future of hard drives. They've also been mentioning that it has a higher speed than the IBM microdrive.

While this is true in a camera, where you tend to erase an entire card and then fill it in a linear fasion, this isn't true when you use it as a hard drive. Flash memory has two things which make it unique, slow erasures, and limited numbers of cycles. Unlike a hard drive, where you can simply overwrite data, in flash memory you have to erase a region of it first. Usually you also have to erase a much larger region than a filesystem block (64k vs 4k). These erasures can be as painful as .5 seconds as well. Typical UNIX filesystems like ext2 or ffs, keep their data structures in fixed locations. Most writes are to metadata, and they will cause the metadata parts of a CF card to be erased and overwritten over and over again. Unlike a hard drive which can survive almost unlimited cycles like this, you will only get a few thousand in flash memory. Copying a set of files might burn out some cells in a single operation.

The log-structured filesystem (lfs) presents a partial solution to this, by writing data in blocks, deleting it in blocks, and writing to the end of a disk before starting over again. Unfortunatly, lfs becomes unefficient once fragmentation starts to set in, as a "cleaner" is necessary to group data back into blocks.

I still think one of these would be cool in my camera, but I want a 4G microdrive for my computer.

Adam

Re:Still not a little hard drive replacement

[TheHawke]

You are correct and i retract my last post. I keep forgetting about the limits that flash-based CMOS memory has...

*sighs* Well, back to the old softstate RAID arrays until someone pulls a rabbit out of his/her hat and gets us some solidstate memory that has the equivalent storage capacity of the ST:TNG isolinear storage sticks, and has the dependability of the old seagate 1.2 gigg drives too.

Re:Still not a little hard drive replacement

[FrankDrebin]

While a CF is not a good choice for a "tradition HD" application, I would suggest that under certain conditions, a CF *can* be a good HD. For example, with embedded Linux you might mount certain partitions (e.g. /usr) as read-only which could either be on the CF, or if speed is needed part of an initrd. Certain writeable partitions (e.g. /dev, /var, /tmp) normally on your system can be a ramdisk (RAM is cheap), avoiding the flash altogether. And if you want persistent storage for other paritions (e.g. /home, /www), you may use a file system that is flash-friendly, as you suggest in your post.

Perhaps the biggest waste of a CF would be as a swap partition, it probably wouldn't last long.

Re:Still not a little hard drive replacement

[seanadams.com]

Flash memory has two things which make it unique, slow erasures, and limited numbers of cycles.

Obviously, it's been a while since you've bought a hard drive!

4 Gb is bits you mean 4 GB is bytes

[Anonymous Coward]

4 Gb is bits you mean 4 GB is bytes

.

Then?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It looks like Lexar has managed to be faster then Hitachi (Former IBM storage division) with their 4Gb Microdrive."

It seems your grammar is worse THAN I would have assumed.

TARD.

Why does people have so much problem using "than"

[Pinteiro]

See the sentence: " It looks like Lexar has managed to be faster then Hitachi (Former IBM storage division) with their 4Gb Microdrive" It's "faster THAN" not "faster THEN", using "then" gives a completely different (and wrong) meaning to the sentence.

Initial format...

[Ayanami Rei]

If the original image is (virtually) lossless as a HQ JPEG, then you can convert it from JPEG to a lossless format during the editing process off the camera.

You wouldn't keep it in that format after you dump it off the camera and start making changes; it's just useful to get more shots in the field.

Re:Initial format...

[NMerriam]

that's what most imaging folks do right now (shoot on camera as HQ JPEG, save as TIFF on system), but that's because we have 256MB memory cards and want to get dozens of shots. Once I can write (quickly) to a 4GB card, there would be no reason to add an extra level of compression to the process. Also keep in mind that higher-quality cameras can and will shoot more than 24-bit color, which is where using RAW or TIFF files will really shine.

4Gb = 512MB, Card is a ripoff

[Anonymous Coward]

"We need to get someone to pay $1500 for our 512MB card"

"Quick, start describing them in different units"

"How about, 'libraries of congress'?"

"Naw, we'll just go with the standard 'b for bits' and let them get confused"

Re:Is the word "than" dying?

[bennomatic]

No, it's just that, along with the rest of the industry, Slashdot has outsourced postings to third-world countries in order to save money and keep margins high.

Actually, might be useful faster than you think...

[Anonymous Coward]

(Digital) action photography is typically "good enough" around the 4MP range, as the typical useage will be newspapers. Hobbyist photographers that want to decorate their walls will get by fine with a 5MP and making prints not much larger than 8x10.

However, landscape photography, especially when looking for a final print size larger than 8x10, something more like poster-size requires *a lot* more MP.

How Much? To break into the realm of large format photography, one would need something in the range of 120MP. While this wouldn't really even be practical yet (the largest medium format digital camera goes to 21MP to my last recollection), it's a start towards camera manufacturers engineering a large format digital camera. For that there *is* already a market; it's just not been feasible to attempt yet.

Other issues are certainly abound, but I suspect that medium/large format cameras will be the area of the market that will both need and drive the volume of large CF cards (ultimately driving the CF price down).

Again there is already a large market just waiting to take advantage of such a "huge" CF.

Bill Biggart went out...

[MsGeek]

...like every Photo-Journalist wants to go out. Shooting photos, getting the story. [snif]

Oh yeah, if he had a Microdrive in that camera, I could guarantee that those photos would have been unrecoverable. Object lesson as to why flash RAM kicks all manner of ass over things with moving parts in a hostile environment like (quite literally) a war zone.

Re:Why does people have so much problem using "tha

[tommck]

People does use that werd cuz peoples is ign'ant! Dem folks just ain't edicated 'nuff to knows the right werd from the rong one!

T

This is not FLASH

[Anonymous Coward]

Many threads here are related to flash supplanting hardrives- This is a harddrive in a flash format, not a solid state flash memory device.

HSM

[Anonymous Coward]

This is called HSM and IBM invented it in the 60's. Of course we are so advanced now that there is no reason to stick with stoarge fundamental priciples. Just stick a whole bunch of 400 MHz RAM in there and forget about it...

I disagree.

[wirelessbuzzers]

I think that you are forgetting the buffer cache in your assessment of the efficiency of swapping. As well as keeping programs in memory, you also want to keep commonly-accessed disk blocks in memory for as long as possible. With a large hard drive, this can take up quite a lot of memory. Swapping application memory that hasn't been used in a long time for cache space that will be reused soon causes a substantial increase in speed.

I run Linux at home without a swapfile (I dual boot and the Linux partition is 1GB), and I've found that when the computer has been running for a while without too many applications, many commands can complete almost instantly and without accessing the disk.

But when several large apps are sleeping (say I have 2 X sessions open, one with my sister's apps while she's afk), commands take much longer to complete. This doesn't happen on other computers, with a swapfile, because the cache stays up-to-date.

It is worth noting that some OS researchers these days are regarding memory as a unified object, consisting of disks, RAM and CPU cache, and attempting to maximize the performance of this single object under standard workloads. This view is nonsensical without swapping capabilities.

If you have 4GB of RAM

[Ayanami Rei]

Sure there's some overhead involved in mapping physical pages to virtual pages, but you ALWAYS have that overhead anyway. In fact, having a full 4GB of RAM is probably your best case scenario in terms of user vs. system page availability. The only trouble is that you will lose 1/2GB due to the PCI addressing hole and a few other "wasted" addresses, but your overall memory utility is optimal before switching to PAE.

This is why you see these systems saying they support 3.5GB of RAM, when really you're plopping in 4x1 GB DDR and saying to hell with it.

You're kidding, right?

[WD]

Using RAM for a swap file, huh? You know, if you used the ram as *system* ram (as opposed to some RAM swap device), then you wouldn't need to be swapping in the first place! Think about it...

That, plus PC133 is not "uber-cheap". RAM manufacturers make large volumes of DDR memory so the price is cheap. PC133 production is much lower volume, so it's actually a bit more expensive. Check crucial.com to see for yourself.

Bah bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Cripes. Better be for some hardcore professionals. For $1,499, I could buy an ultra mini laptop, like those Sony U1 or U3 models, or their newest one (I forget the model).

Most professionals who are going to opt for this card are going to carry high end, $2,000+ cameras. Near all of these, even the older models, have high speed connections to write directly to drives, e.g. over firewire. Most already carry a camera bag for lenses for the SLR style digital cameras, so strapping a laptop the size of your hand to the small of your back is minimal.

The only folks I see really with the need for this GB, for now, is those with absurdly high megapixel cameras (8+MP), use the high end cameras in close quarters, lightweight applications, or needing high mobility (nature photography, maybe war zones), and the like.

Better Compression

[Sophrosyne]

I'd love to see a Camera that can convert images into jp2's or something similar- as a customizable option.
Instead of wasting so much money on storage shouldn't consumers be demanding better compression technology options?
Of course the last thing a pro-photographer wants is compressed images... the average user probably couldn't tell the difference between a jp2 and the uncompressed image.
So any camera manufacturers reading this...start making better use of my memory!

Re:Wow! Closing In On Mechanical HDs

[Nurgled]

You'd probably want a system based on a CompactFlash card to be more like a thin client dependant on a noisy machine in another room, since if you try to use one in a regular machine you'll kill the card in a matter of weeks due to your OS swapping to it, or you updating a single file multiple times.

CompactFlash cards have an essentially infinite read life, but their write life is much shorter. When I get around to making truly silent PCs, mine will keep the card read-only and just use it to get the system up as an alternative to a complete netboot. The real work will be done by a beefy, noisy PC in the closet.

Re:The *real* boon in high-capacity CF (etc.) card

[Travelr9]

I already do this with my Sony Clie PDA and the MemoryStick. The new mid-level (SJ33?) that I have plays MP3s and comes with both PC and Clie player software. With one 256MB MemoryStick and a cheap ($10) USB reader for your PC, you can swap in 10-album (or 100-song) sets in less than five minutes. Sure, I don't have all my music, all at once... but I generally know what I want to listen to 100 songs in advance. I agree that when reasonably-priced media gets cheaper, this will kill the dedicated MP3 player market. Which is why I think that the iPod is actually a stealth move toward the personal information device market... Jobs and Co. will come at that functionality from the storage direction, while Palm and others have been coming at it from the application direction. But convergence is happening.

Just get 2857 1.44MB Floppies

[timeOday]

Cheaper still and even more points of failure!

Re:Is the word "than" dying?

[Anonymous Coward]

>No, it's just that, along with the rest of the industry, Slashdot has outsourced postings to third-world countries in order to save money and keep margins high.

You mean, like everybody?
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/ archive/ dilbert-20030803.html

can you elaborate?

[appleLaserWriter]

Can you tell us more about the read-write-read reliability of CF versus other media?

Re: You need to fix your brain

[maxume]

In that case, I was overly harsh. I am somewhat surprised that the whole loose/lose thing isn't covered by more teachers of english as a second language. Or are you more or less self taught? It is way too common a mistake on /..

Compact Flash for Video

[andygrace]

This is not nearly *enough* storage for the next major application of Flash - Video. Panasonic is currently working on a Pro Video Camera with an array of similar speed Flash working in parallel to replace DVCPRO 25Mbps video tape. (Final product should be at NAB in April) There are high quality audio recorders (Marantz and others) already using Compact Flash cards for radio stations and they work great. The things will make a huge difference to people like me in the professional media industry. No capturing video before editing - just copy it across.

Re:Is the word "than" dying?

[Anonymous Coward]

but man am I tired of hearing people writing "then" instead of "than"...

do you often hear people writing? you should have that looked at.

Cameras which this device works

[sinjayde]

From the Lexar Media website [digitalfilm.com] / [lexarmedia.com]

It is important to note that cards greater than 2 GB can only be used in cameras that support the FAT32 file system. Please be sure to install the latest version of Image Rescue (version 1.1.5) that is bundled on the card on your computers before using the card in a camera.

Image Rescue can assist you in properly reformatting the cards to FAT32 if they are mistakenly used in a non-FAT32 compliant camera.

At this time the 4 GB card can be used with the following cameras that support FAT32 and have a CF Type II slot.

Cameras that accept CompactFlash Type II that are also FAT32-compatible:

Canon Powershot G3
Canon Powershot G5
Canon Powershot S45
Canon Powershot S50
Canon EOS 10D
Canon EOS-1Ds

Kodak DCS 720X (A CompactFlash-to-PC Card adapter is required with these models)
Kodak DCS 760 (A CompactFlash-to-PC Card adapter is required with these models)
Kodak DCS Pro Back (all models)
Kodak DCS Pro 14n

Olympus E-1

Hmm, you may want to keep that in mind before you consider this product.

Hard Drive Replacement?

[DonGar]

Larger compact flash cards are now big enough to act as replacements for hard-drives for small/special purpose PCs. For example, my firewall, even with all of it's logging only needs about 200M of storage.

I could use a CF card to build a small/slow PC with no moving parts (fanless also). That seems like it would be a lot more reliable.

However, how well do Compact Flash cards deal with continuous writing and rewriting? How long could a card handle the data being logging to disk from my firewall before it starting having errors?

How much of a problem would the slower write times be? In the case of the firewall, I would expect there to be enough ram to keep the slow CF read/write times from being a problem, but how much difference is there overall?

Portable storage options

[SuperKendall]

If you want portable storage for digital photos, take a look at This Comparison.

Myself, my perfect storage device would be a small piggyback unit that clipped on top of an iPod, and copied all of the images from a card into the iPod via Firewire. The iPod is the perfect form factor, even with a small reader hooked on the top. And the battery life is good enough that you could probably copy a fair amount of data before it ran out of juice.

I don't even need a preview of the images on the iPod!! I just want to know that the images were copied OK so I can erase the card. And perhaps an option to double up the copies to help prevent data loss.

There will be no hard disks in the future.

[thbigr]

I am convinced that computers will be solid state eventually.

Re:There will be no hard disks in the future.

[zero_offset]

I just hope they all work CF-style, where the "brains" are on the memory device. You will never see this kind of progress with crap like Sony's MemoryStick. Offloading that much of the brains to the storage medium is actually a pretty cool and unfortunately rare feature. It drives up cost, but you don't save money with things like MemoryStick or Secure Digital Media due to artificial influences on the price (e.g. Sony and other licensing requirements).

You can't get more general than FORTH.

[Rares Marian]

HOW ARE PIXELS SPECIAL AND PROPRIETARY?

Forth filesystems have no proprietary components. They're just blocks of bytes.

Open block #
Send block # to port #
Close block #

The block looks exactly as it would in your computer's RAM.

There is no format in FORTH. There fore you don't need any special anything for the file.

Re:You can't get more general than FORTH.

[arkanes]

Thats not a filesystem. That's a file. For a filesystem, you need a way of mapping locations on disk to files, so you know where your file is whe you want it. You want to know how many files you have, so you can tell which bytes are files and which aren't. The index that stores all these things is sometimes called a FAT - a file allocation table. Your proposed "filesystem", besides not working, also means that these special CF cards with the Forth filesystem for cameras wouldn't interoperate with any other CF device, especially ones with more complicated file system needs.

Re:You can't get more general than FORTH.

[Rares Marian]

I'm not talking about the cards.

I'm talking about the cameras.

I could care less what was on the cards.

Hostile or power-limited environments

[KC7YRN]

Like glonoinha said, they're better than hard disks for high-vibration applications.

A mountaintop router for a wireless WAN might not have reliable utility power. There's another niche. Systems that have to run on battery or solar power are much happier if they don't have to spin a platter. CF cards have the nifty property of talking ATA with a cheap hardware adapter, so they're drop-in replacements for hard drives.

Re:Wow! Closing In On Mechanical HDs

[istartedi]

What a shame. The poor write-cycle life seems like a solveable problem though. Isn't the technology magnetic, just like a HD?

Maybe I'll just need to get a spool of copper wire, some ferrite, a needle, and enough free time to fab myself some core. :)

I want some ....

[madpierre]

but OUCH the $price$

Wear-Leveling in CF Cards

[Rambo]

I've read quite a few comments from people speculating that a particular filesystem (fat32) will cause issues because all the wear is concentrated in the FAT sectors, etc. This just isn't the case because the card will do wear-leveling in hardware, including replacing bad blocks with good blocks from a spare pool. Other interfaces (Mem Stick/MMC/SD/SM) do not have this advantage, as CF has a built-in intelligent controller to manage this behavior. The others allow direct access to sectors, and thus it is possible to "burn" a particular sector by writing to it repeatedly.

Here's a link to a FAQ about a CF interface for the Apple II, which discusses the issue (or lack thereof): http://dreher.net/CFforAppleII/FAQ.html

Here's a link to a maker of CF controllers and a description of their features: http://www.mittoni.com/compactflash/article5.html

Generic volumes

[sacrilicious]

At 1500 bucks, I think I'd rather just keep three other 1 gb sticks in my pocket/camera bag/whatever...

A single 4G CF-card can be much more useful as a volume in a zaurus than 4 1G cards.

Re:Wow! Closing In On Mechanical HDs

[jamesc]

What a shame. The poor write-cycle life seems like a solveable problem though. Isn't the technology magnetic, just like a HD?

Maybe I'll just need to get a spool of copper wire, some ferrite, a needle, and enough free time to fab myself some core. :)

No, compact flash is just a cheaper form of EEPROM. It stores bits based on the electric charge on a 'floating' gate, one that is completely enclosed by glass -- no connecting wires.

The methods used to get the charge on or off the floating gate are fairly drastic: Fowler-Nordheim tunneling, hot carrier transfer, etc. So, there is a certain amount of wear, tear, and electrons embedded in the glass to mess things up. This limits the number of write cycles on any one cell. As cells die, if your file system can work around the bad bits, you might be able to manage for a while. Load leveling HW or filesystems help too.

See http://www.howstuffworks.com/flash-memory.htm for details

Lossless compression is possible...

[Anonymous Coward]

... but is it worth it?

You just have to keep the definition of the subpixel lattice in the header. You may compress each color plane individually. (You will not be able to exploit inter-channel correlations but will get most of the gain.)

As it is lossless by definition, it will be as good as the RAW (minus time to decode).

Yet, often the complexity (even with low-complexity algorithms such as JPEG-LS, which is different than JPEG Lossless mode) is not worth the 2:1/3:1 compression on power constrained devices.

Re:Is the word "than" dying?

[lord_nightrose]

It's not common, but the condition exists; it s called synesthesia.

Re: You need to fix your brain

[nbarr]

Actually, I had english classes. But most of my english is self taught. But I will not do that mistake again :)

Same Same...

[MikShapi]

A CPU that goes 200MHz faster than the last one.
A harddrive that has another 40 Gigs per platter.
A CF card that has another 2 gigs on it.

Woohoo. Yip Yip. Horaaay.

I read /. to get more news on the lines of this, which will make a 4Gig CF card (as well as a 40Gig CF card for that matter) stack with the punchcards in your local compy museum.

and where is jpeg 2000?

[cheekyboy]

If we used jpeg 2000, we could fit more!!! and we have jpeg2000 plugins for photoshop, and ie, and mozilla, when are we gona get our stupid ass together? I have, now its time for the dudes at mozilla to make it STANDARD!!! hello mc fly?????

No, it's good for everyone.

[twitter]

A 4 gig card means that the 1 gig card just lost it's bleeding edge price and everything less just dropped in price accrordingly. Regardless of your use of CF for photos, music or embeded hard disk, the world just got a little better for you.

I think that by the time CF gets to be reasonably priced, other devices of similar size and much higher capacity will be available. I don't have a good feeling about the lifespan of CF.

CF is the most reasonably priced, least encumbered format out there. It's in use by like a billion digital cameras and will be produced for them untill the last of them seem obsolete. I plan on using my little 2Mpixel Cannon Powershot for years and I'm not likely to switch storage format when I change over. Getting stuff on and off it through pcmcia is just way to fast and easy, and I'll have too much invested in the format to be easily moved.