Slashdot Mirror
SimpleTech Announces 8GB Compact Flash Card
alterego writes "Digital Photography Review is reporting that SimpleTech has announced 2, 4, 5 and 8GB Type II Compact Flash Cards utilizing its patented IC Tower stacking technology. This comes just a month after Hitachi announced its 4GB HD in under an inch, and less than one year after Lexar announced the first 4 GB CF card, marking a huge leap in drive density. And at only $5,999 it is sure "to meet budget and performance requirements.""
They're rushing these products to market so fast with new semiconductor technologies, I'm beginning to wonder about reliability. This is storage after all, not a processor: if these data is lost you can't just reboot and start over.
Just in time for V-Day! I'm stocking up and getting every member of my harem one.
/. member, of course, this will be yet another costless Valentine's Day for me.
Being a
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
...who said it couldn't be done for less than $10,000! Ha!
It's at just the right price point for those who might be on the fence with CF cards. Although you can, of course, get an extra 11GB for only $50 more...
(yes, I know it takes six grand)
what would the access times be like? comparable to a 42000 rpm drive? 5400? 10,000 sata?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Sweet Jesus, almost $6K for a memory card?
Honestly, who the hell needs this?
Even professional photographers couldn't possibly have a use for this instead of two 4GB disks.
But hey, I guess this means that mass solid state storage for hard drives really isn't far off, at least for PDAs.
With this, and digital cameras like Canon's new S1 IS with digital image stabilization and DV-quality movie capture, I'm not sure why anyone would need a camcorder anymore. Err... rather, cameras and camcorders are going to be on-in-the-same very soon...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
They're still a "little" expensive, but when you least expect they're be affordable. And 8GB is a lot of space. My root partition is 4 GB and my home partition is a lot bigger :-D but lot's of stuff could be saved on DVDs...
Main point is, quiet computers are the new trend, and quiter than this is impossible. So, when do you think this will replace hard drives?
In the future, compact flash cards will be so large and so expensive that only the richest people in the world will have one. $5,000 - 8GB compact flash card $80 - 160GB Western Digital 7200RPM at Best Buy (wait for a sale) Unless there's a $4900 mail in rebate on the compact flash card, then no way.
after a certain number of writes (many fewer than hard disks) it dies.
If I remember right(somebody correct me if I am wrong) flash cards have some max rewrite cycle. Even if its high, it still won't beat my 2.1 GB seagate from yesteryear in lifespan.
You know the computers you work with are pretty damn old when you see a Flash Card that's larger than your hard drive (can't make this stuff up people, Maxtor 6.2 GB HDD)...
How long until we see the obligatory "Yea, but how much pr0n can it fit" posts?
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
here is a post on fatwallet about removing it, to use in other devices. since it retails for around $500 this can be a good deal.
post
True.
SanDisk brought us SanDisk Ultra, rated at 60x speed. Then they reminded us that if we really want it to keep it's memory at low temperatures (such as outdoor photography in winter) then we really need to buy SanDisk Extreme (same speed, higher temperature tolerance).
Seems to me these hardware manufacturers are taking a clue from the software industry. The "implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose" is intended to protect consumers against such crap. But then, if you can shrink-wrap the product with all sorts of disclaimers of warranties (even implied warranties) then hey, why not? Cheating is cheating, and everybody is doing it, so it must be ok.
...to cache a couple of pages of Slashdot's HTML.
...but I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
But nice call, nonetheless.
mini-squared? how about "iPod micro?" Apple isn't going 'doh!' over these just yet. By the time sales of the iPod mini start dropping off, those 8gb cards will be cheap enough for Apple to use them.
I'm waiting for the day that my PC doesn't have a hard drive, CDROM drive, or anything else mechanical in it. If 8GB can be put on a CF card, being about 1" x 1" x .25", when is more development going to be put into replacing my 60GB hard drive with something the same size (3.5 inch standard HDD size) that uses eprom or something similar? I don't care about smaller and smaller and smaller sizes of hardware, I care about not having to deal with the motoro of my hard drive dying in 4 or less years.
You talk better than you fool!
The only uses for an 8GB flash card that I can think of is digital video shoots. I'm guessing that read/write time will be about the same as current CF cards, so it's not going to be steller (not enough on an 8GB media), so you'll want to stream to it slowly. I mean, a photographer wouldn't have a reason to tote around 8GB worth of pictures, because he can always get to a terminal where he can sync pictures over an internet account. I mean, for $6000, I think he has no choice...
And in regards to using this for video, why would you? There are DVD-based DV Cams out there that will write to 4.7GB discs that cost $1.5 each, so why bother spending 6 grand on something that can be done for $3? Plus, DVDs can be read almost anywhere these days, whereas you need to carry a special reader for CF.
What I really want to see is an 8GB thumbdrive for CHEAP!
...I am proof that intelligent beings are not always intelligent...
Seems to me that Seagate, WD, Maxtor et al should be paying close attention (and perhaps they are).
With Flash getting more and more mainstream, and with the now high volumes being made available, hard drives are becoming less and less necessary for commodity products such as desktops and notebooks. The latter especially will make the switch from HDs to Flash, to lighten up the power and physical load.
If Flash sees overall performance and shelf-life improvements rivaling HDs (more so than what it does already), HDs may well be relegated to a place in history/tech museums... right next to the analog cameras.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
with $6000 you buy:
- 20 x 160GB harddrives
- a bunch of 80GB notebook hardrives
4GB of data:
- 1 DVD
- 6 CDs
So why would someone wants (not even asking about *needs*) this!!!
The $$$ per GB is $1250... reality check anyone ?
Oh, I see, I can put one of this on my digital camera that I bought for $500, and could take 1 million photografs.. that's cool.
or does it have a Ferrari logo, and makes the sound of filling gas when plugged to your ferrari notebook ?
The first remarks i hear is "why would anyone buy a $5999 8GB memory card... ...when they could buy 2 4GB cards, 4 2GB cards, ad nauseam ...who could possibly use that much space ...That could store a lot of PORN and DVDs (mayhaps porn DVDs....im guilty here :P)"
;)
But I digress, lets consider other technologies that we all thought we could never afford, and consequently never use. About 10-15 years ago, wouldn't our 256MB+ RAM and 30+ GB HDs run in the thousands or even millions for that stuff then. Give it time, and it will hopefully be cheap for all
Join the TWIT army now!
now who's up for a seriously expensive ipod? at a smaller form factor????
:D
but seriously when will this be ready (price wise) for introduction in the portable music market.. this is what we need, very very very small things which can hold very very very large amounts of music
Tim
HDD failure can be devastating if a company isn't properly prepared. Yeah, the backup early and often mantra needs to be followed, but at least three times in the past couple of years I've been asked to help get data off of a drive that hadn't been backed up in years and failed for one reason or another. RAID isn't a solution, as the proprietary OS on the tools won't support it. I've thought before that a CF-style drive would solve a bunch of problems, if the reliability was good. Especially if the reader can emulate a HDD from the OS's perspective.
A word of caution: I have not seen / used the Canon, but I've seen the output of Panasonic's $900 SD based little video camera, and what *that* one claims is DV quality looked awfully blocky / pixelated to me even at its lowest (least) compression.
...)
...ah well. I wish the toy-like ones weren't such crap, but then, they wouldn't be toys, and wouldn't cost $199 from Gateway :) )
A neat thing, but nowhere as smooth as the video from my low-end digital8 Sony camcorder.(The lens was disappointing, too, but, that's more understandable given the size; this Canon has what seems to be a much better lens, just going by specs
(I too would like an all-flash, decent-capacity video camera -- ones like the Canon you point out are probably the best way to go for now, despite the shape which makes the user think of snapshots, not extended video sessions
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
My current 3M pixel camera gets approx 160 pictures onto a 256Mb flash card; that's with minimal compression of the JPG files. Doing a bit of maths, that means approx 5000 pictures per 8Gb flash card - a bit much to be carrying around with me!
Looking at an extreme case: assume a pro photographer has a 12M pixel camera, and takes only TIFF files. That would get approx 750 pictures (I think; it's pretty late here!) on a 8Gb card. That's a hell of a lot of pictures to be carrying around with you, and a lot you're risking if the card dies or your camera gets stolen. I just can't believe that someone would need that capacity; surely they'd backup to some other, more sturdy media well before they got that quantity of pictures.
IIRC, high-quality digital video would produce data faster than these these cards can store it. DV would conceivably merit the capacity, but the media would be too slow.
Is there any other likely reasonably widespread use for these enormous flash cards? Something I've missed?
This great news. People should keep in mind that 1Gb cards used to cost this much, just a few years ago ... now you can get 1Gb cards for $200 bucks or less. Considering that new cameras can output huge files, extra storage is very welcome. 8Gb is a lot of JPEGS, but only about 1000 RAW files ... which is not a lot if you are a pro and shooting an event. My only complaint is probably with the write speeds ... these cards need to get faster.
It could be a good item in high-cost systems with stringent weight / space / heat dissipation requirements, where there may not be many good solutions, regardless of cost.
Sam
http://www.iamsam.com
Better question would be if this could be adapted to work like a bootable CD. Imagine having a Knoppix-like distro on one of these things, You could upgrade packages piecemeal without having to burn a new CD, you could store data back to the card and it would fit in your wallet. It has 12x the storage of a CD, 3-4x the transfer rate, and faster access times by several orders of magnitude.
What are we waiting for again?
If that's the case, I think you got a bigger problem.
How feasible is it to make a 'boot from USB' option to a PC BIOS?
I know its not an option currently, but with all the advances in personal storage recently it would make sense for motherboard manufacturers to consider adding some kind of ASIC that allows the USB to be used as a boot device.
The next step is to move all device driver software from the operating system to a dedicated flash ROM embeded on the motherboard.
These two advancements would then enable people to carry around an entire OS on a flashcard/portable USB disk. You could simply slot in your flashcard and boot up your own OS (be it windows or linux) on any PC, at home/work/hotel. You dont need to carry a bulky laptop, all your data (and applications) can be on portable storage.
I imagine making the device driver software update a motherboard embeded flash chip is the most awkward part, but it makes much more sense to me to have the hardware drivers linked firmly to the hardware they drive (and not part of the OS as they are currently)
Just something I've been thinking about for years, but with all the recent advances recently I think its slowly becoming more possible?
Given the overpriced iPod is selling successfully, why not just plug one of these babies into it? Then all the kids who have no concept of value can spend even more of their parents' money. I'm still using a portable casette player which cost $7. Works fine.
Must suck to be Apple right now though, considering they just released the mini iPods which are based on tech that is already looking rather inferior.
Have you compared the prices? The mini-iPod is aomething like $199, this is $5,999. Disk is likely to beat silicon in $/mByte for a very long time. Where CF beats disk is access time. And streaming players don't need good access time: once they are on track, they have better performance than CF.
In a dedicated device, this kind of capacity is going to be cheaper in disk. This wins where you need interchangeability (nobody had a good CF format hard disk drive, as far as I know), or ruggedness, or low power, or ultra-low noise. Specialist markets all.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
With a capacity like this I can finally make photos with my digital camera of all things that are important in my life:
My computer, my really huge capacity memory...
Oh - just forget about that
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
> nobody had a good CF format hard disk drive, as far as I know
What about the IBM/Hitachi Microdrive?
I realize all that. Personally, I use compact flash/usb keychain drives fairly frequently. In the long term, there are certainly advantages. It also reminds me of a story I heard yesterday. A co-worker has a lot of repetitive stress injuries to his hands. He bought a $3000 laser-guided mouse pointer a few years back, when they were brand new. It was awful. Didn't work well, was expensive, bulky, etc. He returned it for a full refund (30 day trial period). Now, they sell far superior versions of those for about $100.
Yeah. Only $10.000 a piece!
All songs from iTunes downloadable for free.
CompactFlash is meant to be portable. I don't know of a portable battery on the market today that could allow a machine to fill up (or read all of) this 8GB memory card before the battery dies.
I replace/charge my batteries much more often than the memory card. How would this ever help me?
Instead of buying this kind of expenshuge flash card, I am considering Photo Memory Bank from SmartDisk ($549 (40GB); $699 (80GB)) or a Belkin Media Reader for iPod (price $109) - since I already have the iPod.
However, this is still all eggs in one basket - you loose the thing, no pictures left. I guess the ultimate solution is to simply bring a portable with me for my photo expeditions and transfert my pictures on a daily basis on my computer and then either on CD-ROMS or on my web site.
Loosing pictures is not an option for me - these moments almost never come back.
The 2, 4 and 5 are type I, not type II. Here's the actual press release:
New 8 GB Card Utilizes Company's Patented IC Tower Stacking Technology
SANTA ANA, Calif., Feb. 9 PRNewswire-FirstCall -- SimpleTech, Inc. (Nasdaq: STEC), a designer, manufacturer and marketer of custom and open-standard memory solutions based on Flash memory and DRAM technologies, today announced the industry's highest capacity CompactFlash with an 8 GB Type II card using the Company's patented stacking technology. The Company also announced 2, 4 and 5 GB Type I cards and a significant increase to the write speed of its entire ProX line of CompactFlash cards. The products will be unveiled at the PMA (Photo Marketing Association) trade show held at the Las Vegas Convention Center from February 12-15, 2004. SimpleTech will exhibit in booth N-64.
"We combined the latest silicon with our patented IC Tower stacking technology and produced the highest density CompactFlash card available in the world," said Ken Roberts, director of product marketing at SimpleTech. "This card also uses a high speed controller with 10 MB/sec write speed -- the fastest on the market today."
SimpleTech's IC Tower(TM) stacking technology allows multiple NAND Flash components to be stacked together to provide increased memory and storage densities that provide enhanced capacity in its 5 mm Type II cards.
Delivering a breakthrough write speed of up to 10MB/second, SimpleTech's ProX CompactFlash cards enable images to be saved faster to the CompactFlash card and significantly reduces the wait time between digital photography shots.
ProX CompactFlash cards incorporate Xcell(TM) technology, with a new advanced controller that provides an exponential increase in throughput for writing the picture file, delivering fast, accurate recording of high-resolution images and outstanding reliability.
SimpleTech customers are offered a free trial of PhotoRescue software. Customers can download the photo recovery software onto their computer, and either insert the Flash card into a reader, or dock their camera, and view thumbnail images of their pictures. If one of the images on the card is corrupted, the rescue software allows the image to be recovered.
All SimpleTech CompactFlash cards come with a lifetime warranty backed by SimpleTech's reputation for quality and support.
Pricing and Availability
Manufacturers suggested retail pricing for ProX CompactFlash cards ranges from $89.99 to $5,999 to meet budget and performance requirements. Samples of the new ProX CompactFlash Type I cards in 2, 4 and 5 GB capacities and the 8 GB type II cards are expected to ship during the first quarter of 2004, with production anticipated during the second quarter of 2004.
Sports photographers are the only people really for whom this is remotely useful. Toting an 8 megapixel camera which takes 8.5 frames per second they may just need the space, and they may be willing to pay not to have the card space run out at an inopportune moment. "Hey guys, could you do that touchdown again? My CF card ran out of space, I've got a new one in, now though and my magazine really wants this shot!" What I can't understand, though, is why it wouldn't be far more cost effective for the photographer to have a WiFi card in his camera and a WiFi enabled laptop or large storage device in his bag. Battery life? Is it really worth $6000 ?
the achievement here is in getting 8GB into a standard-form-factor compact flash slot, and keeping power consumption down to a reasonable amount for portable storage.
They could easily bind 10 of these CF cards together and have roughly the same form factor as the sleekest slimline notebook drives. It'd really just be a matter of addressing if they wanted to release an 80GB solid-state drive.
The first problem though, is the transfer rate bottleneck. CF has access times an order of magnitude lower than even the fastest disk drives (0.000256s vs 0.006s), but its transfer rate is ~25% of current consumer magnetic disk drives. (20MB/s vs 80MB/s)
likely they could work out the transfer rate problem (and in under a year if there was a market), but then we're left with the other major problem. The relatively low write lifespan of flash memory. (between 100k and 1m writes/block)
A system swap file would likely burn through that much faster than the consumer market would tolerate.
The bottom line though, is that it's patented technology. Even if they released an 80 GB drive in a couple years, it wouldn't be priced for the consumer market. Not until a competing technology moves in.
You and I will likely still be waiting for a solid state storage alternative for the next 5 years. Sad but true.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Write speed is horribly slow compared to spinning discs, and there's a limited write life.
Sure, 500,000 writes seems like a lot, but not if that's your swap drive. The thing will be dying in 6 months.
As long as it's in a waterproof case I'd reach for it.
Iv'e done worse than to fumble with my own feces.
I see a lot of people expressing surprise about the price. For the target market, these are very reasonably priced. Pro photographers are out in the field shooting with $6000 bodies, sometimes multiple ones, and $2000+ lenses, maybe several in a bag besides the ones on the bodies.
They're not targetting people with a $1000 consumer point-n-shoot, and CF is not good for HD replacement in most cases due to low bandwidth and rewrite lifetime issues.
Having to stop shooting to change media half as often is WELL worth it. You don't want to have to tell your editor "There was a pulitzer-prize shot, but I missed it because I had my head down changing CF cards right at that moment."
My own personal experience with a '26x high speed' card in a PC-Card adapter (a pretty fast interface) bears this out, CF is dead slow compared to even a 4200RPM HD (like the one in my laptop).
How do you fit 5,000 pirated songs onto a cassette?
about reliability. This should make it easier for me to get my flying car!!!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Notice I didn't metion CD's... CD's should already be gone... replaced by DVD Audio.
00101010
OK I'm excited about 8GB in a flash card because I think it would be cool to have a full fledged linux installation on a PDA which you can easily fit into 8GB. However, all you people who are excited about flash memory replacing hard drives because they're quieter need to realize something; these cards have a 10Mb/second interface which is SLOW compared to 100Mb/second+ speeds of a desktop/laptop hard drive. Copying disk images and or 700MB movies onto it is going to take about 10 minutes per disk as opposed to less than 1 minute... Plus, I could be wrong on this but don't these cards have a lifetime of like ~700 writes?
Lots of reasons. The sort things that use 'the smaller form factor of flash cards' aren't going to appreciate the CF card (already the largest form of flash storage) growing in size by a factor of eight. You've reached near 2.5" (laptop) hard-drive style sizes already, possibly larger with the necessary controlling circuitry. Factor in the expense of implementing the RAID controller in said portable device, and I don't think you're onto a winner. GB for GB, it is hardly a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks either.
now I can finally fit a windows load on one...
its a joke son! laugh!!
I guess if you can afford one of these you can afford a new camera with new firmware, but the current cameras are using FAT12 and FAT16, neither of which will address 8GB.
That price point is for early adopters and professionals only, and professionals are not going to be happy about losing 8GB of photos to a corrupted file system. I hope the camera makers are planning something more robust than FAT.
That's true, but there are filesystems like JFFS2 that are specifically designed for flash and spread writes across the entire card. (This will still come nowhere near a hard disk, but can be sufficient for many applications.)
Why? Because we all want DRM'd music? Because we all have super-sensitive hearing which can detect the differences in music encoded at 44kH and some higher frequency? Because we really need albums longer than 72 minutes? I don't understand why DVD Audio should ever take off.
Now we know what Tank was sticking in that funcky disk drive to teach Neo kung-fu. It wasn't some dream-future technology. It was just a really big CF card :) And we thought that was soooo far in the future...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
The Apple Macintosh Classic had the OS in ROM, so if you managed to toast your copy on the HD you could always boot from ROM using "CMD-OPT-X-O". Boot From ROM
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why aren't there more Compact Flash based MP3 players out there?!! Currently I'm using a 1GB Sandisk card with my NexIIe player.
I spent 60 for the player, 200 for the flash.
Advantages:
-No moving parts. The hard drive based Rio I had would overheat and act funny, drain battery fast, and crash during the winter. Primary use is in the car/hostile temps. Flash based player has no problems.
-low power consumption. runs on 2 AA batteries for 14 hours! I use a bunch of rechargeable NiMH batts. Convenient as hell. No worries about proprietary and expensive lithium ion battery dying.
-larger capacities and lower prices all the time. Compare that to smartmedia or whatever.
I like my NexIIe, but c'mon. I'd like to see alot more players with better build quality. Let's see some competition.
I'm waiting for the day that my PC doesn't have a hard drive, CDROM drive, or anything else mechanical in it.
:)
Static electricity.
Zap! Poof! Fsck!
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Now a beowulf cluster of flash cards, that would be a completely different matter ;-)
The linked patent doesn't seem to be related to the story.
The key feature of the story seems to be the volume of the card (8GB), but the Patent is for linking a single flash device to multiple interfaces (ATAPI, GSM, and UART, specifically).
For the last freakin' time, he isn't Sir Bill! You can only be a Sir if you're british!
OK lots of posts questioning applications for that much flash. Video is definitely the big one. Standard DV is 25Mbps, but this amount of flash comes into its own for Pro formats - higher quality DVCPRO50 at 50Mbps is still OK at that sort of read/write speed.
Panasonic's DVCPRO P2 Flash based camcorder and playback decks are set to be launched at NAB in Vegas in April. (pro broadcasting show) It's based on four SDCards working in parallel.
The advantage of flash? You dont need to dump footage off DV tape before editing it. You can even edit in the camera. In a news environment those extra minutes can mean the difference between getting the story on the air or not.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
Check your Sunday ad insert - "$5999.00 List, Our Price $5799.00 before mail-in-rebate of $2000.00 - Your Final Price: $3799.00"
You'll see. Don't lose that UPC code.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Well, I remember a stack of 8 2k SRAM chips to get 16k without taking too much board space. All the pins in the DIP package were soldered together except the chip selects. They were individually tied to a decoder chip (74S138) soldered vertically to the stack.
Does this qualify as prior art ?-)
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I shoot professionally with both types of cards. The CF beats the microdrive, especially when reactivating the camera from a period of inactivity (the hard drive has to spin up). The time lag is about a second longer at spin-up and that has often cost me a shot.
OTOH CF cards die regularly and often, but my three 1gig microdrives have been in continuous, hard use in a since early 2001. They have outlasted two Nikon D1s and a Canon 1D. Interestingly, I thought one died, but it quit working in the Canon 1D, my main camera. It still works in other models of camera and the computer. It is probably on the way out, but I will wait to April to retire it when the Mark II comes out necessitating a move to 2gig units. Others have different opinions of Microdrive durability, but that is my experience.
It's worse if your living depends on it. Redundant backups are the rule.
From "Shooting the D1X for National Geographic":
"CompactFlash cards filled with captured NEFs -- he carried eight Lexar 1GB cards and shot the entire story in RAW format -- were popped into a Lexar FireWire CompactFlash card reader and copied immediately to his laptop's hard drive where the images were renamed. As soon as there was time, McNally or his assistant, Alicia Hansen, used a LaCie FireWire CD writer to burn each picture to a pair of CDs. One CD was sent to Bill Douthitt at the Geographic's offices in Washington, D.C. and the other to McNally's studio in Dobbs Ferry, NY. An original of each frame therefore existed in three locations."
just becuase they disclaim the implied warranties does not mean that the disclaimers are effective. Software is different than hardware on how it is treated. This is evidenced by the existance of UCITA, which originally started out to be UUC Article 2b but was to contraversial for the ALI and so it got the boot.
The point here is that hardware is still regulated under UCC Article 2 -- sale of goods -- which pretty much prevents effective denial of implied warranties.
For an implied warranty of fitness of a particular purpose the person selling the goods is supposed to have a reason to know of the need. Here there is no actual conveyance of that need so most likely there is no implied warranty.
It is somewhat debatable whether the creation of a good for a particular market [the extreem market] would not actually make this a violation of express warrant of merchantability.
Under the merchantibility argument if these cards could not be used in "extreme" environments then they would not be merchantable as goods in their class should be. Problem is that express warranties can be disclaimed.
So really what we probably have is a case where the memory providers are in line with the law but it looks pretty slimey.
It's a lot more typical to bring 10 or 15 512 MB cards, than a single big card.
Because the flash ones are faster than the HD based cards (meaning you can do 10 frames in succession before the camera slows... compared to 4 or 5 on a Microdrive.
Plus, if you drop or step on your 4 GB card, buh-bye to all your photos. With lots of cards, if you destroy/damage one, you have your other photos.
Dell is selling the Creative Labs Nomad Muvo 4GB MP3 Player for $188 Shipped Free.
Hack it open and it has a removable 4gb type 2 compactflash card. As seen here.
Storage cost keeps dropping and capacity is skyrocketing. Potentially, this will mean more data will be local in the future, rather than networked since network capacity is likely to remain a bottleneck. Especially so for bandwidth-hogging data like image and sound.
yes please.
If you want that much pr0n, you're talking about batch downloads and mirrors. You'll have to go over it to make sure you didn't end up with anything incriminating.
You're better off collecting slowly and putting it on a USB-based hard drive. (I real SCSI platter-based drive communicating over USB.)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I'll take 1/64th of one!
Some kind of specialized OS. If you can put an OS that minimizes or eliminates the swapfile, you can avoid burning out the card. Ram is becoming cheaper and bigger, after all. Or you could just use the thing like a slightly more reliable floppy disk drive.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
At least that's what I'm getting capturing mini-dv and DVCAM stuff at the highest quality setting. DVC Pro 25/50 & some of the other formats are much more fun. We maybe talking about different things. A retail mini-DV tape will cost at around $5.50 to $7.50, depending on quality and length. I live in a small town so that may be higher than a city dweller will pay. My station buys in bulk and gets a better deal, of course. It's not like most people need it, but the optics and the mechanical stuff on those cheap DV cameras aren't much good. Forget doing action or sports photography. It will just be annoying to watch.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
It would cost 3 times as much to buy one of these cards as it would to fill it up with (4MB) songs from ITMS.
Rank Presidents by th
This would increase memory 32 times. Then memory would last 256 days instead of 16. (The first rover went into an infinite re-boot loop when its file system claimed flash memory was full. Probably some garbage collection bug.) (Rover memory is radiation hardened.)
In terms of immediate cost, it must be a ratio of about 300, given that you can't buy an 8 gid standard HDD any more, but if you could it would be about $20 or less if it was proportional to larger disks.
It has always been so, to a fair approximation, and no doubt some corollary to Moore's Law says that it will always be so.
Pity, because I could use one of these right now if it cost under $100.
Sometimes the old ways are best. Within its rated operating life (say 5 years), a reputable brand of HDD is also more reliable.
I don't see this changeing any time soon, there are lots of new ideas around for storage devices but none of them seem to come to fruition. This is just an extension of yesterday's technology, more of the same (not to belittle the achievement, these things take money, hard work and expertise in abundance), but not a radical breakthrough.
IMHO holographic memories, with lots of inherent redundancy, and therefore reliability, are the way forward, but we have been hearing that for at least 10 years now. I think there will be a real breakthrough of some sort within 10 years, what it will be is not immediately obvious. What is certain is that this is not it. But, in about 6 years, when my income has doubled and 8 gig costs $200, I will buy one, if nothing better comes along. Of course, it will then only hold about 2 picturtes from the latest gigapixel camera, which is what I would likely use it for....... The problem will move, but will not go away.
It's funny to see even techies looking at problems like this recurring again and again, and failing to note the bug in underlying layers.
The problem is capitalism, not hardware manufacturing.
what is needed to counter the drawbacks of purely flash-based drives is a system that resembles a machine I once saw. The box contained a large quantity of standard SDRAM, a correspondingly-sized harddisk, and a camcorder battery. A controller board allows the RAM to pretend to be a SCSI harddisk. The battery lasts long enough to record RAM contents to disk in the event of a power failure, automatically. A smaller version of this unit, with cheaper (perhaps slower, or writeable fewer times) flash ram instead of the harddisk, would allow for a modestly sized, low-powered solidstate storage unit. Perhaps it could even be miniaturized to fit in a 3.5" drive bay.
I just happened to have this laying around. it is a list of some goodies needed around the office. it's kinda neat to imagine keeping all of this in you (GSM/bluetooth/GPS/laser rangefinder/laser compass/4" LCD/street map database/CCD camera/CFII enabled) cell phone.
.iso 715 MB
2003 Resource Kit Tools 11.7 MB
Active Sync v 3.7.1 3.77 MB
AD Tools Admin Pack 12.1 MB
Adobe Reader 6.0.1 15.4 MB
AEGIS Wireless Client v 2.0.5 7.88 MB
AEGIS Wireless Client v 2.1.0 9.52 MB
Apache 2.0.47 Upgrade (EXE file) 7.91 MB
Apache 2.0.48 Web Server 12 MB
ARS Client Tool 4.05.01 25.8 MB
ARS User 5.1 20.4 MB
DivX 5.0.5 3.2 MB
IPTV viewer 24.6 MB
Knoppix
LeapFTP 2.6.2 1 MB
Microsoft Office 2000 Pro CD 2 (iso) 608 MB
Microsoft Office 2003 478 MB
Microsoft Office XP SP 2 14.7 MB
Microsoft Powerpoint Viewer 2.76 MB
Microsoft Windows 2000 Pro (iso) 360 MB
Microsoft Windows 2000 SP 3 124 MB
Microsoft Windows 98 SE (iso) 622 MB
Microsoft Windows ME (iso) 409 MB
Microsoft Windows XP Pro (iso) 488 MB
Microsoft Windows XP SP 1 133 MB
Microsoft XP Pro with SP1 installed 527 MB
Mozilla 1.4 11.6 MB
Mozilla Firebird 6.1 MB
Netscape 4.79 with Calendar 19.1 MB
Netscape 7.02 Web Broswer 31.3 MB
Netscape Calendar 2.95 MB
Opera Web Browser 7.02 12.6 MB
Palm Desktop 4.1 9.31 MB
Putty 0.34 MB
Quicktime 6.5 11.7 MB
QVT 5.0 7.3 MB
R25 Uniprint Printer Driver 3.52 MB
RAW AEGIS Wireless Client v 2.1.0 9.64 MB
SecureCRT 3.4.6 2.37 MB
SecureFX 0.1 MB
SSH Secure Shell Client 3.2.3 5.22 MB
Symantec Antivirus 2002 (iso) 165 MB
Symantec Antivirus CE 8.0 (iso) 631 MB
Symantec Ghost 2002 9.95 MB
System Commander 7.03 (ISO) 45.8 MB
TigerLAN Client 53.7 MB
Winamp 3 3.11 MB
WinRar 3.0 0.92 MB
WinRAR 3.11 0.94 MB
WinZip 8.1 1.8 MB
Grand Total 5682.11 MB
How do controllers address CompactFlash cards?
With a 32-bit address space and no paging, which is about all I would expect from a last-generation microdevice, you'd run into the dreaded 2GB barrier.
Was the CF spec written with forward-looking support for devices of this magnitude, or will a new interface be necessary to make full use of these monsters?
low power consumption. runs on 2 AA batteries for 14 hours!
My iriver runs for ~30 hours on a single AA battery (well, a single charge). 512MB flash player.
I use SUNPAK 2200mAh NiMH AA batteries. They last. Try'em.
Something to go along with my $750 hammer. You know what I like best? The fact that they priced it at $5999, not $6000. That makes it seem so much more affordable.
Dang marketing weenies.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
The upcoming Playstation Portable (PSP) 1.8GB HD hasn't been mentioned as a contender. It's rewritable, decent size and surely they've reduced power consuption to a minimum, and with lots of production this winter, they should becoming cheap.
NASA should build another rocket to carry this as a patch to Spirit and Opportunity, and load QNX instead of VxWorks on it (better yet, uCLinux, now that space isnt an issue).
Of course this will really happen if Microsoft was incharge of the mission. Now have you patched your Windows against the recent bug???
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I am considering Photo Memory Bank [smartdisk.com] from SmartDisk ($549 (40GB)
Instead of spending this money, why not try the ArchosAV 40GB? 4" color LCD (handy for previwing!), built-in CF slots, TV output, on-device video and still recording. And it plays MP3s. There is an 80GB model, but it's pretty pricey - you're probably better off swapping in your own 80GB 2.5" drive if and when you run out of capacity.
Actually my ulterior motive for recommending this is that I'd like to see a Slashdot review...
Da Blog
For example, use MMPlayer to play any one of the many full-length movies that would fit on a large card, using a Treo 600 (which albeit uses SD rather than CF).
Thanks,
Peter
LOSING!
GOD-DAMNIT! It's spelled LOSING! Not "loosing", as in, I'm going to LOOSEN my bowels all over your fucking head! (No, loosing isn't a word. Loosening is, I think, but clumsy. ARGH.)
LOSING! For fuck's sake! Fucking epsilon semi-morons! GET OFF OF MY PLANET!
Thanks for the comments.
Since there was no such thing as "extreme" prior to the new Extreme product, all we had was regular. Since alot of photgraphy is done at sub-freezing temperatures (all those wonderful outdoor scenes in calendars, for example), then aren't they marketing a defective product to all photographers? AFAIK they did not sell these with limited claims on use in low temperatures - it was discovered by photographers the unfortunate way.
I guess my point is, when SanDisk finally found a way to make it work at 0 degrees C *and below* (and started admitting the others may not work well at those temperatures), shouldn't that be a fix of a defect and not a new specialty product worthy of a higher price?
This thread was about releasing products before they were actually ready. My feeling is that since these memory cards (in hindsight) were not ready, shouldn't they be returnable under an implied warranty?
It really doesn't change much except disclosure (they would have to disclose any known inadequacies to avoid returns) and perhaps it would impose more incentive to properly design a product before selling it.
... and yes I do recognize the potential impact of a broad application of this: e.g. inexpensive 35mm SLRs often fail at sub-freezing temperatures, and those who know better purchase professional grade cameras for these and other, often related reasons. But even with this in mind, shouldn't the specifications clearly state these facts, and if not, can't satisfaction be sought via implied warranty of fitness for purpose, for example?
Last I looked you couldn't just shrug off your obligations because you know you produce a crappy product - if it really didn't work you had to take it back. (except, of course, for software!)
Yeah, we all will have local access to all the data we could ever want. Bandwidth, like storage capacity, is increasing. Your logic is rather flawed, it assumes a static knowledge base and that you'd have already attained all the knowledge you need.
Last summer I bought a 512MB CF card for less than $100; that is one sixteenth the capacity of these new products. However, the price that I paid is ONE SIXTIETH the stated $6000 price of this product... not exactly a proportional increase, now is it?
Perhaps in the meantime, until the manufacturers of these toys can develop a more fair and realistic price structure, perhaps I can simply buy sixteen of those 512MB CF cards and tape them together?
$499. So IBM is going to start selling a 4 gig HD that works in a CF slot for under $500. So tell me again why I would by a $6000 8 gig CF card? IBM to ship 4GB microdrive By Ed Frauenheim Staff Writer, CNET News.com IBM plans to make a beefed-up tiny hard drive available later this month, targeting laptop users. The company's 4GB "Microdrive" is slated to be available Feb. 20, according to Big Blue's Web site. The removable drive, which is the size of a matchbook, carries the IBM brand but is made by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi spokeswoman Kim Nguyen said Wednesday. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies took over IBM's hard drive business last year. Last year, IBM sold a branded 1GB Microdrive also made by Hitachi, Nguyen said. Small drives have become increasingly important in the consumer electronics arena, with the potential to handle the data storage needs of devices such as digital music players and cameras. IBM's Web site emphasizes the 4GB drive's possible use with notebook computers: "Take advantage of the latest removable disk drive technology by adding the IBM 4 GB Microdrive to your ThinkPad notebook," the site says. "This new Microdrive weighs less than a AA battery, has a footprint measuring less than one square inch, and can hold almost 2,800 times more data or images than a diskette." IBM is selling the Microdrive with a PC Card adapter priced at $499. The Microdrive product also is designed to the Compact Flash Type II industry standard, and can work with a number of digital cameras, Nguyen said. Hitachi has priced its branded version of the 4GB Microdrive at $499.
It has been said you are only as old as you act... I am 9. "Hey thats my toy give it back!"
They have patented soldering chips one on another? Funny, i've soldered ram, rom and even logic dips and ssops this way from early childhood when i ever came around chips for the firs time. :)
...Until somebody will patent these things too...
Meybe somebody could patent sitting on toilet, so we will have to sit on them reversely or for example stand on it.