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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.""
The access times, I think, are much faster than hard drives, but the transfer rates are somewhat lower. If I remember correctly.
hey!
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.
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
We've tried this here at work for use in our embedded devices. The performance hit is awful, throughput is about 10% of 5400rpm IDE using an IDE-to-CF adapter (http://adis.ca/store/cfdisk.php). Using PIO3 (no DMA I'm afraid), hdparm -t reports speeds up to 4MB/s vs ~40MB/s for 7200RPM IDE. CF sectors also have the limitation of "wearing out" after about 10000 writes or so, so this is not a good solution for read-write partitions, although it will work great for read-only, or very infrequently written-to data (think binaries, libraries, config, etc). CF is optimized to do wear-levelling so that sectors are written to evenly (in theory, once the card begins to fail, it is failing across the board, not just a few sectors).
Boot from USB is available already- I purchased a USB flash drive a few months ago and it came with utilites to make it bootable.
Speaking of patents...
The 'stacking' description immediately made me think of 'prior art'. I recall articles back in the '80's on how to double the RAM in Apples and other microcomputers by stacking more DIP RAM IC's atop the existing ones and running wires for the additional address lines.
So then I skimmed through the patent referenced... to be honest, I didn't study it in detail, but I'm left confused. I didn't see anything in to that had much to do with stacking memory IC's. In fact, I honestly don't see *what* they have patented.
It's probably just another overly broad patent with the purpose of scaring up some license payments.
> How feasible is it to make a 'boot from USB' option to a PC BIOS?
> I know its not an option currently, [...]
Actually, it's been in lots of PC BIOSes in for a few years now. The problem is that it is still not as reliable as floppy/hd/cdrom boot: some usb devices work, some don't. Also, there seem to be a number of different usb boot standards, usb-fdd, usb-zip, usb-cdrom, usb-hdd.
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.
What it said. You're not feigning ignorance are you? Boot KNOPPIX from an USB Memory Stick.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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.
> I think their ability to keep their state wanes over time, although I don't know what that time period is.
Most CF manufacturers garantee 10 years retention. You can get more if you buy the more expensive "industrial" cards.
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?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you can (almost) do just this with Knoppix now. You boot off the Knoppix cd into a full Linux environment, which mounts your home drive from a USB flash drive. As long as any PC you come across has a bootable CD and a USB port, you can have your whole environment with you. it wouldn't be as easy installing new software, etc. but it's close.
- Dan
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.)
You're assuming the compact flash or eprom would live longer than your drive if subjected to the same usage pattern, which is certainly not a given - both flash and eprom can usually handle much fewer writes than a hard disk can before you can start expecting failures. Add to it that flash is more expensive and slower, and we're not anywhere near replacing hard disks yet.
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
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.
Doesn't matter, because the transfer rates for a 3gig $1100 CompactFlash Type II Card are so incredibly slow (3.5mB/sec). You can buy a 80gig IDE drive that transfers at 58mB/sec for $66.
That's 16 times faster for 1/16th the price. Anyone still want to replace your hard drive with a CF card?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
You can turn off the swap file in Windows if you want to see how well that works out. You're likely not going to get a desktop machine to perform acceptably until you throw about a gig of memory in there - and you won't be leaving apps open the way most people do.
Using it for secondary storage, as I said - is already possible. You can just plug a $20 USB card reader into your machine and put whatever CF/SD/etc media you want on there as secondary storage. Or you could skip the middleman and buy a USB memory stick (same memory type essentially, higher transfer rate).
It can be faster, sure - but most of the performance gain you realize from improvements in storage, is when you use such storage on your system drive to alleviate the more frequent accesses.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Flash as well as EEPROM accept only a limited number of write cycles, after which you can expect problems. But in casual use e.g. digital cameras this shouldn't be a big issue. The specs for one flash chip that I investigated said it will last up to a minimum of 100,000 write cycles. Personally I keep a lot of my precious data on CompactFlash, so that when I go online I can just pop out the card to prevent crackers from getting the goodies. But about these new flash cards, I'm skeptical...