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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.""
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...
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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?
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The one good thing that can/will/may come out of this is simply the new advances in non-volatile memory technology, even if there isn't a sustainable immediate need for an 8GB CF card. I mean, seriously, how cool would it be to have an 80GB solid-state HD in a few years???
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.
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.
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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
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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.
Furthermore since flash has limited flash cycles that is much less than that of a hard drive, your /tmp directory will have you buying a new card in no time.
/tmp wouldn't burn a hole through the chip in 20 minutes.
I read somewhere that at least some flash disk devices will remap writes to evenly 'wear' the flash chip even if the writes are supposedly 'physically' in the same location. But I don't know how well that mechanism scales to 8GB or how it affects speed. I also don't know how long such a wear-managed device would last under a typical workstation or server load, but at least
On the other hand, for a filesystem with few updates and many reads (some web servers and a few databases--think LDAP), this device could be neat for a low-latency but faster-than-network throughput network server. But I'll wait until the price drops a few thousand.
Put loads of RAM in, make /tmp a RAM disk. Oh, and turn off swap.
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."
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.