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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.""
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.
(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.
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?
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?
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?
External hard drives (FireWire/USB 2.0) are about $1/GB. They're realatively small and not particularly heavy - at larger sizes/prices (over 256MB/$60), I'd say they still have flash beat hands-down. For the price of a 512MB flash drive, you can have a 120GB hard drive. Yes, it's big and bulky in comparison, but unless you've got money to burn (which I'm assuming is not generally the case on /.), they're probably a better choice.
G
I get the impression that Hard Drive manufacturers are heading towards making their drives smaller, lighter and with less power drain (for portable devices, eg. new iPod) than they will making them have a greater capacity.
A tiny compact flash sized HD with very low power drain and good price point would be excellent. Something like the IBM Microdrive - but one that won't drain your PDA batteries after 30 minutes.
Although bear in mind I know as much about Hard Drive technology as I do Russian Line Dancing.
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Err... rather, cameras and camcorders are going to be on-in-the-same very soon...
:) Honestly, I can't figure out who it's aimed at. I'm a professional photographer, and I'm a pretty heavy shooter, and I'll generally only fill up about 2.5 1GB cards at a wedding. I'm not worried about having to change cards, as with a 6MP camera I'll get about 400 shots to a card, and there's plenty of dead time there to swap. Portrait and magazine photographers certainly don't need this. Actually, most serious magazine/fashion photographers shoot tethered, anyway. Sports photographers need speed (which this card has, but so do the SanDisk Ultra/Extreme II cards), and there's plenty of time at football game to swap out cards every 600 shots (assuming you're using a 4MP 1D or D2H. That might change when the 8MP Canon 1D mark II comes out this April...). Really, I would specifically NOT buy a card this big, simply because I'd be afraid of putting all my eggs in one basket. If I had somebody's wedding spread across three cards, and one of them was damaged/destroyed/lost/whatever, that would be horrible, but at least I'd still have the other two (yes, I backup with a portable harddrive at every opportunity). But if I had it all on one 8GB card and it died...ouch.
At the consumer level, that may well be true. Most people with point and shoot consumer digital cameras never print their photos, and those that do don't often print anything much bigger than a 4x6 or a 5x7. So, having the extra resolution of a still camera doesn't really do much good for them anyway. The resolution of a video camera would handle their still images just fine.
However, an 8GB $6,000 CF card is not a product for somebody buying a $299 consumer camera
Maybe an 8GB card will be practical when DSLRs all have 20MP (which probably never will happen...) but in the meantime, it's expensive overkill.
* My shots/card figures assumed JPEG capture, not RAW. For RAW, cut my numbers in half.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Canon's EOS-1Ds has 12Mpixels: if you save an uncompressed image that's about 36MB per shot. Thus an 8GB flash card would provide space for 222 photos. That's not unreasonable for an expedition to the Khumbu or somewhere equally remote, where there might not be the possibility of transferring images to a computer. Of course, I'd still rather have 8 1GB cards (stored separately around my bags) just to minimise losses in case one got stolen.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
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?
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 ?
How much of a current CF card is packaging? If the standard casing for a CF card is removed, it should be much smaller. The better implementation would be an emulation of a 2.5" drive. Forget software drivers, use hardware to provide a flash drive that the computer sees as a "drive". Plug it into your existing laptop and you have an immediate power and vibration limit reduction.
Inexpensive is all relative. If you told someone in 1970 that they could store 1TB of data for $5999 (Apple XRaid) they'd laugh. How about 1995 even? My POS IDE 2.1GB HD cost $400 and I thought I was getting a deal. The fact the average non-corporate person can afford a RAID setup is proof that it is inexpensive.
There is another alternative. The photographer who did our wedding had a wireless card in his camera body which was constantly transmitting the pictues to his laptop. No worry about storage there. Not appropriate for everyone, but damn good for alot of situations.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
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.
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.
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.