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.
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.
Using a flash card would be worse than a disk. Sure it has access times an order of magnitude faster than a hard disk (200ns according to the first google hit for "compact flash access time") but bandwidth sucks at less than 20MB/s while cheap desktop drives are getting between 30-60 sustained (tom's hardware review of Seagate Baracudda 7200.7)
/tmp directory will have you buying a new card in no time.
Furthermore since flash has limited flash cycles that is much less than that of a hard drive, your
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
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?