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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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?"
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."
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.
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.)
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
Swap is a way of extending your available (volatile) RAM using a disk, which is cheaper but slower. Flash is a way of using (non-volatile) RAM instead of a disk, which is more expensive but quieter, less power, etc.
So using flash RAM as a swap partition is replacing cheap and fast volatile RAM with expensive and slow non-volatile RAM that has a limited lifetime. Hmm. Time to put on my thinking cap...
I know! How about making a RAM disk in cheap volatile RAM for your swap partition. Then it will be almost as fast as normal memory. Oh, hang on a moment...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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...
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.