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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...
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.
The access times, I think, are much faster than hard drives, but the transfer rates are somewhat lower. If I remember correctly.
hey!
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
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
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.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
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!
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?
hmmm.... Registered Trademark Pending?