World's Fastest Flash Memory Card?

ResQuad writes "Digital Photography Review has an article about what is claimed as the fastest MMC Memory Flash Card. Not only is this new card 200% faster than any current SD card (rating it at about 22.5MB/s read), its also 2GB. Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA?"

Comments

Media Playing

[anamexis]

Both these speeds and large capacities will become more and more important as we see better video capabilities come to the PDA market.

Good News...

[Piranhaa]

This is really good news for mini- formfactor systems. Some people just want to have a quiet PC without the noise and failure rate of a hard drive. The main thing holding people back is the performance of these cards, on top of the pricing. I wonder when entire computers will start switching to the fast access times of solid-state media like these!

Flash Memory

[ctwxman]

Ask any digital photographer. Memory is like closet space. One can never have enough - never

Re:Flash Memory

[squaretorus]

I'm not meaning to question your wifes abilities, but taking hundreds (maybe 500 if my maths is right) photographs of an empty home seems to smack of a 'shoot now think later' mindset. And the 500 assumes you are taking relatively high res shots - something I can't imagine being important on 'sell my house' shoots.

Much better to spend those 15 minutes working out which 6 photos to take, then taking a small burst of each than to simply walk around being Miss Snap Happy.

Portrait shoots are similar - spend a bit of time working out what your going to aim for - and then take aim. Don't just shoot until you explode.

The Austin Powers piss-take of David Bailey isn't too far off the mark - apart from he misses the part where Bailey interviews and observes his subject for an hour before his 5 minute burst of 'yeah baby yeah'.

Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA?

[saha]

Not yet, but people are ripping out the 4GB Microdrive from the iPod minis for their digital cameras. One of the biggest bottleneck for digital photography is the write speed. The XD standard is an attempt to address this issue. This new fast memory is a step in the right direction. I'd like to see 25MB RAW images generated by a camera shooting 4fps writing without delay onto memory. Thats when I'll sell my Nikon 90s and fully convert to digital.

More tech info needed

[hdd]

Move on guys, this is nothing more than a press release. Unless someone one can provide more info on exactly whis is inside that is making it faster or some REAL benchmark results.

one giant leap for PDA media

[antimatt]

In five years, when everyone has a PDA with 50GB of solid state storage space, we'll look back at this and wonder why we ever wondered about it. Yes, we WILL eventually need (or at least perceive that we need) this much space.

As things stand, it frustrates me that I can only store approximately one movie trailer on my PDA. This is just the expected step forward. There will be more to come; I anticipate it all with great anticipation.

quick cards

[SKPhoton]

Is there a need for speedy memory cards? Absolutely!

Think about sports photographers. They definitely need quick cards to save the last picture and be ready for the next play. Never underestimate the importance of timing in digital photography.

Music?

[moberry]

Mot only video, but with 2GB or more of storage. a PDA will make a fully featured music player. Windows Media player is fine for this. Quite possibly in the near future manufacturers will market PDA's not only for office, and email use but for portable auido.

Re:Music?

[kbranch]

Flash cards are inconvenient compared to a hard drive based player, but the niche is there.

How can a flash card possibly be more inconvenient than a hard drive based player? Is drawing more power and breaking after a fairly minor fall now convenient?

Are you referring to the need to insert the card after you buy it as opposed to the iPod where it comes with the hard drive already installed? If so, how can the ability to easily upgrade the storage compare to the minimal effort of putting the card in for the first time?

Re:Music?

[nametaken]

I think the mp3 / pda hybrid concept isn't being worked like it should. It's a great idea that isn't getting pushed hard enough. On the email and browsing front however.. I think we need better, faster, cheaper connectivity options. I'll buy a new pda when pdas become small palmtops with fast, CHEAP wireless and tons of storage for my music. The storage part looks feasible now... so we just need way better connectivity. Seeing as you can't FIND a good cellphone company as it is, I don't see a serious wireless access option coming along any time soon. C'mon, streaming internet radio and complete mp3 library in one device would be pretty wicked if I don't have to mortgage my house to pay the wireless bill.

Memory card as computer storage

[fembots]

Recently I have been pondering about using my 512MB SD card as a permanent storage for my computer, so that I can install applications and games and run off it.

However, after further investigation, and the stats from this article, memory card is still too slow for day-to-day computing usage.

USB2.0 is about 480mbps (~60MB/s), so the bottleneck is now with the memory card.

So I guess the fastest is still not fast enough.

Re:What's interesting...

[Ark42]

Honestly, this is why I stick to CF. Recently bought a new digital camera and my method of picking the camera out was to just walk in to circuit city and eliminate all the non-CF cameras. Ended up with the Canon Powershot G5. My very old 1 megapixel camera takes CF and it has no problem seeing any CF cards I have, even the brand new ones. Isn't the pin-out for CF the same as IDE, and the file system just a basic FAT16? Sure it might run into a limit at 2.1G if the device doesn't support FAT32, but I think most CF devices will use FAT32.

Re:DNA

[dnahelix]

I carry billions of copies of mine.

Music is just the beginning

[yog]

A Palm with multimedia features (Tungsten, Zire 72, etc.) works nicely. I have a 512MB card in my T|T that is good for a few CDs' worth of MP3 music, but I have a few other things that I like to keep on the card that take up a bit of space: my entire wedding photo album viewable with Acid Image, BackupMan backup images, a few documents, dictionaries, Voice Memo recordings of various events.

I would love to put a few more CDs on the card. Actually, even 2G seems a bit small and I hope they bump it up to 4G in a year or so. That would start to be a serious library of music.

Flash storage is a synergistic part of a PDA and can grow arbitrarily large as you think of more ways to virtualize your life onto the card. For example, physicians are already loading upwards of a dozen large medical references and databases. Lawyers are carrying electronic law libraries around, and I could see real estate agents putting hundreds of houses with images and stats into a nice handheld database that they sync with a desktop every day.

Now combine this monster with an email-enabled phone and you have an all purpose personal information device. Bring it on!