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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?"
Both these speeds and large capacities will become more and more important as we see better video capabilities come to the PDA market.
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!
Ask any digital photographer. Memory is like closet space. One can never have enough - never
.. is the fact that the article says that it is backwards compatible with older MMC devices. I don't think this will be the case, I have a cheapo mp3 player for my phone (Sony Ericsson mp3 hands-free, the OLD one not the bluetooth one) and the device came with a 32 meg MMC, when i tried to get a 128 meg MMC card, it didn't work. Sony Ericsson said that the device is so old, that 128 meg MMC cards weren't even thought of. I doubt this 2 GIG MMC would work with this "older MMC device". Anyone else have the same experience?
Good! I am glad we have 2GB available. I am sick of carying a copy of the Human Genome on my Ipod.
Keep the faith, share the code
I run Familiar linux on my iPaq. My ipaq has a mere 32 megs of flash ram. While this is enough for familiar, X, and a few applications, it gets filled up quickly. Once you start adding lots of packages, that 32 megs gets filled up very quickly. In order to get more space, I move all the binaries to an SD card.
Having 2 gigs available to store packages, not to mention music and even movies would be fantastic, especially for long trips.
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.
Aren't there a set number of accesses that a flash memory device can handle before they're toast?
I think that's what is holding back adoption of flash based PCs. Screw the expense, if the thing can't have a drive failure, some industries will buy it.
My mom says I'm cool.
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.
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
I don't need, but i want it.
Since my Archos broke down, and the "repair shop" "fixed" it -- "fixed" it so it will never work again -- I've been using my Zaurus PDA as an MP3 player.
I can get about six or seven albums*, in MP3 format, on the 512 MB SD card, so the 2 GB would give me room for about 24 albums.
And I see that this new card is faster, which will be nice: getting all those MP3s on the card does take a while.
Any idea how much the 2GB card will retail for?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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.
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.
What happens to anything if you lose it?
What kind of question is that?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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.
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.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Aren't there a set number of accesses that a flash memory device can handle before they're toast?
Isn't there a set number of revolutions that a hard drive's bearings can take before it's toast?
An individual sector on a quality flash card will last for 100,000 writes. The competing "multi-level" flash technology, while slightly leading binary flash in capacity, lasts only about 10,000 writes. If you're curious, here's the difference. Don't worry too much: CompactFlash cards perform wear leveling, which uses some spare sectors to make sure that no single sector gets overwritten overly often.
Indeed. I don't want to carry a phone and an iPod because I don't have three ears for two headsets. But I'd happily pay the money to put some decent storage on my next smartphone so I can listen to music on its hands-free headset.
The division between a high-end phone and a smartphone/PDA is becoming one of expandability. My spouse's excellent Sanyo VM 4500 plays sounds, pictures, and videos, but has no expandability: Sprint doesn't support the phone's built-in Java and PC docking capability because they want you to get media by paying them $15 a month. Meanwhile the promising Samsung SPH-i550 runs PalmOS and has the SD expansion slot and explicit docking. That's what I want.
Another amazing way to get your media on the go is using Rendezvous and Wi-Fi to share it from strangers. No memory card or phone network required.
=S
Large, fast flash cards like this are good for high-quality (no lossy compression) portable audio recording too.
Even at 24/96 stereo, live audio needs less than 600 KB/s sustained write speed. Recording in 3D Ambisonic surround takes only double that. This page claims that a CF-compatible Microdrive cartridge can write at over 4 MB/s, so it should have no problem with data rates typical of live audio capture.
You do still have a point about durability however.
i had planned to get the 4 gig microdrive for storage of media files (maybe a couple gigs of MP3s, a few hundred megs of ebooks and a few movies) and a SDIO wifi card for wlan. I hadn't thought of movie files, but you can get a 256meg rip of a dvd with stereo sound and full-PDA resolution... pretty nice for travel! I just burn a few to cd/dvd for longer trips and transfer then around when necessary.
So if someone just wanted to gift a 2gig SD card to a poor technician, i sure wouldn't look that gift horse in the mouth... ;-)
"Snoochie-Boochies? Who talks like that? That is babytalk!"-Jay, Chasing Amy
So, will this mean that all the people out there who must have the best of the best of the best but have no idea how to use it will rush out and arm themselves with 2GB for a digital camera they never use thus creating a huge spike in sales, eventually driving the cost down and making them more accessible to us money-challenged digital geeks who can and will use 2GB?
As a computer, I am amused by the faith you have in technology.
One more use, beside the many already mentioned, would be storing maps for satellite navigation devices such as the many Pocket PC / TomTom combo's, or my Garmin iQue. 2 GB would allow me store the whole of Europe (at street level, with points of interest) on it.
Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA?
Actually, yes, as a matter of fact I do.
I use my PDA (a Zire 71) as a portable music device. I do not like moving parts in standard players when I am also in motion. I'd love to be able to have 2 gig of tunes in my pocket with no hard drive or CD required.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
so, your hypothetical 50GB storage PDA of the future (let's assume for a moment that PDA has a future, which I doubt) costs how much in the future? and how much now?
see you can't say "we will need it one day therefore we need it now." That's bullshit because the economics don't come out right. 2GB card costs a (hefty) premium today, and there are not so many conveniences that justifies this premium. After all, if the darn thing was free then we'll all stock up with hundreds! "What would I need this for" is actually a shortened question for "What would I need this for, at this price?"
I think for the price premium, I cannot find any good reason why I would spend so much money for it - SD / MMC card based cameras are mostly storing stuff in JPEG (every camera that assumes to be pro-oriented and stores raw has compact flash for storage, even SONY!), so for cameras it's moot. for PDAs, sure - but like I said, do you really need 2G of storage on the go for the price of another PDA or even a fully funcitonal music player that stores 10x as much?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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Yeah, a ton of them. RAW files are usually compressed, but it's lossless. Just look for RAW in the specs and you've got your answer.
Some may shoot TIFF, but that's less common.
Presently here, but not there.
As flash memory speeds and capacities increase, maybe we could start using them for swap partitions or something. As long as it's faster than a hard drive and cheaper than RAM, I think they'd be quite useful.
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"Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA?"
/., aren't you?
Muahahahahahaaaa
You're new here at
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
"Nano-iPOD" with two of those cards and small enough to fit in a pair of cute white headphones with a sports ear band. Yum!
I love this stuff. 2Gb at 22.5mb/s is incredible - you could easilly do a high-res movie on that.
I'm yearning for the absence of all of the moving parts in my machine except for possibly CD/DVD drives. I can't bear the fact that my hard disk has spinning platters and incredibly fine-precision moving heads which could fail at any time (I leave my machine on all the time and consequently I'm now terrified to turn it off in case it'll fail when I power it up again). I want peltier coolers instead of fans, and I want solid state memory instead of hard disks. Once this happens, not only will my machine be ultra-silent, it'll also be much more robust.
It's a shame flash memory still costs so much, but the prices are pretty much where similar sized hard disks were several years ago, so I'm confident that we'll get 40gb flash memory in the next four or five years. God knows where hard disks will be then.
The world really needs a new storage paradigm. Mechanical magnetic storage is the oldest concept still alive in home computing, and is as archaic as the system BIOS. Intel are busy with getting rid of the currently outdated and rubbish BIOS and replacing it with something fancy and new, I just ooze over the same thing happening to data storage. For gods sake, the HDD is the biggest bottleneck in any modern home computer.
I don't know how much this card will retail for and anyway it is MMC. I don't think the Zaurus takes MMC. Why not get a 12GB compact flash card? A snip at $14,999.
:)
Zaurus takes SD or MMC (and can't use the SD "security features" anyway); I got the (slower) SD card because I was in a hurry, as I wanted to have my music along on a ski vacation.
Not only is 15 grand way out of my price range, I use the Zaurus's CF slot for the WiFi card anyway. But since I have a lot of fans on Slashdot, I'd put the 12GB CF card on my Amazon.com "wish list", but like a good Slashdotter, I don't want to encourage business with companies holding fatuous "1-click" patents.
Let's see 14,999 dollars / 334 fans, yeah, only $50 each. I mean, there's the woman who put up a web site and got random strangers to pay off her credit cards. And the woman who with the BuyMeImlpants site.... Yes, e-ebegging works -- if only I were a cute woman!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
No, since I don't have one.
But CF is not a PDA/DigiCam only storage.
I use it as IDE harddisk on generic ATX motherboards for both my media- and lan-server.
For the media-server (512MB Kingston CF) it stores, read-only, all the system and applications. This means, that when I listen to internet-radio, CD, watch a movie (TV or DVD) I do not need to spin up the storage disks. Similar for my 24/ server (also 512MB Kingston), which only spins up the disks, when some action happens (fetchmail, logfile). When I am abroad the system is mostly idle, except for the fetchmail every six hours and my own SSH access.
Hello?? Fred?! Is this you?
Project Gutenberg recently released a 4.7 GB DVD Image containing the 10,000 books scanned so far so i figure I should be able to squeeze at least 3,500 books on a 2 GB SD. i.e. 97 yards of books. A good start! Put this on a next generation e-ink unit like the sony libre and you have a "read or die" level bibliophiles dream.
Please stop asking this question. The answer is yes. Until I can carry every version of every document/song/movie/computer program ever made in the history of mankind in my pocket, in lossless formats, no amount of storage on any device will ever be too much.
And even then, I want a larger one to come out so the prices will come down.
-Esme
...buying something like this. The FlashTrax is probably the nicest portable hard disk card reader but you can also get cheaper ones without the screen; for example I got a USB2 X-Drive 20gb, which reads all memory formats but xD card, for around €150. Which is a lot cheaper than 20gb in memory cards.
Hell yeah. This means I can load up not only all my favourite utils, but the source as well.
... looking forward to it.
There is nothing quite so useful as the Sharp Zaurus PDA's, well set up, well configured, and running in your pocket.
Having a complete Linux install, source and all, wherever I go, for any particular practical reason I have it, gives me what I've wanted since the day I unwrapped my first MIPS Magnum pizzabox and plonked it on my desktop: a portable, power Linux workstation.
So yeah, please. I'll be getting a 2GIG SD card for my Zaurus as soon as I can find one locally
In short: Sonic Screwdriver!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
> Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA?
Yes, absolutely.
This weekend I was at Hershey Park, and practically filled a 4GB flash drive with photos from my Nikon D100 (photos in raw mode, shooting 3 a second of some action shots eats storage space fast).
With my current camera, 16GB would be comfortable.
I can remember, the year was 1984, and I was walking down a hallway in high school talking to a friend of mine about 'Apple's new Macintosh', which came in two flavors - 128k and the 512k 'Fat Mac'. I remeber, clear as anything, saying "Why would you need 512k? You can only fit 400k on one of its floppies...". I will never, ever make that mistake again. I can remember staring, dropjaw, at the first 400Mhz Pentium II we got in my office, thinking it was amazing. No matter how high I (realistically at the time) raise my expectations, they are always beaten.
Until I can carry every version of every document/song/movie/computer program ever made in the history of mankind in my pocket, in lossless formats, no amount of storage on any device will ever be too much.
Indeed. I require a device so small it will fit between the molecular strands of my spinal column near the base of my skull, and be able to make the world's knowledge (as well as natural language skills, mathematical intuition, and the aggregate creativity of humankind) available in response to a single, unspoken, thought-driven command.
I require that the device expand in capacity as needed, offer limitless (and instant) transportation capabilities (the "teleportation" module), as well as imparting upon me perfect health, immortality, and eternal youth.
I'm sure I've missed a few features (non-crackability, the "self defense feature that outperforms national militaries" module, and whatnot), but those specs should do for starters.
[ The sad thing is, I say this only party in gest. I really do want such a device. ]
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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!
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
a 2GB SD card would let me keep roadmaps for my GPS mapping/routing software for the entire US in non-zipped format. And that high speed card would mean for quick searches and route planning. Sweet.
A truly silly question on
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