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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You must be new here :)
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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?
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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?
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
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!
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