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Taiwanese Firms To Launch a 2 Terabyte Memory Card
Krafty Koder writes "The Register is reporting that a consortium of Taiwanese firms are to launch a 2 Terabyte memory card at the Taipei International Electronics Show (Taitronics) on the 8th of October, with mass production expected to start next year.
The card will measure 3.2 x 2.4 x 0.1cm according to this DigiTimes.com report" The reports say that this is supposed to be a "new type" of card, so the details are still quite sketchy. Offical unveiling will happen in early October.
to buy a solid state MP3 player. This sounds great. Mad expensive, but great.
The title appears to be exagerating a bit in announcing 2TB cards: the article itself only mentions that the format supports 2TB, not that actual 2TB cards will be available.
:-)
Not that a 2TB memory card wouldn't be nice though
It looks like it's a new interface which is capable of supporting 2TB, but fitting 2TB of data onto a device the size of a MMC card is a problem that each manufacturer needs to solve, and they'll solve it when Moore's law says they'll solve it. So this isn't actually exciting; they've just made the address field longer.
It does mean that devices using this standard SHOULD support cards way larger than existed at the time the device was made. But based on my experience with almost every format of storage I've ever used, this won't work in practice.
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if something seems 'wrong' in the slashdot headline..
then read the fucking article. slashdot headlines are no good for gaining information on wtf is going on or what the story really is about.
they will introduce a card(format) that can support 2tb sizes.. a bit more believable but not so spectacular, no? now, as to why slashdot makes these shitty headlines that could be accurate instead of empty on the spot invented hype.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Very nice until I read the fine print. Too bad there are a lot of technologies that haven't reached their theoretical limits yet. I guess the marketeers will start us off at 10 G and move up from there each year until getting to 100 G at which time another format will obsolete this one -- which seems to be the story of my favorite CF card technology (now that 1G CF cards are somewhat affordable, I can't find many cameras to accept it now). Oh well. I guess yet another memory card to confuse things.
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If you read the article, you'll find that the new format "supports up to 2TB" of storage. They mention nothing about initial densities.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
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if a story claims to outperform Moore's law by several orders of magnitude, the claim is probably false or misrepresented.
Please note that "Moore's law" is not a law of nature, but a marketing strategy of Intel...
Even with "up to" 2TB, this is still pretty amazing. Mainly because of that transfer rate. 120MB a sec it pretty damn quick and it runs on very low power. If the latency is good as well then this puts hard drives to same, esp since it would have less if any moving parts. If they can pull off cards like this of equal size to HDDs with not a HUGE price gap, we might see people start to turn away from old school HDD. We have heard talk about moving away from them for a long time because it is doubtfull that they will ever be able to hold enough data to satisfy us in the future. :)
(although wouldn't want an IDE interface, that isn't fast enough to support this card. SATA maybe.)
Nothing to see here, are you insane. Depending on what the price of the card is, this could potentially replace hard drives in many applications. If its cheap enough, perhaps even in Laptops. Its transfer speed is fast enough to replace a hard drive, plus, being solid state, it won't develop mechanical problems. It'll take up substantially less space and consume less power. In this age of miniaturization, and subsequent problems with power consumption and heat output, it seems a great solution.
I really don't care about initial size. What would be nice if if you could stick say 4 of these in even an ATA raid you could expect massive perfomance gains that would go increase on the next faster interface up to SCSI320. With a 4 drive setup you could have a RAID5 for fault tolerance and failure and it would be so speedy in transfers that you wouldn't even notice. This would apply to software raid, and or hardware. Give me 4 200GB versions of these and I would be happy cause its not always siz that matters. A single 2TB drive with no data redundancy would honestly just plain scare me anyway.
"Supports 2 TB" could mean "uses 41-bit addressing" (2^41 B = 2TB). Current IDE interfaces with 48 bit addressing "support" up to 256TB of storage but you're not going to see that kind of density on a single device any time soon.
As for replacement of mechanical HDDs - all current non-volatile rewritable storage has a limited number of write cycles, making them less than ideal for HDD replacement (imagine the damage your swapfile would do to one). If somebody had figured out a way to work around this, I'm sure it would be the #1 thing mentioned in the press release.
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Ok, but don't you think that we don't have enough information about the technology yet to just write it off. If the cards come out with sizable storage capacities, they could replace HD's on MP3 players and laptops. The fact that they're substantially faster than existing cards is exciting news in itself. Perhaps this is just one step closer to a complete solid state storage system in your laptop. I, personally, would love to get rid of my hard drive. It uses a lot of power, makes noise, takes up a lot of space, and is prone to failure.
Surely you should be more intested in reads vs. writes. I only load songs onto my MP3 player once - but I might play each song 500 times. Maybe not a good idea as a general harddrive - but perfect for few write, many read applications.
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Right now you could use a big RAID of small chips, to get rid of your hdd (like a DIMM filled with flash) . Using some intelligence at the file system level, limited writing cycles might not be an issue.
So, solid state storage, hundreds of Gb, is feasible right now, although not cheap.
Parent (and GGGreat parent) highlight the fact that this is not important, unless it is. Many press releases claim great storage capacities, that's not new. Something new would be some chip maker making some actual chips.
If press releases had actual value, we would already have holodecks.
Every time one of these things is announced, with "Up to a zillion bazillion petabytes capacity!!" there's a bunch of people like you that insist that this new fancy thing could replace hard drives.
If recent history has been any lesson at all, then we've already seen that initial offerings are usually 10% of the claimed "up to" capacity, they aren't as fast, and they are extremely expensive.
Have you seen the prices on the top capacity memory cards available today? Many thousands of dollars in some cases.
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Because one day maybe they will stack multiple layers on a card. Maybe they'll come up with a larger form-factor (like CF Type 2 as used by microdrives), or maybe they'll turn into endpoints for access to remote storage (in which case 2TB suddenly looks rather small; I've got 1/4 that in my desktop already).
plus, being solid state, it won't develop mechanical problems. It'll take up substantially less space and consume less power.
You're most likely right about the issue of mechanical problems. However I'm not sure about the power issues. Hard disks use lots of power only when they are starting to spin. At idle or full speed they use little power.
Dynamic RAM memory, on the other hand, has to be constantly refreshed which means it has power running to it at all times to scan addresses. There has to be uninterrupted power to drive the RAM bank, the DRAM controller, the hot-plug interface to the PC, and the regulated power supply for the unit. This might be a significant percentage of the power that would be used in total by a low-energy magnetic storage device like a hard disk.
It's also time to start considering the possibility that Taiwan will possibly be invaded and occupied by the Communists from the mainland at some point within the next five years. This will, if it happens, disrupt manufacturing design and shipping for years to come.
If I were an American politician, I would suggest to the US State department that the USA would only guarantee to provide an efficient co-defense of Taiwan if Taiwan relocates a significant number of IC fabs and design centers to the USA employing primarily American workers. This is the way that the world works. They would surely understand. They wouldn't like it, but they would comply.
Really? You must know a different set of "most people" than I do. I'm about 60% full on my 15 GB hard drive on the laptop I got in March. Mind you, I'm running SUSE 9.1 Pro with a lot of developer tools, but there are no media files (mp3, ogg, divx, etc.) that a lot of people have stored that take up a lot of space. If you're still running Win98 with a small app collection and all ten of your CDs ripped to mp3s, then maybe 4 gig will work out for you.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
It probably is. The article is too short on details and too long on claims. The biggest memory card I've heard of is 2GB IIRC, and these guys say they're going to have 2TB in the same form factor by October? When the biggest 3.5" HD they have is 512GB? And a 120MBps transfer rate? What's the fastest they can go now? 10? Maybe 20? So what you're telling me is that some company out in Taiwan has replaced Intel's flash technology with something that holds 1,000 times more data in the same physical space. The tech world would ordinarily go apeshit over an advancement of this magnitude, given the clear violation of Moore's Law. And yet this is the first we've heard of it. And instead of rolling out solid state hard disks, or mondo RAID arrays, they are making memory cards for PDA's and digital cameras out of these. And they are going straight to market in October. And they did it all before Intel and IBM, who spends billions on R&D developing this kind of thing.
Repeat after me, everyone.
This.product.is.vaporware.
-R
OK, I've read the digitimes.com page closely, and it says that they will "soon mass produce a new type [emphasis mine] of memory card", but doesn't say that these cards will all have 2TB.
The "Memory cards specifications" table in that article has a "Maximum capacity" column that gives "2TB" for those cards, but it also gives "128GB" as the "Maximum capacity" value for CompactFlash cards; has anybody seen a 128GB CF card?
So I think any speculation on what technology might be used for these cards, based on an assumption that they'll have 2TB in 2005, is premature, as it is not at all clear that they'll have 2TB in 2005, even though the specification for those cards will allow cards of up to 2TB to be constructed (i.e., the spec is intended to allow that format to scale to 2TB if and when the memory technology gets to the point where that can be supported).
You are getting ahead of yourself here. Specifications haven't even been set. They are working on the ideas, the products haven't even begun to be designed or manufactured yet.
It's like saying my new computer will be able to recognize my speech and talk to me like a human being would, as soon as someone writes the software to make that happen.