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.

Comments

IDE interface ?

[spiny]

or even SCSI - it would be nice to replace all my bulky (by comapison) 3 1/2 inch IDE drives.

Re:IDE interface ?

[ca1v1n]

Actually, we do have non-volatile memory with unlimited write cycles. It's just a lot more expensive, so it doesn't get used much, particularly in very high volume. It sounds like this technology is sufficiently flexible that they could put whatever sort of memory they see fit on the inside and it would work the same way. You put in the expensive stuff, and you've got a replacement for the general purpose hard drive. You put in the cheap stuff and you've just replaced a media storage disk.

Re:IDE interface ?

[dgatwood]

Any bets on whether this is actually probe storage? That could easily explain the claimed capacity, assuming that the technology is close enough to production quality to actually go to market.

I first heard about this stuff back in '99 or 2000. It's pretty neat stuff. The basic idea is that the limit to hard drive density is caused by the horizontal orientation (across the platter surface) of the metallic particles that represent the bits, coupled with the need to have multiple particles for each bit to avoid them changing state at room temperature.

Probe storage partially solves this problem by reorienting the bits in a vertical fashion. Instead of a spinning platter, it has a square chunk of substrate on which the particles sit. Instead of a head arm that moves in one dimension, the head arm contains multiple heads and moves in three dimensions---left/right and front/back to address a bit, then up and down to read or write the bit. By having multiple heads, it is able to read multiple bits at once and concatenate them into a few bytes of data.

Of course, this could be entirely unrelated, but it certainly would be cool if that turned out to be a viable production-quality technology this year.

Solid state reliability?

[nz_mincemeat]

My only objection with solid state memory like this is how many rewrites can the media sustain before failure?

I use my USB drive + MP3 player a lot but sometimes wonder how long the gadget would last...

Are there any existing tests available for perusal?

Re:Solid state reliability?

[Threni]

> My only objection with solid state memory like this is how many rewrites can
> the media sustain before failure?

Depends. IBM use flash ram in their printers (ie the model 4610), and it's supposed to last 100,000 writes, so I guess if the USB things use the same stuff then that means it'll last over 100 years if you wrote to it twice a day. Lets face it - you're going to lose it or replace it with a model with enough..uh, I mean more memory before that.

I'd love a usb/mp3 player but I'm not going to pay more than £50 for one and it'd have to have a few gigs of storage so it looks like I'll be sticking with my £45 diskman which plays cds/mp3s for a little while yet.

Re:Overstated

[Animekiksazz]

oh really?

On that note, I didn't realize CompactFlash supported up to 128 GB.

And Sony's original MemoryStick pales in comparison to all of these formats. 256 MB compared to 4 GB. Yeah... Yes I know they have MSPro but nm that.

Read/Write

[rf0]

You have to wonder how many times you can read/write this format. Is it like CF where you have a limited number of more like a hard disk where you can use it form main storage. If the latter mass backup storage suddenly becomes very easy..

Rus

Re:Read/Write

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical flash parts these days are rated for 100,000 or a million erase cycles. Some of the really cheap parts intended only for program storage are rated for 10,000. A quick google scan indicates a lot of CF vendors quote 1M+.

Even at 100,000 erase cycles, and assuming you erase and rewrite the entire card, you could back up your hard drive every hour for ten years straight before wearing out the flash.

Yes, you have a "limited" number of times you can erase a flash -- but it's not much of a limit in practice. I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

Just a new format

[tji]

From The Register article, it sounds like it's just a new format definition. The 2TB size would just be the addressing limit. Also, the claim a 120MB/s xfer rate.. which, like ATA133, represents the upper limit - not any real xfer rate.

So, it's basically an updated format specification with no (current) practical limits.

Nice size, but

[grunt107]

storage devices that large should have a multi-parallel division of storage.

Although 2TB is tremendous, at the 120MB/sec, it would be about 5 hrs to access the entire contents (while rare, a card-card transfer to save data might be performed).

XD picture card promise ...

[adzoox]

Fuji/Olympus promised by the end of 2004, we'd have 1GB XD cards and assured their buyers that they wouldn't be abandoned by the format [in terms of space], like they were with smartmedia cards. A 4GB was promised by summer 2005. It looks like neither will materialize.

Who would pick up this format? It seems Fuji/Olympus would be their only buyers on the digital camera market. I suppose this will be aimed more at Mp3 players and possibly computers/laptops/PDAs, if it's fast enough.

Concerning XD cards - if anyone is interested - I'm trying a mod project for smartmedia cards - see my journal

Re:What a tiny card.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tested a lot of post office packages. I have tested a stamp on one side the address and return address on the other side of the stamp.

I've also tested mailing a $1 and a $5 with no envelope to see if it would make it.

I also tried to send a message with 50 $1 bills in it and said that everyone that touched the envelope could open it and take $1. I wanted to test the theory [because I had a problem] that NO ONE at the post office can open a package NO MATTER WHAT, unless they suspect something hazardous.

All packages made it safe in trips across country.

I was told they put the postage stamp in a large velum envelope.

Its like fox news twisting but worse

[t_allardyce]

Nice wording in the post, it should say a new card format with up to 2TB storage. Backwards compatability is always good but i cant help thinking 2TB addressing is not gonna be enough. Can this be used as a multi-purpose card? Things like PDAs and phones really need a couple of slots that can be used to plug in memory, wireless cards and other things and it needs to be a single standard - something like USB in a long card-shaped socket?

Hmmm, must be using really small atoms

[goneutt]

Since it takes a couple transistors to make a logic circuit there will be several times as many transistors as bytes, possibly a minimum of 6-8 trillion transistors. At present the microprocessor lines are at around 42 million transitors, and doubled every year(moore's law is exponential) it might be 10+ years to be able to put that many transistors on a chip, but by then the chip will have to larger than the proposed standard. Other wise you'll need to use smaller parts, and I think in the space allowed you're looking at transistors smaller than the electron orbit around hydrogen. Just because you can adress a certain amount or memory doesn't mean you can make the memory to use it.

New iPod (or cell phone) in 2005?

[xylix]

I can't be the only one that immediately thought "iPod" when I read this news. Now if there can be another breakthough in battery technology to make my iPod last longer / not slowly die out, I would be a very happy camper.

Yeah 2 TB would be excessive for music. But I am more interested in the tiny size than the massive storage. (Seriously, I can't imagine needing a terabyte ... but then I once thought 1 GB was an impossibly large amount of memory space. HAH! Wonder what comes after tera ...)

With 2 TB I could have all my CDs (somewhere around 400 - 500) copied in Aiff format for better quality. With a 2 TB iPod I could keep my entire home folder backed up to take with me from home, to work, on vacation... wherever. I personally can't see the point of incorporating video into an iPod ... but with 2 TB you could throw it in as an extra.

But then, on second thought, if you could shoe-horn one of these into a cell phone equiped with the iPod software I could have one less device to carry with me.

Re:Here's hoping

[pla]

Mind, the problem with this media, no matter who much of a data hoarder you are (like me), you'll find ways to fill it.

Hmm, I don't know about that. Personally, I keep everything that hits my PC, and it adds up, but still hasn't come close to 2TB...

About every two years I replace my fileserver's smallest HDD with one roughly twice as large as the current largest (so I basically append a zero to the right end of the current size, expressed in binary). Currently that means almost a third of a terabyte after an upgrade this spring.

This time, I've started keeping my CD rips in a lossless format. Next time (which will put me around 0.75TB) I will probably start keeping raw DVD rips. After that, I don't know what else I might keep that could use so much room. Until now, audio and small video clips have taken the bulk of the space.

Although I know everyone who has ever said this has later eaten their words, at the moment, I really don't think any home computer needs more than a few TB of storage.


But if the media is reliable enough, I wonder what backup solutions coming out of this?

Ah, great point. That currently seems like the biggest problem we have with storage - Not the actual online storage, but the ability to keep up-to-date backups. I've worked for the past few weeks to backup my fileserver to DVD, and still have a few more discs to go. Most likely, at least a few of the over-50 DVDs I've created have errors, and in the event my FS fries, I would almost certainly lose something. Even Blu-Ray doesn't look like that great of an alternative... 25GB doesn't suck, but it still means five discs per 100GB. After my next HDD addition, that will come out to around 30 discs, almost the same situation I have now (Yes, Blu-Ray theoretically holds a lot more, up to 100GB for dual-sided dual-layer. But keep in mind that DSDL DVDs hold almost 20GB, and we've just now started seeing SSDL burners, with media incredibly scarce and expensive).

So what do we need? A solution for making backups of several hundred GB at a time, that doesn't cost more than buying a similarly-sized IDE drive and keeping it off-site (ie, tape backups, not even counting the cost of the drive itself).