Slashdot Mirror
A New Global Memory Card Standard
Lucas123 writes "The MultiMedia Card Association has approved a new memory card standard called the Multiple Interface Card (miCard). The card will make transferring pictures, songs, and other data between electronic gadgets and PCs easier. Twelve Taiwanese companies are preparing to manufacture the new miCard. 'The compatibility with both USB and MMC slots means most users won't need separate card readers anymore. MMC cards fit most consumer electronics, while USB connections are built into a wide range of IT hardware...'" Initial cards will hold 8 GB; the maximum the standard supports is 2,048 GB.
Would the RIAA and MPAA approve of this ease of use? And would SONY approve?
computerworld could use some of these, so they can store some pictures:
http://images.google.com/images?q=miCard
I found an image showing what these things apparently look like:
Link to Image
The image shows that they can be used with an adapter to fit an existing SD card slot.
Can these things just be stuck strait into USB slots?
I use ext3 on my portable usb harddrive. Works fine in windows using FS Driver.
Or probably more accurately, an existing MMC slot. MMC is an older spec that SD is compatible with. The form factor is nearly identical.
This one looks smaller than XD. It looks like it is about the same size as the piece of plastic inside the shell of a USB connector. It might be the same as MicroSD, I don't know. It's not the first card to offer USB compatibility. There are standard SD cards that can fold in half to present a USB connector to the user, but that's not a standard.
As a matter of fact, a USB plug doesn't have to be bulky! Most of it is just protection for the interface. There are USB plugs just as thin as the card itself. For instance, a Sony product:
/ 250/c/2634
http://www.superwarehouse.com/Sony_mini_storage/b
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
The USB interface is a nice feature, but a USB nub is pretty clunky, and is, in and of itself, bigger than competing media cards. XD and microSD are both smaller than a USB connector. Every format is flatter (CF, XD, SD, MMC, MemoryStick). How is this going to be better than any of those? If it doesn't have a standard USB nub, then is it going to need an adaptor, therefore defeating the while "card reader not required" argument?
Actually, I dont know either, since MMC/SD cards with built-in USB connectors already exist. See Here. I know microcenter around here has been carrying them for quiet some time now. Basically, you fold the card in half and the tab that sticks out has the contacts for a USB plug. Its not a full USB plug form-factor, just a card large enough to hold itself in place against the USB jack's contacts. Maybe they are making the interface the same so that there is only one "plugin" side, and it can determine if its being used as mim or USB. The only other plus would be that it can hold up to 2T, and starts at 8G, where todays MMC/SD cards top out around 8G.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
unfortunately, to be universally accessable it needs to be fat. ntfs for windows would work but write support is not complete across platforms or is in a functional beta state. ext2 would work but drivers would need installed on a number of OSs to use it. if this is released @ 8GB, i wonder what system then plan on using?
udf is the closest thing to a more modern universally supported fs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format The only big issue is that XP can't write to it. (Mac, Linux and many other OS's can read and write udf, atleast MS is finally coming to the party with read write in Vista.)
the make this clear, the USB interface does not have the plug casing and is therefore very small. this is the same thickness as an sd/mmc card. it is electronically compatible with sd/mmc via contacts on the card as well as with USB by a seperate set of contacts. this is essentially MMC2.0(it is lacking the 'secure' part of the SD name, no 'write protect' switch) and looks to use the same type of logic for memory access as mmc rather than sd. the idea here is that this card will fit in a modern digital camera with an sd/mmc slot AND fit in the USB port on a pc. this is a reverse adapter system where the card needs a 'guide' to fit in SD/MMC slots but not for USB.
We don't need another standard. A few days ago at Wal Mart I saw Wii-branded product that is really slick. It is an SD card, but the back of the card has been notched out so that the last few millimeters are the width of the little PCB that is in the connector part of USB. So the card fits in SD slots as normal, and the back side can be directly plugged into a USB slot.
Here it is.
Here is a similar product with a slide on sleeve. I assume that might be needed for physical compatibility with some SD slots?
Here is a SanDisk combo SD / USB memory card, but I don't like it as well because it has moving parts which can break.
These products are pure genius. Personally, I think the SD standard should be updated to increase supported capacity, so we can use a ubiquitous form factor long into the future. I don't know about the rest of you, but I have these worthless PCMCIA memory cards lying around, which I replaced with now worthless CF memory cards, which I've now replaced with SD. I don't want another change, and we don't need anything smaller than Micro-SD. So only bandwidth and capacity need to increase, which the SD standard can be modified to support (while maintaining backwards compatibility) as the technology improves.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
FAT32 supports up to 8TB volumes in 2k and xp under certain conditions, and generally 127GB volumes will work fine on win9x. Microsoft nerfed their format tool to ensure that people used ntfs instead. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184006/EN-US/
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Although it's sort of a technical duplicate; it looks simple and sturdy. But more important:
"Officials expect local companies to save $40 million in licensing fees thanks to the card, in addition to profiting from sales."
If enough companies use this, it will be the standard for, say, at least ten years. So everybody complaining 'great, just wat we need; another standard'; please think again.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
So you didn't bother to look at the image the parent posted? Apparently all of these cards can be plugged into USB ports, unlike special SD cards that need to have an internal USB plug.
So you didn't bother to look at the image the parent posted? Apparently all of these cards can be plugged into USB ports, unlike special SD cards that need to have an internal USB plug.
... the parent was talking about the difference between an MMC (that's "MultiMediaCard") and SD ("Secure Digital") cards and slots.
No
Many people think that they are the same, but they are slightly different. MMC came first, and was a pretty neat format, but Sony and the other big music companies decided they hated it, because it didn't have built in features that made it DRM-friendly. So they "upgraded" the format and made SD, which includes an extra pin on the connector, an area of the card's memory that's not user-accessible (for storing the media keys, according to some never-widely-implemented DRM scheme they were cooking up), and a lock/unlock switch. They somehow got the manufacturers to kill MMC, by not producing many large-capacity cards for it, and replace it with SD.
From a consumer's standpoint, we got a lock/unlock switch, higher prices for a while, and lost some capacity to the key-escrow area. (The latter is hardly noticed now, but it really sucked back on 32MB cards). MMC seems to have come back from the grave lately, though, mostly because of the reduced-size card implementations. (Maybe it's easier to implement in hardware and software than SD? I'm not clear on that.)
These new memory cards are compatible to both USB and MMC, not SD. However, most SD card slots are backwards-compatible (IMO, that's a misnomer; SD was hardly a step "forwards" for anyone except the content monopolies) to MMC, so to the consumer it's "same difference."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Such adapters exist, and aren't too hard to find. Here is an example.
Things like this will keep CF around for a bit longer, but I do suspect that its days are numbered. Flash is currently improving faster than CF-sized hard drives, so the little disks which made CompactFlash so desirable as a pro standard are no longer important.
And, there's something about the big, fat, durable, and mostly self-cleaning contacts on an SD card which makes the insertion process a whole lot less scary than the 40 pin (!!!) socket connector of CF.
Other than that, it's just a lot more compatible. My PDA, laptop, cell phone, car stereo, and consumer digital camera all have SD slots on them.
I'll miss CF when its gone, though, because the format's inherent ability to act, pin-for-pin, just like IDE hard drives makes for some useful (though probably not very interesting) hacks, which is something that none of the other flash formats are currently capable of. I've currently got two diskless computers here booting directly from CompactFlash cards which are plugged directly into the IDE bus, which has so far worked quite nicely. One is an old 386 laptop which now has zero moving parts (and which should last indefinitely), while the other is a K6-2 box that is doing some audio DSP work (which is now almost silent).
Kid-proof tablet..