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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?
A new standard that will unify ALL the others... where have we heard this before?
computerworld could use some of these, so they can store some pictures:
http://images.google.com/images?q=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.
...Of course, since most older MMC card devices can't read anything over 4GB,
you'll still need to upgrade either your storage or your devices (or both).
I applaud the direct USB compatibility and the increased capacity, but don't kid us with claims of backward compatibility. Everyone already has 2-4GB MMC/CF/SD/XD cards in all their devices nowadays, and the industry needs to find an artificial reason to upgrade. Nothing more, nothing less.
Please, lets do something other than FAT.
Anyone know what the physical form factor specifications are?
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
I use ext3 on my portable usb harddrive. Works fine in windows using FS Driver.
What does this do that previous ones don't? Why is this so much better than existing technology that it will supplant it?
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?
I really only see three markets for these cards. Large: currently filled very well by Compact Flash. Medium (a niche): filled by SD. And small: where microSD is doing well [I was routing for xD].
PS. "Taiwan's miCard chosen as global memory card standard" by the companies invested in promoting that standard. Check the list of supporters. It's all media manufacturers. There are no device designers on the list (possible exceptions are BenQ and Asus).
2048 Gigabytes *should* be enough for anyone...
I think it's great that SD/MMC has taken hold as a "standard" of sorts. CF was once the king, but is too big by today's standards. SDMMC is good because it's not TOO small (i.e., I'd expect my own mother to lose a microSD card but not an SD card), and it has a wide range of applications like SDIO cards for wi-fi and other uses. And, the adapters for micro/miniSD make sense too.
Now, if only they can convince Sony to at least stop making their OWN formats obsolete...
One Card to rule them all, One Card to find them, One Card to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
FAT is ubiquitous and can be read by nearly all operating systems, so it is hard to displace. However, given such a high capacity, these cards will have many video recording applications and hence something besides FAT is needed because of the 4GB limit. I doubt the format is a problem because you'll be able to just format it to whatever you need.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sure but how many users have that installed already? It's a matter of native support if they want mass adoption, not some third party option being available that grandma won't or can't figure out how to load.
They're competing with essentially plun-n-play stuff now. If people have a choice between plug-n-play and "install drivers, hope it works, reboot and then plug" there's no need to guess which one the average consumer will go for.
You know the thing about UDP jokes? I don't care if you get it or not.
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
There's always RAW. But personally I prefer to have my meat trimmed and cooked.
Of course, since most older MMC card devices can't read anything over 4GB, you'll still need to upgrade either your storage or your devices (or both).
Why? Have your old devices stopped working? Mine have not and I've got more than enough flash cards for the forseeable future. Time marches on, sometimes things get better. My six year old CF based Cannon camera is still a champ, but it shipped with a 16MB card! 64 MB cards were just enough for a weekend, 256MB cards were nice and the 1GB card I have is strictly overkill. My newer of the same takes MMC and I knew it's limitations when I bought it. 1GB cards are enough to get as much video as the device has battery. I'm looking forward to HD video devices that will tax this new card.
The big reason to move seems to be licensing. FTFA:
Slam, that's a lot of money. Hopefully, they see the same logic for OGG and friends. I'd really like it if my next camera did not come with a CD full of Windoze shit and that everything worked out of the box.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...several Years ago...Blah
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
That's what the driver CDs are for. "Grandma" still has to use those in order to use her camera (or so she thinks), so it can be easily included with the installation process.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
"2,048 Gb should be enough memory for anyone"... where have we heard this before?
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.)
We already have to put up with different memory card formats when we switch devices and phones, Mini SD, SD, XD, MMC etc. etc., and these people are creating a totally new format that we can all call a standard and not have to worry about it all any more?!
Forgive me for being a tad sceptical at that logic.
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.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
This is the upgrade of the MMC standard to beyond 8G. That was "planned obsolescence" in the sense that everybody knew that eventually, we'd need a new standard for that. But every other flash standard has done the same because it didn't make sense to design a standard for 4G+ cards in the days of 8M and 16M cards.
"Backwards compatibility" means that you can use your old cards in new devices conforming with the new standard. They also gave you a small card format and direct USB compatibility. Those are nice features; if they didn't care about backwards compatibility, they could just have chosen a new, small format that was incompatible with all your old cards.
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!
A driver CD doesn't help me when I walk into the local public library, hoping to use webmail to send a picture to a friend...
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
I wonder how long it will be before Sony release their "similar enough to fill the same needs except more expensive and totally incompatible with anything except Sony hardware" version.
Many posters are commenting here that FAT works across all operating systems and that's why it's being used. If these manufacturers came out with a new file system specification (say, based on BSD UFS), I doubt it would be a big deal for Microsoft, Apple, and the Linux Kernel developers to include it in there.
The reasons we are stuck with FAT is:
1. Simplicity. This is huge for embedded devices (IE, the things that do the writing to all of these cards). A read-only FAT driver can be implemented in a few kilobytes of (compiled) code. It requires trivial amounts of memory to operate (only a few hundred bytes). I've written a bootloader for an embedded product that could load an OS from a FAT partition and it was under 10 kilobytes. A read-write implementation is not much bigger and the memory requirements are similarly trivial. No other major file system out there can claim this. Particularly, modern file systems like NTFS require huge amounts of memory (comparatively) due to the complex structures they need to maintain, and have massive, complex code to read and write.
2. Reliability. I know this seems counterintuitive for such a lousy file system, but FAT is fairly resilient both to power failures (or card yanks), and more subtle corruption such as bad drivers or media defects. Sure, it may corrupt and lose your file, but it very rarely destroys the entire file system and lose the rest of the files on there. This is again because of the simplicity of the structures and the fact that very little needs to change on disk when a modification is made. Remember how many times Windows 95 crashed? How many times of that did you get major FS damage? Compare and contrast with Ext2.
So, yes, FAT is a terrible file system compared to modern ones. But there's a reason everyone uses it.
Thank you! Finally someone who actually knows what they're talking about rather than repeating other people's misconceptions.
Like you said, FAT32 can go really large, but Microsoft intentionally disabled support for formatting FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB. Many non-MS tools can format a larger FAT32 drive, that Windows 2000/XP will happily mount.
The bigger problem though, is all the 16-bit garbage apps that are typically present on FAT32 systems. Windows 98 is a very dirty thing. It likes to destroy anything it doesn't understand, so mounting a large FAT32 partition under these crusty old Dos Shells is disastrous.
Ideally, I'd like to see a simplified, open file-system for removable media. Something that could be trivially supported in future releases of all major operating systems. It certainly doesn't need balanced B-trees or any such perks, just a basic system that requires very little memory to operate, making it easier for consumer devices to safely access it, and easy for any OS developer to write a quick kernel driver.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
That's assuming you don't have any shots longer than 10 minutes. And without knowing the latency of the card who can say if it is suitable for video editing or acquisition. And some of us like to work uncompressed which brings up even more issues. It's got the bandwidth for one, maybe two, streams of uncompressed SD, but not even close for a single stream of uncompressed HD. I'll stick to my RAID.
+0 Meh
You mean most of your devices. Professional photographers have standardized on CF. We've dumped millions into CF gear and it will be around for a very long time.
What the industry really needs is a memory card standard that is totally open with absolutely no fees required to produce memory cards, card readers or software for it (unlike SD where you need to pay license fees). Or failing that, develop a standard where you only need to pay license frees if you are producing the physical hardware (i.e. the memory card or socket) and where the software is totally open. Motorola for example were caught between a rock and a hard place a while back because they had released a phone with a driver for the included SD slot built into the linux kernel instead of being a module and were stuck between "GPL violation" and "violating the SD association NDAs" (at the time they had to choose "GPL violation". It was all cleared up when the SD card people were convinced to release the "simplified specs" and Motorola could release the code in question)
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..
So, partition the flash device into two partitions.
Make one of them FAT32, and the other EXT3.
Make the FAT32 partition contain an autorun which installs, without prompting, Windows IFS drivers for the EXT3 partition.
It would probably require a reboot, I'd guess, but that's typical of anything Windows.
The problem isn't just the FAT32 device size limit, it is also that FAT32 has a maximum file size of four gigs. Given this format will be used for videos, that is a cripling limitation.
According to Wikipedia, Microsoft's solution is exFAT.
You missed the point of the SD slot on the 1Ds Mk II. It's not meant for primary storage. It's meant so you can have simultaneous JPG+RAW. Finish a card, give an art director the SD card so they can quickly look through the JPGs.
CF will be around for quite a while yet, for one simple reason. Large cameras have "plenty" of space available. CF cards are physically larger than SD, ergo, CF card sizes will always be larger than SD, and as resolution increases, so too will demand for space (one - not discounting the changes in technology re miniaturization, and two - not entering into the discussion of how best to increase resolution).