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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.
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?
2048 Gigabytes *should* be enough for anyone...
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.
That's a better question than you probably intended.
This new memory card format marks a major shift in who's leading and shaping the market for electronics. The companies involved in setting this standard are all what used to be second-tier manufacturers - companies like Asustech and BenQ. In the past, it's been Sandisk, Sony, Siemens et al who've decided what shape our storage cards will be.
I think it's pretty revealing that this group of second-tier Taiwanese manufacturers has come up with a unifying design instead of fragmenting the market even more, as has been the habit of Sony et al. Your DRM comment becomes more relevant when we realise it's this same group who've been providing us with inexpensive DVD players that support way more standards, with less restrictions than the old guard Euro/America/Japanese based electronics companies.
It's probably a good sign for those of us who despise DRM.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."