Panasonic Working On 2-Terabyte SD Cards

An anonymous reader writes "SD cards with a theoretical maximum capacity of 2TB are in development by Panasonic and the SD Association, it has been announced. The technology is called 'Secure Digital Extended Capacity', or 'SDXC', and Panasonic has announced it will soon show off a 64GB SDXC card. Using the new technology, read/write speeds are set to hit 300MBps. SanDisk and Sony are using the same standard to develop Extended Capacity cards in Sony's Memory Stick Pro and Memory Stick Micro range. SDXC utilises Microsoft's new exFAT file system — AKA 'FAT 64' — which first appeared in Windows Vista SP1, and has a theoretical file size limit of 16 exbibytes." Reader xlotlu adds a note about the "proprietary exFAT file system, which is available for licensing under NDA. There are currently no specific patents on exFAT, but its legal status is uncertain since it's based on FAT. The FAT patents have been previously upheld in court."

Comments

They're talking about address space

[seanadams.com]

This article is absolute blithering bullshit. They're talking about the interface / file systems' _addressable_ size. Compared to actually achieving higher storage densities, that's about as hard as pulling a number out of the air. It has absolutely nothing to do with the technology needed to fit 2TB or any other number of bytes into whatever little card.

And oooh theyre making a 64GB card but "working on" a 2TB card? Yeah right, so only a 30-fold increase in density left to go!

Then he goes on to discuss throughput as if that has anything to do with it....

Re:They're talking about address space

[sexconker]

No! They're working on a 2 TiB card and have a 64 GiB card just about ready. They have a theoretical limit of 16 EiB!

Get with the times, accept the ibi!

(Fuck ibi. 1 KB = 1024 bytes.)
(Fuck this article. Might as well say Sony is working on a new battery that will recharge in less than 1 minute and last for days, while Intel is working on 32 nm CPUS, and later, 20 nm!)

Re:They're talking about address space

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Get with the times, accept the ibi!

Why? Exabyte is 2^40, GB 2^30, and MB 2^20 - simple.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Shrubbman]

No, the file system may support it but the SDXC standard will top out at 2TB. That way, after you buy all new kit this round they can get you to buy something else when they come up with their NEXT standard. It's called planned obsolescence, see the previous transition from SD to SDHC and this forthcoming transition from SDHC to SDXC. You really think they aren't planning to milk this cow every couple of years for as long as they can, rather than do it right and just come up with ONE standard that'll have headroom in the hardware logic to match that 16 EiB limit on the file system.

Re:They're talking about address space

[CaptainPatent]

No, the file system may support it but the SDXC standard will top out at 2TB. [...] It's called planned obsolescence

What are you talking about? 640k should be enough for anybody!

Re:They're talking about address space

[nine-times]

Yeah, I came in here to point out how silly this is. There's no announcement about any hardware in the pipeline. They're planning on using a filesystem built on FAT but with a 2TB theoretical limit? Who cares? There are better filesystems than FAT with theoretical limits much higher than 2TB.

In fact, the bigger question in my mind is, why is Microsoft coming out with a new version of FAT to support bigger filesystems? Wouldn't the effort be better spent on figuring out how to kill FAT once and for all and replace it with something that doesn't completely suck?

Re:They're talking about address space

[CaptainPatent]

No! They're working on a 2 TiB card and have a 64 GiB card just about ready. They have a theoretical limit of 16 EiB!

very doubtful actually. With a magnetic media, the odd division of the disk into sectors nearly always meant each new layout was a different, non-standard size. Drive manufactures in that case found every way possible to round up, including using 1000 bytes as a KB when it is only a KiB. Flash forward to... well... flash. When making the circuitry, it actually takes less work and programming (generally) to round out all address spaces to a given digit to be used. In addition there are very standardized chip memory sizes for flash. I don't know specifically if Panasonic is going to disregard the standard chip sizes and only shoot for KiB, but that's the case far less frequently with flash than with standard rotating hard drives.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

I can already tell this thread is going to be fun ...

Re:They're talking about address space

[Glonoinha]

Amen.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Surt]

At 2 TB you have room for hours of 8K 120fps 3d stereo video. You don't likely need more, so as long as your camera is backwards compatible, you won't have much reason to upgrade.

Of course, it will be so ridiculously cheap to upgrade that you will anyway. I thought I would carry my 4GB SD cards onto my next camera, but by the time I upgraded cameras, they were throwing in 16GB SDHC cards with purchase!

Re:They're talking about address space

[andy_t_roo]

640k may be enough, but only if not many people talk about it.
I think that some sets of comments here on /. could end up being > 640k -- the 36 comments that this page is up to take 112k.

Re:They're talking about address space

[cheater512]

It could be *much* worse.
It could be based on NTFS.

I still cant understand why Microsoft is the only company who hasnt been able to make fragmentation resistant file systems
Hell OS/2 had HPFS which didnt fragment and that was ages ago and made partly by Microsoft.

Or maybe they desire the 'gradual slow down' effect that fragmentation causes.
So they release a new version of Windows just in time and advertise that its even faster, and it does actually seem faster.

Re:They're talking about address space

[sexconker]

I'm joking. I hate ibi.

Re:They're talking about address space

[sexconker]

Normally I'd agree.
But after SDXC, they've run out of good options for acronyms.

SDUC (Ultra)
SDxC (xTreme!)
SDSC (Super)

Re:They're talking about address space

[sexconker]

7680x4320 (8K) x 120 (fps) x 2 (3D) x 3 (lame-o 24 bit color) = 22.247314453125 GB/sec. 1 hour is 78.213214874267578125 TB.

Oh, you meant compressed? I don't accept compression at the source level!

Re:They're talking about address space

[sexconker]

...
The 1000/1024 fiasco is due to marketing, nothing more.

Re:They're talking about address space

[sidyan]

Drive manufactures in that case found every way possible to round up, including using 1000 bytes as a KB when it is only a KiB.

Actually, the size of a KiB (Kibibyte) is not in question, it's most certainly 1024 bytes. The kB (Kilobyte) on the other hand, is used by drive manufacturers to mean 1000 bytes, and in this they are only following IEC, IEEE and ISO standards.

Re:They're talking about address space

[jmorris42]

> Wouldn't the effort be better spent on figuring out how to kill FAT once and for all and
> replace it with something that doesn't completely suck?

1. NTFS is to complex and undocumented to be used in embedded consumer electronics.

2. Microsoft needs to keep control over the file system used in consumer electronics. If they hadn't offered this up (for a small fee of course) vendors might have been forced to look elsewhere... at the many filesystems in Linux or BSD that easily scale to the sizes required and have free reference implementations available, although the GPL would preclude many embedded vendors from directly using many of the more popular ones's code.

If I had to guess Microsoft will give em a sweet deal on the license fees so long as they give desktop linux some patent hell on implementing support, thus allowing SuSE to ride their trojan horse again.

And from the 2TB upper limit I'm guessing the are not reworking the maximum block size so there will still eventually have to a "LBA48" style incompatibility breakage at some point. Because 2T on a full size SD card isn't decades away.

Re:They're talking about address space

[geniusj]

Don't worry.. In the coming years, fragmentation won't matter nearly as much. On will come the log-structured filesystems and their ilk to replace the heavily disk-tuned mainstream filesystems we use today.

Re:They're talking about address space

[wooferhound]

""At 2 TB you have room for hours of 8K 120fps 3d stereo video.""

You could fit all your porn on one SD Card.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Samah]

As amusing as that "quote" is, it's an urban myth. ;)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180#fn*

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

You insensitive clod. I can already fit all my porn on one SD card.

Re:They're talking about address space

[grumbel]

Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't the standard came *after* the HDD manufactures used to abuse the 1000/1024 for their benefit?

Re:They're talking about address space

[Starayo]

Who the hell thought that "ibi" would be a good replacement anyway? Some sort of tongue twister enthusiast group?

Re:They're talking about address space

[Fulcrum of Evil]

I know. ibi needs to die.

Re:They're talking about address space

[NeutronCowboy]

Pretty much. I had this discussion constantly about 10 years ago. It was ill-defined then, though the common assumption was 1K = 1024. The abuse by HDD manufacturers spurred the development of actual definitions.

Re:They're talking about address space

[jomiolto]

You could fit all your porn on one SD Card.

Nope. No, I couldn't (but I'm sure you didn't want to know what).

Re:They're talking about address space

[sentientbeing]

Peter Piper, from the Peck of Pickled Pepper organization.

Re:They're talking about address space

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Most scenes aren't actually as entropic as all that, so lossless compression could almost certainly be applied. In particular, I'd be absolutely shocked if, in any but contrived scenarios, a stereoscopic image pair requires anything close to double the storage of a single image.

Your point is valid in that 2TB isn't actually all that much, for really tweaky video; but lossless compression should be considered.

Re:They're talking about address space

[CaptainPatent]

Ahh, duh... I reversed KB and KiB in my head when I responded to that... No wonder the parent to my original post confused me so much.

Re:They're talking about address space

[vlad30]

Normally I'd agree. But after SDXC, they've run out of good options for acronyms.

SDUC (Ultra) SDxC (xTreme!) SDSC (Super)

SDPL (Plaid) They'll go Plaid

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

I still cant understand why Microsoft is the only company who hasnt been able to make fragmentation resistant file systems
Hell OS/2 had HPFS which didnt fragment and that was ages ago and made partly by Microsoft.

Bullshit. Many filesystems can and do experience fragmentation; fragmentation in NTFS is only such a big deal because of the existence of defragmentation tools. One of the new features of ext4 is an online defragmenter; there was an ext2 offline defragmenter, but nothing for ext3. XFS has an online defragmenter as well. OS X's HFS+ also does limited automatic defragmentation.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

The online defragmenter for ext4 is not only a defragger but it will also make existing files use extents.

FAT/NTFS can get fragmented quite badly.
ext3 and so on rarely go past 2-3% fragmentation.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Nazlfrag]

Why? Exabyte is 2^60, GB 2^30, and MB 2^20 - simple.

FTFY

Re:They're talking about address space

[YrWrstNtmr]

You insensitive clod. I can already fit all my porn on one SD card.

Slacker.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

So you buy the urban myth coverup? how lame.

Re:They're talking about address space

[ion.simon.c]

*points to my ext3 volume with 10% of its files as "non-contiguous"*

(It became completely full one day. While deleting some files, I kicked off another process to start filling it back up. Bam! Extra fragmentation!)

Re:They're talking about address space

[theeddie55]

Unfortunately, with read/write speeds of 300MBps you may have to accept compression.

Re:They're talking about address space

[grcumb]

Microsoft needs to keep control over the file system used in consumer electronics. If they hadn't offered this up (for a small fee of course) vendors might have been forced to look elsewhere... at the many filesystems in Linux or BSD that easily scale to the sizes required and have free reference implementations available, although the GPL would preclude many embedded vendors from directly using many of the more popular ones's code.

I'm going to parade my ignorance for a moment. Hopefully it won't wilt under the baleful gaze of your 4-digit ID. 8^)

Okay, seriously: How would the GPL keep device manufacturers from integrating Open file systems into their hardware? Granted that they wouldn't be able to use any non-LGPL'ed libraries, but surely the existence of an open spec would be enough for them to build support for common file systems without their firmware or software code becoming tainted by the GPL?

It's always seemed to me that the big hurdle blocking movement from anything but FATxx or NTFS was Microsoft's unwillingness to support them on their OSes.

Hence of course the announcement of a New, Improved FAT that requires no further effort from the device manufacturers, something which bean counters in enterprises everywhere applaud.

I'm genuinely curious - exactly what other issues besides lack of Windows support could stop manufacturers from building different file systems into their storage devices?

Re:They're talking about address space

[Fulcrum of Evil]

yeah, missed one.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

1 KB = 1024 bytes -- WRONG

KB is reserved for base 10 numbers
KiB is reserved for base 2 numbers...

I agree, it's annoying, but correct and we should get used to the correct way.

whatever dipsh*t first decided to KB for base 2 numbers needs to die.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Ian Alexander]

I kind of appreciate ibi. It explicitly means the units are measured in terms of powers of two. Yes yes I know SI units are _supposed_ to be base-2 when referring to storage but it does still generate confusion because no other SI unit is base-2 and RAM and hard drive makers exploit this fact to their advantage. I got burned by this a couple years ago before I was aware of the ambiguity and bought a "320 GB" hard drive that ended up missing around 20 GB.

It's obviously not used universally but where it is it helps eliminate ambiguity. Which I like. I just wish they'd picked better prefixes.

Re:They're talking about address space

[biryokumaru]

Acutally, that's not necessarily true. Exabyte is sometimes 2^60, sometimes 10^18. That's why the "ibi" system was developed: to be specific. The old system allows marketing folks to cheat people. At the "exa" size, the difference is more than 15%.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have it backwards.

they ARE working on 2TB and 64GB. Capacities are generally in base 10, not 2. Pretty stupid, I know, but they take advantage of people wrongly associating TB, GB, MB with base 2 because it makes their drive seem larger.

64GB = 64,000,000,000 bytes -what people get (base 10)
64GiB = 68,719,476,736 bytes -what people THINK they're getting (base 2)

Re:They're talking about address space

[dakameleon]

Or two.

Re:They're talking about address space

[karnal]

All of a sudden, Emeril Lagasse appeared from the ether and punched your hard drive with "extra fragmentation." *BAM!*

Re:They're talking about address space

[jmorris42]

> Okay, seriously: How would the GPL keep device manufacturers from integrating Open file
> systems into their hardware?

Reread "the GPL would preclude many embedded vendors from directly using many of the more popular ones's code" again. Writing a filesystem less trivial than FAT isn't easy, especially if you want to get it right. So if I were proposing a replacement I wouldn't pick ext[23] for example because of the GPL. Let every camera maker and music player's semi-skilled and over worked monkeys try to reimplement ext2 and watch the fun trying to read cards written in one device elsewhere, like say a printer with a card slot. But ext2 would have the advantage that a driver already exists for Windows.

> I'm genuinely curious - exactly what other issues besides lack of Windows support could
> stop manufacturers from building different file systems into their storage devices?

The big one would be the tower of babel problem. Unless someone imposes order on em every vendor would support a different, almost certainly homegrown, filesystem that would subtly vary between products and major versions. They would supply a buggy driver for Windows -current release and if enough wailing went up a wildly inaccurate spec. Even if the holders of the SD trademark handed a non microsoft filesystem spec down as part of the rest of the specification you could bet Sony wouldn't have adopted it for their latest memory stick, etc. Madness, but we live in a mad world.

Re:They're talking about address space

[ion.simon.c]

XD

I Fuckin' KNEW IT!

Re:They're talking about address space

[Lorien_the_first_one]

You're right about that, except for the patent hell part. The proprietary part will reverse engineered in short order and MS will be afraid to sue. Why? Eben Moglen points it out very nicely here in the "Be Very Afraid Tour": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YExl9ojclo So while it's true that MS and Novell have a deal that could protect their customers, the success of MS' patent threats depend on the ignorance of the companies that could be threatened by them. And besides, once a lawsuit is filed, MS is going to have a lot of public explaining to do in discovery. And their patents will still have to withstand recent rulings. Its only a matter of time before it will become politically and economically untenable for MS to use those patents against Linux.

Re:They're talking about address space

[azenpunk]

they picked the right guy for the job

Re:They're talking about address space

[MojoRilla]

And Gates also tells conflicting stories. In the article you mention, he says IBM laid out the memory to have a 640k limit. In a 1993 Smithsonian Institution interview, he says that he did it. Boastful, forgetful, a fucking liar? Who knows.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Jeff DeMaagd]

So far that I've seen, the -ibi- is not very irrelevant for most cards 1GB and above, because I've not seen any that actually hits the power of two mark in unformatted capacity. The actual number of bytes fall somewhere about halfway between the power of ten and the nearest power of two equivalent.

But I too am annoyed by this "working on 2TB cards" bit in the stories, because it gives the impression that they're near making the actual product anywhere close to that capacity.

Re:They're talking about address space

[aliquis]

I much rather see that they make a card technology able to handle 2 TB than the current tiny baby steps they always seem to do when setting limits in the technology. 2 GB for SD and then 32 GB for SDHC, but we are already at 32 GB so the format is fucked, I hate it.

And yes, 2 to 32 GB with SDHC took what? 2 years? 3 maybe? And that's a 16x increase, 32x may not take as long as you think ..

Re:They're talking about address space

[aliquis]

Read his parenthesis?

Re:They're talking about address space

[p0tat03]

Last I checked all my SD cards still work in SDHC slots... how is this planned obsolescence again?

Re:They're talking about address space

[Joce640k]

They we all know WHY it was invented, we just want the name/address of the person who thought it rolled elegantly off the tongue.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

SDEC (Expanded)

Or they could go the Capcom way with Super Secure Digital II Turbo Hyper Cheating Fighting Champion Edition Capacity.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Exa is an SI prefix, while Exabyte is 2^60 bytes. Simple.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Joce640k]

yes... but you won't have the 64Gb/sec transfer rate needed to play it.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Joce640k]

They're leaving themselves the option of being "flexible" about royalty payments.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

Normally I'd agree.
But after SDXC, they've run out of good options for acronyms.

Don't worry, they have at least three generations left: SDLOL, SDROFL and SDROFLMAO.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Mattsson]

And, what have the filesystem to do with anything?
The way the abstract is worded, one would get the impression that SDXC requires exFAT, which is ridiculous.
You'd be able to utilize the card with any filesystem that can handle drives that big, many of which is free and open, contrary to the two options from MS (exFAT and NTFS).

Re:They're talking about address space

[Linker3000]

I use micro-SD cards for my midget porn!

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

holly mother of a virgins baby!

everything is going plaid!

Re:They're talking about address space

[Bert64]

Yes, the biggest problem is that MS would simply refuse to support any filesystem they didn't control... They only grudgingly support the filesystems used on optical media because they had no choice...

Many filesystems have reference implementations available which are BSD licensed, such as UFS and EXT2... UFS is actually supported out of the box by pretty much everything except windows.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Bert64]

They did the same with IDE and a whole heap of other things...

Design something that's just a quick fix and barely adequate for today, and tomorrow you can sell another one.

But if you look at SCSI, I don't believe it has any practical size limits, and you could easily connect a huge disk array to an ancient SCSI-1 controller.

Re:They're talking about address space

[amorsen]

kilo was defined in 1795. HDD manufacturers switched from the incorrect definitions to the correct ones.

Re:They're talking about address space

[amorsen]

Yes yes I know SI units are _supposed_ to be base-2 when referring to storage

SI isn't base-2. The HDD manufacturers are right, most geeks are wrong.

Re:They're talking about address space

[KDR_11k]

That your device with the SDHC slot won't accept these new cards and once those cards hit their limit you have to replace the reader again.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Detritus]

The early versions of SCSI were limited to a 21-bit logical block address. This was later extended to 32 and 64 bits. That should last for a while.

Re:They're talking about address space

[gbjbaanb]

You insensitive clod. I can already fit all my porn on one SD card.

Slacker.

The word you're looking for certainly ends in 'ker', but it isn't the one you used :-)

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

Your low slashdot ID should make you recall first HDs whose (little!) space was measured as power of 2.

Reducing to 1000 was a marketing move. SI happens to come to the rescue of the PHB. But using base 10 instead of 2 on a system with binary logic is clearly impractical when counting memory. HD are mass memory. They map to memory in case of swap.

Re:They're talking about address space

[drinkypoo]

It's called planned obsolescence, see the previous transition from SD to SDHC and this forthcoming transition from SDHC to SDXC.

SDHC is a more complicated interface than SD. It costs more to implement. Guess what? The same is going to be true of SDXC. I mean, do you really think Apple changed connectors when they went to FW800 just to make you buy more shit?

Re:They're talking about address space

[maxume]

Oh wah, you have to spend $10 on a new card each time you spend $200 on a device.

Most people want new shiny well before the technology inside the device expires anyway (I live in the "use it until it breaks or an upgrade is insanely compelling" world, but I'm pretty sure that more people live in the "oooooooh, shiny" world than that one).

Re:They're talking about address space

[rufus t firefly]

Boastful, forgetful, a fucking liar? Who knows.

When you've got his kind of money, you can buy whatever kind of truth you want, apparently.

Re:They're talking about address space

[not-my-real-name]

I do remember seeing adds from the late 70s or early 80s for computers with 65K of RAM. My impression then was that it was written by some marketing person and anyone who knew anything about computers would see right through it. The practice did die out fairly quickly.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Surt]

Then unfortunately, there is currently no consumer camera you can buy for digital video. And there probably won't be for at least a decade, maybe longer.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Matheus]

Well.. which limit should be higher?

I'm pretty happy with a file system that is fully capable of handling my current hardware limitations with plenty of room to grow as the hardware gets better.

When the current SD cards are coming in at around 64GB designing the current standard to handle 2TB ain't bad. (lots of headroom in the standard as it will take manufacturing a few years at least to get to that point at the rate they're going)

Re:They're talking about address space

[Bigjeff5]

Er, did you actually read the article you linked to?

Bill gates never says he said "640k should be good enough" in that article, and in fact he blames the 20 bit Intel architecture for creating the hard 640k limit. He does say he layed out the 640k for ram and 384k for hardware i/o in the software, but obviously he would have had to if DOS were going to match up with the addressing scheme of the Intel chip, and since he was only mentioning it in passing I would not expect him to go into that kind of detail. It's not much detail, but he only talks about the addressing for two sentances.

Maybe you should actually read your own sources before you call people inconsistant? It seemed pretty darn consistant to me.

BTW, got add the disclaimer that I am very much NOT an MS fanboy (I have to use XP at work, but I run linux at home), I just don't appreciate someone - anyone - being called inconsistant when they are being perfectly consistant. At least with what evidence you used, anyway.

Re:They're talking about address space

[Bigjeff5]

I mean, do you really think Apple changed connectors when they went to FW800 just to make you buy more shit?

Yes. But then, I don't buy Apple anyway. :D

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

We only needed "ibi" in the first place BECAUSE marketing folks cheat people. Why does everyone else need to change because drive makers are happy to lie about their storage? Nobody else ever uses KB to mean anything but 1024 bytes.

Re:They're talking about address space

[billcopc]

And I wil never ever ever ever ever write a song about ibi...

Re:They're talking about address space

[Ian Alexander]

Really? Well I'd read somewhere storage was a special case. "Somewhere" could be wrong. But that still doesn't make sense because hard drives and RAM (or at least Crucial RAM, as I found out my last RAM upgrade) are the only places I ever see the SI prefixes used to mean powers of 10 and not 2 when referring to storage/memory.

Re:They're talking about address space

[memristance]

I believe it was picked to help foster in laymen the vague notion that we're just making shit up to mess with them. In order to solve this issue, I propose we now start calling them kibibikibitibobitiboobytes.

Re:They're talking about address space

[MojoRilla]

In this email, Bill blames IBM for the 640K limit, instead of the 800k limit they could have had. He clearly says "...IBM laid it out so those other things started at 640K and used all the memory space up to 1M. If they had been a bit more careful we could have had 800K instead of 640K available." So he is blaiming IBM for laying out memory poorly.

In this interview, he brags that he personally laid out the memory for the original IBM PC.

Microsoft was playing a much broader role[laughs] than just doing software for this machine. I mean whether it is the keyboard, the character set, the graphics adapter, or even the memory layouts. I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit.

As far as I can tell, he didn't say 640k would be enough for anyone, and that problem was due to the processor only having 20 bit addresses. But Gates definitely is contradicting himself. It's like he wants to take credit for the memory layout until people hammer him on it, then says IBM did it.

Re:They're talking about address space

[toddestan]

Yeah, but without the "byte" being a SI unit, the "kilobyte" is just a word. Or do you think a megaphone is 10^6 phones?

Re:They're talking about address space

[treeves]

Actually, Intel IS working on 32nm CPUs, in their D1D fab. They're just not for sale yet.

Re:They're talking about address space

[amorsen]

Kilo in kilobyte was picked because it is 1000, not merely to mean something large. Mega in megaphone is using mega in another sense of the word.

Re:They're talking about address space

[amorsen]

Your low slashdot ID should make you recall first HDs whose (little!) space was measured as power of 2.

Yes, the HDD sizes were wrongly labelled in the beginning. Yes, I'm sure that if the base-2 size had been smaller than the base-10 size, the manufacturers wouldn't have switched. That doesn't change the fact that what they are doing now is correct, and what they did before was incorrect.

But using base 10 instead of 2 on a system with binary logic is clearly impractical when counting memory.

Memory is the only thing that comes in powers of 2, and that is simply because address lines are expensive so you want to use all of them. Flash is generally accessed across a bus, so flash generally doesn't have a power of 2 size even if the individual chips usually do. I don't see the impracticality of using base 10 for memory.

They map to memory in case of swap.

Now you've lost it completely. They map to Star Wars movies if that's what happens to be stored on them. That doesn't mean we need to count their size in Star Wars movies.

Re:They're talking about address space

[sexconker]

Reading comprehension.
You don't has it.

Re:They're talking about address space

[p0tat03]

That's not "planned obsolescence" - that's just progress. Planned obsolescence is where my new TVs will refuse to play old DVDs, forcing me to buy all my content again in hi-def. Or, in a more precise example, forcing me to buy new memory cards if I want to use new cameras. Neither are true - my SD cards will work just as well in new cameras as they did in the old. The fact that storage is getting bigger has nothing to do with "planned obsolescence".

Re:They're talking about address space

[Anonymous Coward]

"And oooh theyre making a 64GB card but "working on" a 2TB card? Yeah right, so only a 30-fold increase in density left to go!"

Uhm... not too long ago SD cards came no bigger than 256MB - now we got 32GB SDHC cards: that's a 127-fold increase...

Heck, I can remember the time when I bought a second-hand harddisk of 100MB, which took the space of two 5.25 inch slots for about 80 dollars, and it was extremely cheap at the time... just a few months later NEW harddisks were bigger in disksize, smaller in slotsize (only one 5.25 inch slot) and cheaper too... and nowadays 2.5 inch harddisks are already going well beyond 320GB... and cheaper too! No, a 30-fold increase may seem a lot, but they've done it before... I just wonder when the absolute limit will be reached... probably never...

Anyways, Even with a 512GB SDXC card at 300 MB/sec it becomes a serious option as a boot-device, making laptops even thinner and cheaper... Not to mention desktop-pc's

Come to think of it... how about replacing your harddisk-videorecorder with a SDXC-videorecorder??? It'll fit in your pocket!!!!

My point is: don't say "It can't be done" - just start using your imagination on how to use them things... I know I am... :)

Grts, Walter W. Krijthe, The Netherlands

2TB? exFAT?

[Anthony_Cargile]

Well even if I would take so many pictures on my camera that I'd need twice the size of the library of congress to hold them all, not too happy about some proprietary filesystem (assuming it isn't ro/rw on all platforms yet).

But still, I would buy one just so I could take it out of my pocket whenever I was having a problem so I could say, "Well, this was possible, so...." despite never using it.

</humor></criticism>

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

not too happy about some proprietary filesystem (assuming it isn't ro/rw on all platforms yet).

Wikipedia indicates that Vista SP1+ is the only OS to support it. At all. Oh, and maybe Windows CE too. Wasn't that the only advantage of FAT32? So instead of designing a lightweight, flash-oriented FS from scratch, they bolt some extensions onto their ancient crap?

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[vux984]

not too happy about some proprietary filesystem (assuming it isn't ro/rw on all platforms yet).

Is there any decent modern FS that is reliably read/write on Win/*nix/osx platforms? I'm still looking for one.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[cheater512]

ext3? I hear you can get it on Windows without too much trouble.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[Seth Kriticos]

The problem with ext3 is the same as with NTFS. They are journaling file systems, meaning that they do a lot of read/writing to the media. This is no problem with hard drives but flash media have just a limited amount of these. That's why non journaling file systems are employed on them. Mainly some kind of VFAT but ext2 would also do the job quite nicely. Problem is, that ext2 is not supported on the Windows platform as a default option. Additional installation is not an option for the avarage Joe. The bigger media will have some sort for FAT for the same reason. I'm qurious, is this new version of FAT also readable on non Windows platforms? Anyway, if you feel like it, it should be no problem to reformat them to ext2. Just your Windows friends will look a bit surprised that it seems unformatted. If you go more into the thing, you probably can also partition that thing like normal USB flash media, put a standard VFAT in one partition to it's limit and fill the rest with ext 2 to 'hide' your info from your clueless friends / boss / whatever. Or you put an array of normal FAT partitions on it with their maximum limitations. Did I miss something?

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[inamorty]

either i don't get it or that should be />

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[Redlazer]

exFAT is Windows Vista SP1 and Windows CE only so far.

Theres some weird concerns with who-owns-what apparantly.

They can realease whatever file system they want - I can still format it to NTFS or XFS.

-Fred

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[slimjim8094]

NTFS doesn't absolutely suck, and it works on all of 'em.

Mac has MacFUSE... though I can't comment on that personally.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[ion.simon.c]

Ext2.

There are plenty of available drivers.
If MSFT wanted to roll their own, they could base their ext2 driver off of the one of the ones in one of the BSDs. Why the fuck is MSFT reinventing the wheel again? :(

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[ion.simon.c]

They *really* need to use an existing FS that has a driver in one of the BSDs. 'Twould be really nice if the EU would turn up the heat on MSFT until MSFT stops with this exFAT bullshit.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[ion.simon.c]

Or, instead of being consumed by NIH syndrome, they could find some nice BSD-licensed FS to use.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[denzacar]

Think Personal Life Recorders.

Stick 2TB card in a audio/video/photo/data/navigation/internet device - record EVERYTHING.
You could store about a years worth of video in more than a decent quality PLUS have a shitload of space left for everything else.

Attach a portable viewing device and make nearly every form of artistic entertainment delivery model obsolete.
Movies? In theaters? Why? There are going to be so many cams on the day 0 that SOME of them must be watchable.
Most people have no sense for quality anyway. And at ~1GB per movie you could have about 160 DAYS of non-stop video content on 1 card.
Get a couple of cards and you could have every movie you will ever see in the palm of your hand.
About a 100 cards will record your entire life anyway.

Music? Sure. Paying for it? Umm... again.. why? For a CD? You like the artist - send him a buck or two through his paypal account.
Every single live event in the world will soon be captured by someone, somewhere.

Books? Scannable by just flipping the pages.

Lectures? Seen one, seen em all.

Privacy? Very soon non-existent.

What we will start seeing a shitload of as a result?
Various digital watermark/thumbprint technology in EVERYTHING. And simple ways to bypass them.
No jewelery zone suggestions and attempts in enforcing.
Criminalization of EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE and resulting paranoia.
Accountability of everyone, everywhere for everything they ever do. Personally, I would love to see something like this mandatory for politicos.
Clash of need to spy on everyone, everywhere by governments with entertainment lobbies that would like to ban any and all digital recording.
A shitload of amateur porn.
A lot more problems with (better) identity theft.
Death of keys, passwords, and any locking system not featuring encrypted data on a chip not readable by a human.

End of the world as we know it.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[Trahloc]

Don't worry, by the time this actually hits the shelves it'll only be half the size of the library of congress.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[Ilgaz]

If you have any kind of smart phone, camera, video camera you will be formatting it with whatever vendor decides.

For years, I keep wondering why the hell Nokia uses FAT on internal boot drive of Symbian. I understand the external (SD) but can't understand the internal. They may have evil reasons (iTunes,App Store) but one of the outstanding features of iPhone/iPod Touch is the use of a modern filesystem such as HFS+. Unless you really push so hard, it doesn't break.

They should sit and decide on a native, optimised and neutral format first. All the SD/MMC/Memory Stick guys. It is getting really pathetic.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[TwistedSymmetry]

It isn't reliable, though. I tried using it once, the filesystem got very corrupted.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just your {camera/cellphone/mp3 player/digital picture frame} will look a bit surprised that it seems unformatted

Fixed that for you.

If you want to slap a crazy filesystem on your thumbdrive, thats one thing, but using non-fat32 on an sd card kind of kills most uses.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[dakameleon]

From the Department of Pointing out the Bleedingly Obvious:

Why the fuck is MSFT reinventing the wheel again? :(

Licensing fees. And also because it is, after all, Microsoft.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't even matter, because the most important thing is whether the filesystem is r/w on the device using the card! They are all highly constrained devices running any number of embedded OSes (often DOS), and need to be able to use the filesystem without lots of code. Since they already work with FAT, extending the current FS won't put much burden on device manufacturers.

dom

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[TooMuchToDo]

With regard to your live events comment, it was just posted on the Nine Inch Nails forum that three shows were tapped by non-officials in HD. Almost 400GB of content being offered up over Bittorrent.

http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?18,378166

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[Hal_Porter]

exFAT has been reverse engineered by some Japanese guy here

http://bbs.znpc.net/viewthread.php?tid=5366&page=1#pid33197

The downside is that he seems to have used Google translate to translate his document into English. I hexdumped some exFAT volumes and he seems to be correct about what the fields in the boot sector and directory entries mean.

Executive summary. exFAT has, at least when Vista formats a disk, one FAT that is basically the same as FAT32 except that all 32 bits of the entries are used rather than the upper 4 bits being reserved.

The boot sector layout is new and the main difference that the volume size in sectors is now a 64 bit entry. Cluster size is a byte allowing upto 2^256 sectors per cluster, though the Microsoft implementations have a limit of 32MB.

So you could have 2^32 clusters, upto 32MB each. For a reasonable cluster size of 64KB you can have 2^48 bytes or so sized filesystems.

Directory entries have a new layout with no short filenames. The file size is 64 bit, to allow files bigger than 4GB, which is the most pressing limitation with FAT32. There are also special nameless files. One is a bitmap of free clusters, the other is a table to convert Unicode characters to uppercase, since this is part of the filename hashing.

Adding a bitmap is to speed up free space. Finding free space in FAT requires reading the FAT until you find a free cluster. Each fat entry is 32 bits, and the FAT would grow to 16GB on a 2^32 cluster volume. Adding a bitmap with one bit per cluster makes the worst case read a mere 512MB, perhaps 10 seconds or so on a modern drive. Of course the normal case is that you search from the last cluster allocated and find a free cluster much quicker than this. In fact you could cache the bitmap and most likely you find a sector in the same cache line that you found the last one. With a smaller device of course, the bitmap will be smaller too. If you were really feeling adventurous you could compress the bitmap into extents of free clusters and use those to allocate free space instantly most of the time.

So it's more or less FAT32 with the legacy stuff removed, volume size in sectors and file size in bytes fields widened from 32 to 64 bits and a cluster allocation bitmap ( Tanaka-san calls this KURASUTABITTOMAPPU, a sort of Japanesified version of cluster bitmap ) added to speed up free space searches. You can have volumes of upto 2^32 clusters or 2^64 sectors and files of upto 2^64 bytes.

Windows CE supports a transactional version of exFAT. I'd guess this has two FATs and switches between them to get transaction safety.

Incidentally, if this ends up part of something like SDXC it will be quite cheap to license, so I'd expect consumer electronics devices that need to support big files to start to use it as well as or even instead of FAT32. It wouldn't be hard to write a driver that supports both. The Microsoft exFAT driver in Vista works fine on XP. I'd guess someone will write a Linux driver once the reverse engineered internals become well known. It's not clear what patents Microsoft have on this. My guess is that they won't sue end users for using it, but they may approach Linux vendors like they did with Novell.

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

ext2 ifs:

http://www.fs-driver.org/

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[richlv]

you can access ext3 as ext2 on windows with http://www.fs-driver.org/

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[denzacar]

Imagine instead of 3 shows, 300 or 3000 cameras PER show, then mesh them together in a Photosynth kind of presentation.
Enjoy the show in a way only available to some insects up until now.

And just imagine what could CSI do with something like that. XD

Re:2TB? exFAT?

[bhtooefr]

There is a workaround, of course.

A small read-only FAT12 partition with two files... autorun.inf, and the installer for the ext2 IFS.

Then the rest is ext2.

FAT

[serviscope_minor]

The only, ONLY good thing about FAT is that it is very well understood and supported everywhere. Why on earth would someone license a proprietary filesystem based on an awful filesystem when they don't need to?

Oh, and why on earth would a SD card manufacturer need to license a filesystem in the first place? It's not like it'll care what data is on there.

Re:FAT

[Amouth]

because they ship them formatted because 90% of buyers are stupid.

it is cheaper for them to pay a fee to licence a file system - preformat the card than it is to ship them blank only to have the consumer call in saying it is broke + the costs associated with said consumer returning perfectly good products thinking they are broken.

users are idiots - if they ship them non formatted then people will think they are broken

- yes it's sad - yes its true

Re:FAT

[HiggsBison]

So when does the bloody FAT patent expire, anyway?

Re:FAT

[More_Cowbell]

- yes it's sad - yes its true

Well, it certainly is sad, and most likely true to some extent, but seriously I'm only 31 and I recall easily the days when all disks were shipped unformatted. I would like to think that ^most^ consumers could get the hang of formatting disks fairly quickly.

But then with ^most^ users using Windows, wouldn't they format it with FAT anyway?

Re:FAT

[DoofusOfDeath]

because they ship them formatted because 90% of buyers are stupid.

Stupid != not wanting to waste mental bandwidth on how to prepare a digital medium for use.

The world is too amazing. and life is too short, for all intelligent person to waste time worrying about that crap.

Re:FAT

[serviscope_minor]

No, I completely disagree. These days the computer is too ubiquitous to not "waste mental bandwidth" learning at least a bit about how to operate it. It's not like many jobs exist where people spend most of the time in front of one. To use a tired car analogy, it's like a mechanic not wasting mental bandwith on learning how to use a wrench because he has that important job of fixing cars to get on with.

Re:FAT

[TheRealMindChild]

Don't let the name fool you. This is less a "FAT" file system than FAT32 was to FAT16. It barely resembled anything FAT AT ALL. Long file names are different. Storage is different. The boot sector layout is different. File entries are different.

A snippet from wikipedia (since I can't find a link to the specification right now):

exFAT is an incompatible replacement for FAT file systems that was introduced with Windows Embedded CE 6.0. It is intended to be used on flash drives, where FAT is used today. Windows XP file system drivers will be offered by Microsoft shortly after the release of Windows CE 6.0, while Windows Vista Service Pack 1 added exFAT support to Windows Vista. exFAT introduces a free space bitmap allowing faster space allocation and faster deletes, support for files up to 2^64 bytes, larger cluster sizes (up to 32 MB in the first implementation), an extensible directory structure and name hashes for filenames for faster comparisons. It does not have short 8.3 filenames anymore. It does not appear to have security access control lists or file system journaling like NTFS, though device manufacturers can choose to implement simplified support for transactions (backup file allocation table used for the write operations, primary FAT for storing last known good allocation table).

Re:FAT

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm unhappy about money going to Microsoft for a filesystem I will not be using. Windows users already have a license for Microsoft file systems, why should storage manufacturers (and by extension the consumer) have to pay for an additional license?

It's a taxation on mass ignorance and unavoidable even for the computer literate.

Re:FAT

[CannonballHead]

You're right. When I buy something, I don't want to be able to plug it in and use it. I want to have to sit for $X $unit_of_time before being able to put my files on it!

What's this with computers coming pre-built and even pre-installed with $operating_system_name, anyways? I don't want to plug it in and have it work, I want to have to spend $X $unit_of_time before I'm able to use it!

... your point remains true that people would think it's broken, but I'm not sure that "smart people" wnat to have to format it, either.

Re:FAT

[tlinget]

You are right. Almost all are stupid. I bought a netbook a few weeks ago from a retailer. The sales person warned me that it does NOT have a drive (which I knew). She only told me because of all the people that return it because they were too stupid to know the difference between a netbook and a notebook.

Re:FAT

[MrCrassic]

Stupid?

1. Pop the card in...
2. Windows tells you that it's unformatted...
3. You format it...
4. You're done!

Re:FAT

[Telvin_3d]

Also, FAT32 is only an issue if you are dealing with single files larger than 4GB. Considering that most cards are still smaller than that there is no problem. If you are the type of person who is aware enough about file systems that you want something different, you are free to reformat it for no extra effort than you would have had to expend if it came unformatted. And if they are going to come formatted, FAT32 is a pretty good choice as a no-hassle work anywhere format.

Re:FAT

[Anonymous Coward]

You're talking to an audience of people who would buy shirts with RTFM in bold caps on them.

While a part of it is a smug hubris, we do wear them to make a statement about people who "don't have the time" to read simple instructions or a guide. We especially hate it when people with that ideology then start to run their fucking mouths off about how much something sucks because they had to read a manual. We also hate it when by their din of whining cries we are forced into industry standards that treat us like lazy morons.

For that lazy consumer who is the reason we cannot have nice things I wear that shirt. Also, NO I WILL NOT FIX YOUR COMPUTER!!!

Re:FAT

[slimjim8094]

No. Stupid is returning a product that works because you're too stupid* to read the back of the package that says THIS MUST BE FORMATTED.

All digital cameras have a format option.

*And I meant stupid, not ignorant. Ignorant would be 'well I didn't know I had to do that, but now I do'. Stupid is not even checking.

Re:FAT

[innocence18]

I don't want to put it in my machine first. I want to put it in my camera and start taking photos. Unless every single possible device I could put it in lets me format it, then shipping it unformatted is completely unacceptable.

Re:FAT

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't cameras even prompt you to format disks nowadays?

Re:FAT

[MrCrassic]

So far as I know, many products that need additional instructions have labels or some other informative, yet prompt, insert that informs the user of actions that need to be taken before using the device.

Last time I bought a hard disk, they did the same thing.

I do agree with you, though. Most consumer applicances should be ready to use right out of the box, so it's really not a big deal that they are formatted FAT32 beforehand (not to mention that most cameras and appliances that make use of SD/CF/xD/MMC memory can only read FAT and FAT32).

Re:FAT

[RiffRafff]

Let's see...I pop in a new card, the camera LCD screen says, "Memory card is not formatted. Format now? Y/n?"

Hmmm. Yep, it's a quandary. Makes you wonder how people ever managed to thread a 35mm leader onto a spool in ancient times.

Re:FAT

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a retard? Cameras let you format SD cards ...

Re:FAT

[Anonymous Coward]

you forgot
5. Profit

Re:FAT

[Neoprofin]

Or more correctly, the mechanic not learning how to size his own wrenches, because he can buy them pre-sized in two convenient formats and then get back to his real job.

Re:FAT

[DesertBlade]

Working in tech and with family members, you will get a flood of calls.

"It is a virus on the card it is formating my computer!"

Re:FAT

[jonbryce]

I don't think Windows would let you format a disk of that size with FAT, so they would format it with NTFS.

Re:FAT

[BazilBBrush]

As if on cue, from two days ago...

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20090107

Re:FAT

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple.

SDXC cards will have to work on Windows.

Microsoft will not support any filesystem but their own. Ever.

That means they have no choice but to go with one of Microsoft's file systems.

Re:FAT

[PitaBred]

Back when disks were shipped unformatted most people didn't have computers, only geeks and technologically oriented people did. Which meant they could read a manual. When your market expands, so does the bell curve, and with it come the people at further ends of the capability spectrum.

Re:FAT

[RMH101]

Surely the point is that with various different file systems the chances are quite high that you'll insert SD-shaped-card-with-new-disk-format into your consumer device, it'll try and read it and assume it's unformatted, and pressing Y at your prompt results in it trying to write FAT32 all over it, wiping the contents?

Re:FAT

[Mattsson]

Also, exFAT has one critical flaw, compared to earlier FAT versions.
It isn't supported everywhere.
For instance, MS hasn't released exFAT for XP, even though you can manually copy the dll's and and the appropriate registry-keys.

Once exFAT starts being used by cameras, mediaplayers and such, people running XP or other OS's will have trouble.
If you get a camera that uses SDXC and exFAT, it's practically incompatible with most OS's.
Even EXT2 and NTFS has more widespread support than exFAT, considering that there exist EXT2-drivers for XP and Vista.
Manufacturers should use that instead and simply ship a disc containing EXT2-drivers with their equipment.

Re:FAT

[Hal_Porter]

Free third party tools can format drives upto 2TB

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/fat32format.htm

Re:FAT

[TooMuchToDo]

That's a plus, because Windows XP's tools won't let you format a partition FAT32 if it's bigger then ~32GB.

Re:FAT

[TooMuchToDo]

Argh. I should've read your link before posting to Slashdot. My observation is in the first paragraph of the link.

Re:FAT

[Bert64]

I hate how proprietary vendors put in artificial restrictions to prevent you doing things...
Older versions and other systems don't have these restrictions...
A technical limitation is one thing, but to intentionally cripple a feature that already worked perfectly well is completely underhanded.

Re:FAT

[Bert64]

That's the whole idea...
Force people to move from xp to vista, and make it more difficult to use any other OS.

This is the microsoft business model, because making vista a desirable product that people would actually want to switch to with everything else being equal would cost them more. It just goes to show the utter disdain they have for everyone else.

Re:FAT

[amorsen]

Oh, and why on earth would a SD card manufacturer need to license a filesystem in the first place? It's not like it'll care what data is on there.

You can kill some SD-cards and USB-sticks by dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdcard. They die if they can't find a partition table and a FAT file system.

Re:FAT

[FireFury03]

Surely the point is that with various different file systems the chances are quite high that you'll insert SD-shaped-card-with-new-disk-format into your consumer device, it'll try and read it and assume it's unformatted, and pressing Y at your prompt results in it trying to write FAT32 all over it, wiping the contents?

Assuming the camera pops up that message whenever it can't read a card, that's going to happen whether cards come preformatted or not.

On the other hand, it isn't exactly hard to tell whether a card is unformatted (all the bits are on or all the bits are off) or has data on it that you don't understand - looking at the first 512 or 4096 bytes should give you a pretty good clue. So the camera should really only present a "this card is unformatted" message for blank cards - if the card has data on it then something more appropriate should be displayed, such as "this card can't be read by the camera, it may contain data in another format. Do you want to format it and erase this data?". Yes, some people will still press yes and lose all their data, but there is a limited amount you can do to protect idiots from themselves.

Re:FAT

[FireFury03]

Also, FAT32 is only an issue if you are dealing with single files larger than 4GB. Considering that most cards are still smaller than that there is no problem. If you are the type of person who is aware enough about file systems that you want something different, you are free to reformat it for no extra effort than you would have had to expend if it came unformatted. And if they are going to come formatted, FAT32 is a pretty good choice as a no-hassle work anywhere format.

Except I don't particularly want part of the money I spend on media to be a licence fee to a filesystem vendor for a filesystem I'm not going to use.

It's much the same as computer vendors preloading all computers with proprietary software that I don't want - why the hell should some of my money go to the vendor of some software I am never going to use?

Re:FAT

[Killjoy_NL]

All the cameras I know can format the disk as well :)

Re:FAT

[huge]

Entry barrier to computing has gone down, a lot, in past 10 years. Also like you said back then most of the disks were shipped unformatted thus most of the people knew they'd need to format them before use.

Nowadays flash drives are predominantly shipped formatted so people assume that they work once you plug them in. If they don't, people assume that they are broken.

Re:FAT

[Detritus]

All digital cameras have a format option.

I wouldn't bet on it. I've seen devices that could read, but not format, both FAT16 and FAT32.

Re:FAT

[Detritus]

Some disks have always been shipped formatted because they were used in systems that could not format their own disks. That was common for 8" floppy disks. See the DEC RX01 for an example.

Re:FAT

[Hal_Porter]

Do you also hate it when proprietary vendors add free functionality to their systems and wipe out companies that use to sell that functionality? Or when they use a proprietary undocmented protocol? Or when they use an open protocol with their own extensions? Or when they document their own document standard and submit it to a standard body?

Re:FAT

[drinkypoo]

Are these really SD cards and USB sticks, or wifi-enabled SD memory cards and USB mp3 players? I can see this happening on a USB stick since they are pretty intelligent devices, but SD cards usually go out of their way to act look a dumb lump of flash.

Re:FAT

[marcello_dl]

I disagree. If you're using digital media you will eventually need to know why the data you put with appliance A can't be read by appliance B. Formatting and choosing a filesystem makes you start wondering. Better sooner than too late.

They ship formatted because
1. it's practical
2. commercial reasons (lock in, trying to sell added value... some companies develop completely redundant usb storage drivers for their pens don't they?)

Re:FAT

[Anonymous Coward]

> "It is a virus on the card it is formating my computer!"

You can't blame formatting on that. You can't blame idiocy on that.

Blame windows. :D

Re:FAT

[Anonymous Coward]

As previously mentioned, digital cameras usually do have a "format media" option. So, looks like people thought of that...

Re:FAT

[Hyppy]

A more fitting analogy would be a normal person not "wasting mental bandwidth" on his vehicle's valve timing adjustment because there are mechanics around to do that for him.

Re:FAT

[amorsen]

Are these really SD cards and USB sticks, or wifi-enabled SD memory cards and USB mp3 players?

Yes, just plain SD cards and USB sticks.

SD cards usually go out of their way to act look a dumb lump of flash.

They implement wear levelling. Perhaps they try to do more aggressive wear levelling on the spots where the FAT is kept, I don't know. Either way it is highly annoying, but hopefully no new cards have the problem.

Re:FAT

[Anonymous Coward]

Any camera that's recent should allow you to format your card.

Re:FAT

[Mattsson]

The question is; Why is hardware-manufacturers who don't make computers bundled with Vista aiding MS in it's quest to make modern hardware hard or impossible to use on most systems currently in use?

They tried RieserFS

[Anonymous Coward]

But it died on the table.

Re:They tried RieserFS

[sexconker]

Zing.

Re:They tried RieserFS

[Anonymous Coward]

my pants are around my ankles and I'm ready to take it like a Reiser. Give me a good rogering, chap!

Re:They tried RieserFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah - a file system that has a TOC. I don't think that they will need that for this instance.

The issue that they will see here is one of pins and whether SONY is going to get off of DVTape. It seems to me that they may have a problem with the suction off the device to get it to the computer for editing. This seems like a very different thing from SDHC.

Re:They tried RieserFS

[Anonymous Coward]

But it died in the woods.

There . . . fixed that for you.

Re:They tried RieserFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Reiser jokes are not funny. Woman is dead, man is in jail, kids without a parent.

It's tragic. but NOT funny.

Re:They tried RieserFS

[Killjoy_NL]

Everybody deals with uncomfortable subjects in their own way. Not everyone agrees on it though.

Re:They tried RieserFS

[Darth_brooks]

I believe a "stranglehold" joke was what you were looking for here...

I, for one...

[banffbug]

cannot wait until everyone's walking around saying "pebibytes". Thou some people will call them pebeebytes and that will annoy me to no end.

Re:I, for one...

[banffbug]

Please forget what i just said. I am wrong so so wrong.

Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you can design a standard with an arbitrarily high capacity compared to current ones and get front-paged on /.

I'm going to go "work on a 30 petabyte" storage medium standard, and it will be an open standard. Too bad there won't be an actual device that supports it.

Re:Wow!

[Linker3000]

Keep going - your storage device may be needed for the game maps for Duke Nukem Forever.

Yeah.... no.

[Anonymous Coward]

The 2 TB comes from Moore's law running out due to feature size being atomicly fine. Look for them sometime between 2017 and 2020.

Waste of time

[ickleberry]

Since everyone is getting rid of DRM anyway would it not be a good idea to drop the SD standard altogether and continue where MMC left off? a bit like the way Sony are getting rid of MagicGate

SD is just a RIAA-approved version of MMC with extra DRM features added. Maybe I'm just a bitter old sod but I find this continuation of the SD standard and it's DRM suspicious, perhaps they are waiting for a good time to re-introduce DRM on a massive scale and since every SD card ever made already supports it they will have no problem implementing it

I bet most the supposedly hardcore RIAA-hater nutjobs don't even realise SD has the built in DRM. They have been selling DRM-enabled cards for about 10 years now and just because the SD DRM hasn't seen any widespread use nobody batts an eyelid.

Re:Waste of time

[th0mas_g]

I did not know that about SD... I actually owe you many thanks and have read up on it now.

Re:Waste of time

[trolltalk.com]

"I bet most the supposedly hardcore RIAA-hater nutjobs don't even realise SD has the built in DRM."

The term "Secure" in "Secure Digital" should have been a clue :-/

Re:Waste of time

[marcansoft]

SD is more than MMC+DRM. It added the 4-bit protocol which is pretty different from the SPI-style that MMC used and which helped improve transfer speeds. There are also quite a number of changes to the protocol. The DRM seems to be pretty worthless anyway - does anyone actually use it?

On a sidenote, SDHC already has a maximum addressable space of 2TB (2**32 512-byte sectors), though it's limited to 32GB purely artificially by the wording of the spec. Methinks this is mostly marketing and not a real change.

Re:Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

It means sandisk you fool! Sure they may say otherwise...

Re:Waste of time

[PitaBred]

What DRM? Sure, it theoretically supports it, but no one has ever seen it in any SD devices, anywhere. If it doesn't exist in your device, does it matter that the standard exists? HDMI has an encryption option, HDCP, but that doesn't mean that HDMI is a bad interface. It just means that the encryption is retarded.

Re:Waste of time

[TSDMK]

SD-Audio uses CPRM (the SD DRM), although as far as I know is only available in Japan at the moment.

Re:Waste of time

[maxume]

No one cares and, as long as the DRM isn't mandatory, that will continue to be the case.

Take Vista. I'd bet at least a nickle that the number of people who are upset about the DRM 'in it' is dwarfed by the number of people who would go ape shit if their shiny new computer wouldn't play BD movies back on their shiny new TV.

Re:Waste of time

[Hyppy]

I saw a display over Christmas at a Best Buy or similar store with some albums and singles for sale on SD cards. I'm sure the DRM was put to use in those.

64GB and 300MBps

[Anonymous Coward]

throw away your hard drive and just use your SD card

More proof it's too late for copyright.

[w0mprat]

With the continual increase in the capacity of storage, exponentially decreasing cost per size, and ever increasing bandwidth to link it all together, I wonder if there is there any use worrying about piracy.

You could say piracy moved to the internet because floppy disks were useless and CD/DVD burning costly, even when it's now rather cheap. Generally piracy has been scaling with availability of bandwidth and storage. But is there a point where it gets so stupidly cheap and powerful that old world business models become completely untenable?

Re:More proof it's too late for copyright.

[Gat0r30y]

that old world business models become completely untenable?

As long as you are just selling bandwidth and storage, your business model would seem to be primed for success.

Re:More proof it's too late for copyright.

[moogsynth]

I've been pilfering the mp3 collections of everyone I know via meatspace for some time now, and have a pretty massive collection stored over several drives. I call it my INFINITY JUKEBOX! People come to me when they want music, rather than get it online. I've given complete mirror images of the drives to a couple of people already. When it gets to the stage where all this data can fit on to a single shitty card, hell, I'll hand them out in the street for free.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.

Re:More proof it's too late for copyright.

[andy_t_roo]

i believe the main problem associated with these ridiculously large storage capacities is that the exponential growth of storage capacity has been faster than the exponential growth of bandwidth.

1.5TB is the largest hard drive that isn't overly expensive, which (at the 1.9Mb/s bandwidth which is the median internet speed in America, is 76.6 days. Even in Japan (with a median of 61Mb/s) it takes 58 hours.

20 years ago with a 56k dialup and a 300MB hard drive it would only take 12 hours to copy it.

(hard drive capacity from http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/hist-c.html , http://www.speedmatters.org/document-library/sourcematerials/sm_report.pdf , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem and a few other places for an estimate of connection speed, i might be a little high for the historical estimate here)

I don't see this situation improving any time soon.

Re:More proof it's too late for copyright.

[Anonymous Coward]

Though, the difficulty is generally not in transferring data but in storing it. If you can store infinite data then it is only a matter of time to transfer what you need of it. If you can't store anything then no amount of bandwidth is going to help.

Re:More proof it's too late for copyright.

[Microlith]

I wonder if there is there any use worrying about piracy.

If enough people decide to pirate instead of pay, then less stuff gets made. A big disk does not just magically have content appear on it.

But is there a point where it gets so stupidly cheap and powerful that old world business models become completely untenable?

Not really. Capacity is irrelevant, what matters is whether or not people pay for the content that fills it. If they don't, then they won't have a whole lot to fill their big disks with,

Re:More proof it's too late for copyright.

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it. No matter the price, the internet is still near real time and instant gratification, which is what the population demands.

If I had to wait for 3-6 days shipping to get an album, I wouldn't.

The only way pirating over these is beneficial is if you had a HD crash and a friend mailed you some backups, or MAYBE some kind of pirate newsletter with all of last weeks releases for building a complete archive, but thats just for the OCD collector pirates.

Re:More proof it's too late for copyright.

[TooMuchToDo]

"Moogsynth's Infinite Playlist"?

Re:More proof it's too late for copyright.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or: more proof that you're just a worthless, fucking thief!

Re:More proof it's too late for copyright.

[maxwell demon]

You had 56k dialup 20 years ago? According to Wikipedia, even 14.4k wasn't available before 1991. With 9600bps, you'd need 70 hours, or about 3 days, to transmit your 300MB. That's more than the modern Japanese 58 hours.

ZFS?

[argent]

Given that ZFS has been optimized for flash, why bother with FAT?

Re:ZFS?

[PCM2]

Presumably because you can't pull a ZFS-formatted SDXC card out of your digital camera, plug it into your Windows laptop's onboard reader, and pull the photos off onto your desktop.

Re:ZFS?

[flyingfsck]

It doesn't matter what file system you put on these devices. The flash memory is managed by a little hardware controller.

Re:ZFS?

[thanasakis]

ZFS has been optimized to take advantage of SSDs as ZFS intent log devices (whatever those are) in conjunction with regular drives. I think you may want to take a look at this for instance.

I haven't seen any specific optimizations for ZFS on standalone flash drives, but I would love to. Can you please provide any links?

Re:ZFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Sun's fault. They "opened" ZFS but crippled it at the same time by using a license that's incompatible with the majority of open-source projects or in this case pseudo-commercial use as part of the SD standard.

Sun is like all the other failed companies that shoot themselves in the foot time and again. They try to "open" something yet control it at the same time (not dissimilar to what they tried with Java). Trying to do this has put so many companies out of business that I can't count and it's why Sun is failing as a corporation.

Re:ZFS?

[KonoWatakushi]

While ZFS was not designed for flash, it is basically a perfect fit, as it is a copy-on-write filesystem.

Re:ZFS?

[nxtw]

Given that ZFS has been optimized for flash, why bother with FAT?

Because ZFS is a filesystem with lots of features that are useless in systems in which SD cards are normally used. ZFS's goals are completely different than those of exFAT.

Re:ZFS?

[John Hasler]

> ZFS's goals are completely different than those of exFAT.

Right. ZFS provides no benefits to Microsoft at all.

Re:ZFS?

[ion.simon.c]

ext3cow and btrfs are also COW filesystems.

Re:ZFS?

[ion.simon.c]

Are ext2's goals completely different from those of exFAT?
How about ext4 vs exFAT?

Re:ZFS?

[ion.simon.c]

You can't currently do that with extFAT on any version of Windows older than Vista SP1. (With the exception of CE 6.) What's your point?

MSFT could have licensed *any* *number* of suitable filesystems. They could have freely used any number of BSD implementations of said filesystems and quickly had *wide* compatibility with existing systems. Rather, they chose to roll yet another FS that they can control completely. :/

Re:ZFS?

[Ilgaz]

Well, it could happen if Sun was a consumer friendly company who would sit and write ZFS read/write driver _and_ get that WHQL etc. certificate, convince both Sony and Panasonic guys to use it and demo them Apple like idea of putting a small FAT16 partition which does auto install/update Windows ZFS driver.

They sure know FAT is junk but they can't get rid of it because they want their consumers see the memory card/camera on Windows/OSX desktop right after plugging it. Or consumer heads to their service centre.

So the most precious data of consumers, family photos etc. are stored in a format which even MS does everything to stay away. Lets not forget the "NTFS uses too much CPU" lobby out there too. Now they call NTFS a CPU hog, imagine what will they say about ZFS?

Re:ZFS?

[nxtw]

exFAT is a simple filesystem that will work with large files and volumes - in this case, intended for use on removable storage devices like USB/SD drives and in embedded devices like digital cameras and MP3 players.

Filesystems like ext2 are more complex than FAT32, with more features like permissions and ACLs. Things could easily get messy with permissions when moving volumes between systems.

ext4 (and any other journaling filesystems) are not optimal for flash devices because of the limited write cycles.

Ideally, there would be a simple filesystem suitable for large removable volumes and large files with an open specification.
FAT32 and ext2 are probably the closest, but FAT32 is a bad choice on volumes above 32GB and ext2 is more complex.

Re:ZFS?

[ion.simon.c]

exFAT has support for ACLs. Imagine the madness when *those* get screwed up (Especially when Vista SP1 doesn't have a GUI to manipulate them!). :D

Things *could* get messy with permissions. You could, however, write your embedded FS driver so that it ignored FS permissions and made files that it processed readable and writeable by all. (It is probably running as root, after all.)
[It seems that some (all?) ext2/3 drivers for Windows ignore permissions on ext2/3 volumes.]

WRT ext4: I wonder if you could disable journaling...
A quick search reveals this conversation by Ted Tso.
https://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-ext4/2008/10/7/3532804
This post implies that an ext4 FS can run without a journal.
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:eivENzNpGUwJ:lkml.org/lkml/2009/1/7/378+site:lkml.org+%22allow-ext4-to-run-without-a-journal%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

I'm rather unqualified to comment on an issue like filesystem complexity, so I can't address that part of your claims. If you're qualified to comment, would you kindly direct me to some documents that could give me a feel for the complexity of implementing an exFAT driver?

Cheers!

Re:ZFS?

[nxtw]

There's no exFAT specification or documentation that I can find, but it's supposed to be close to FAT32 with design improvements.

I couldn't find any conclusive information on exFAT ACL support; however, ACLs for exFAT aren't implemented in Windows Vista. It might be for Windows CE use only, like the transaction feature, and could be implemented as one of the extensions that exFAT is supposed to make it easy to implement.

Re:ZFS?

[argent]

Oh you're SUCH a cynic. :)

Re:ZFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously... and it's open source!

Re:ZFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but do they moo?

Re:ZFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Filesystems like ext2 are more complex than FAT32, with more features like permissions and ACLs. Things could easily get messy with permissions when moving volumes between systems.

Way easier to chmod a+rw and mount -o uid=xxxx than change FS altogether, though.

Re:ZFS?

[obscuro]

That's AWESOME! Where can we find out more about that?

Re:ZFS?

[ion.simon.c]

If they're running on Gentoo they do!

Re:ZFS?

[Rich0]

Yup. For this reason ext4 is the next big filesystem for linux, and btrfs will probably be next after that. At that point Sun doesn't really have much to offer since btrfs will do just about everything zfs does - zfs will just be what jfs is today - a great concept filesystem that nobody actually uses.

Don't get me wrong - zfs is great stuff. Granted, support for raid-z reshaping would be nice (adding to a raid, removing from a raid, etc - not just adding a new raid to an existing zpool). However, the license is going to end up killing it for linux use.

convert it to GPT (nt)

[Rooked_One]

what? The nt == no text ;)

Crazy to use exFAT

[macemoneta]

Since Linux, Mac and even most existing Windows users won't be able to use exFAT/FAT64 formatted media, they're not doing anyone any favors.

They could use NTFS as a more common file system, except for that whole journaling burning up the flash thing.

The most reasonable alternative is ext2, though I wouldn't want to spend a day fscking a 2TB SD card any more than I'd want to spend a day with chkdsk on an exFAT formatted one.

If flash sizes are going to continue to grow, they need to deal with journaling filesystems. Perhaps the easiest, most cost effective way to do this is by pre-partitioning the unit, with the bulk of the storage in one partition, but a second partition for a much smaller external journal aligned to more robust flash (e.g., 128MB with a 50M+ write life). Even with a 5 second journal update interval, that would give you about 8 years of 24 x 7 x 365 usage. Ext3 supports this configuration, not sure about NTFS or HFS+.

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[ZorinLynx]

Why not use HFSplus? It is open source, has existing open source implementations on several operating systems and isn't patent-encumbered or restricted.

It would be trivial to write a Windows filesystem driver for HFSplus which could be packaged with cameras and card readers, and HFSplus doesn't suffer from any of the filesystem and file size restrictions that FAT32 does.

On top of all this, we know it works well on flash devices, otherwise Apple wouldn't use it on Mac-formatted iPod Nanos.

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[macemoneta]

Why not use HFSplus?

The problem is the same; as a journaled filesystem, it would significantly shorten the life of the flash. A quick google search doesn't point to HFS+ being able to support an external journal either.

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[The Bungi]

I have no idea what the MTBF is on these things, but is the expectation of a shortened life because of the additional write activity really that much of a concern?

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[macemoneta]

I have no idea what the MTBF is on these things, but is the expectation of a shortened life because of the additional write activity really that much of a concern?

Yes. Consumer flash has a typical life on the order of 100,000 writes. A journaled filesystem writes its status about every 5 seconds. That will start killing flash blocks after about a week of continuous use.

That's why a high write capacity area is needed for the journal. As an example, a 512MB (4Mbit) nvsram - non-volatile SRAM, effectively unlimited write cycles and almost as fast as RAM - costs only $7. By combining this with the larger flash area, free / open source journaled filesystems like ext3/ext4 can be supported without shortening the life of the flash.

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[Tweenk]

It would be trivial to write a Windows filesystem driver

FS drivers are the least trivial of all, and moreover Windows IFS drivers are incompatible between Windows versions. So you would have to write at least 4 different drivers just to cover the NT family.

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[alannon]

HFSPlus (MacOS Extended) is only optionally journaled. The option just happens to be the default.

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[Ilgaz]

HFSPlus has journaling as a plugin option. It doesn't have to have journaling unless you use hard links (currently only Apple uses them on time machine). Theoretically it is even possible to add journaling to FAT under OS X as journal is just a plain file which can be any place on disk.

Apple does do very interesting things while enhancing their HFS+ but are wise to keep backwards compatibility same time. You can read more at TN article at http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html

The real option to get rid of FAT is really ext2 though. Completely open, vendor neutral and basic. It is not a real big deal to add something like Apple did, it has "install macos9 drivers" option on its disk utility. So, with a basic partition hack. one can put ext2 drivers to a FAT16 partition in the SD card.

As a smart phone user, one thing really bothers me is the use of FAT junk. Now with a 2TB max standard, they still stick with exFAT, hack on hack on a thing that poor non techical users will put their private, non reproducible data.

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[The Bungi]

Interesting, I didn't realize they were so "fragile", so to speak. Thank you for the explanation.

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[macemoneta]

HFSPlus (MacOS Extended) is only optionally journaled. The option just happens to be the default.

Yes, but without the journal, you have the same problem as exFAT and ext2 - a very length filesystem check on a 2TB filesystem.

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[macemoneta]

HFS without the journal or ext2 or exFAT doesn't solve the problem of having to run a filesystem check on a 2TB system, which could take many hours (possibly days). That's why journals are used.

Re:Crazy to use exFAT

[TooMuchToDo]

Depending on size constraints, you could also use a small amount of DRAM sandwiched onto the SSD to keep the journal hot. You write out the journal to solid state at shutdown and reload it at startup. You use capacitors to allow time for the system to write out the journal to solid state in the event a clean shutdown doesn't occur (similar to how high end RAID cards have an on-board battery backup for the write cache).

Microsoft does not own ZFS

[SuperKendall]

No license stream if you pick a sensible filesystem, sorry. Instead you get Microsoft further extension of FAT. Ack.

SDHC can already do 2TB

[Anonymous Coward]

Says Wikipedia "the SD 2.0 standard in SDHC uses a different memory addressing method (sector addressing vs byte addressing), thus theoretically reaching a maximum capacity of up to 2 TB (2048 GB). However the SD Card association has artificially defined the maximum limit of SDHC capacity to 32 GB"

Sounds like another way to extort people into using MS only standards. Hooray!

Re:SDHC can already do 2TB

[Timmmm]

Yeah I was wondering about that. At what point did it make sense to introduce a standard with a range of 2-32 GB?

Re:SDHC can already do 2TB

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty much the upper limit for a FAT32 filesystem that Windows XP will support. If you attempted to format a larger SD card in Windows, it'd only let you format as NTFS which, of course, no device would be able to use.

It's really kind of stupid how much the rest of the world has to bend over to handle the Microsoft way of doing things.

OH I lost 2T of data

[kentsin]

Is that a nightmare?

Re:OH I lost 2T of data

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until you drop 2TB of data in the toilet. Then you'll really feel bad.

Pocket

[ajkst1]

Is that a terabyte in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

I'll be here all week! Try the veal!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Another way around high licensing fees...

[sootman]

... would be to just ship it cut into a thousand FAT16 partitions.

Speaking of which, I've never bothered to try... what happens when you try to mount more than 26 (A:-Z:) drives in Windows? Was there a point where it was just impossible--2K, 98, 95? I'd try it right now but I don't have a copy of Windows handy.

Re:Another way around high licensing fees...

[Anonymous Coward]

what happens when you try to mount more than 26 (A:-Z:) drives in Windows?

I run Win98 and use DOS for embedded software, which limits the partition to about 2.05GB. My drives are partitioned into 10 equal 2.05GB partitions named C:\ to L:\

The rest of the drive is one huge partition named M:\

A second drive is partitioned exactly the same way and used as a slave. Win98 renames the C:\ drive on the slave to drive D:\, and bumps drive M:\ on the master to drive N:\

The rest of the slave drives appear at O:\ through X:\. Drive Y:\ is the CDROM, and the Network Neighbourhood appears at the end without a drive assignment. I don't know what happens to drive Z:\

The USB memory stick appears with its own label, but I can't let the system install it since it takes over the drive E:\ partition and wipes out drive O:\

To prevent it from installing permanently, I keep the SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT files archived in a separate directory, and unarchive them in the autoexec.bat file during boot. So no matter what a program wants to do with the registry, I always overwrite any changes unless I really want to install a program. A simple switch in the boot program selects which registry to use after bootup. This feature is impossible in the later versions of Windows that do not have autoexec.bat.

I use XCOPY32 with the date copy option to copy partitions from the master to the slave. This allows me to back up a drive very quickly since it doesn't have to copy all the files, only the ones that have changed or were added. I had to map which slave partition corresponds to which master, then let the software take care of those details.

So it is possible to use all the drive letters in Win98. I have since found I can do the same thing in Ubuntu, so I am planning on bringing up my first Linux machine as soon as I finish this post.

Regards,

Mike

Re:Another way around high licensing fees...

[roguegramma]

I gave up having two partitions on my USB stick because some version of windows would just show one of them.

Re:Another way around high licensing fees...

[kkaltuu]

You'll always have the option to use mountpoints.

Give me a break

[bradbury]

How hard is it to write a file system driver? You write a generic form, you make it open source and adapt it to Windows and Linux (maybe Mac) drivers). It is a couple of hackers in a room for a weekend maybe. The only tricky part might be if the interface allows you to schedule multiple read/write threads to the drive. I still can't believe this is more than a week's worth of effort for people who know what they are doing.

And 2 TB cards. What have they been smoking? I've been downloading genomes for the last month (DSL line speeds) (I have most of the known mammalian and many bacterial genome sequences) and I *still* have room left over on my 500 MB drive). There is simply *not* that much useful information in the world yet.

Now, you could argue that this is Panasonic and so their currency is in "non-useful information" and so we have reached the point where we are recording the lives of individuals that will never be watched and certainly is not useful. Do you have 2 TB of "poignant moments" that you wish to record for some subset of humanity to view? If we all have 2 TB cards we are going to have to *pay* people to watch them. (Oh, please come watch my video).

And so I view this advance of information storage technology as an evil thing. In that it will allow the recording of minutes of ones life which are on balance unimportant (at least for the progress of humanity).

Needless to say the disk access speeds are insufficient to support moving 2 TB of data around. One would have to totally restructure the PC data interface to be able to deal with those data loads.

Re:Give me a break

[Ksevio]

I didn't realize how slow DSL really was if it's taken you over 2 months and you haven't even filled up half a gig. Glad I got cable instead

Re:Give me a break

[Anonymous Coward]

A 5DII records HD video at 38.6Mbps, or 5MB/s. That gives you about 110 hours of 1080/30p video on the card. It's not too hard to imagine recording some trade show like CES and getting 100 hours of video. Of course by the time 2TB cards are available, it will probably be common to have DVCPRO HD (100Mbps) cameras record to flash, and you'll get 44 hours on a 2TB card.

Of course, the reason for using a FAT-based filesystem is that simple embedded devices (cameras, phones, music players, digital picture frames) need to be able to read and write the filesystems with little CPU and memory overhead.

dom

Re:Give me a break

[bradbury]

It takes me only several hours (over DSL) to download a CD. A genome for the megabat is 3.2 GB, a genome for the several versions of the elephant genome is 11 GB. I constrain my downloading so as to not adversely affect other family members (something you with your meager speed obsessed mind might not be able to comprehend -- and I do mean that as an insult.)

Go ahead, take me on, you may not understand who you are dealing with and I would suggest that you tread carefully.

Re:Give me a break

[Ksevio]

Well it sounds like you missed what I was saying in my post how you only have a hard drive that holds less than one CD

What the hell are you talking about?

[Sycraft-fu]

Unless you have a file system that simply refuses to do a write when there is no contiguous block large enough you WILL have fragmentation. Go do some brief searches if you don't believe it. For example one of the features ext4 will have over ext3 is an online defragmenter, meaning you can defragment the volume while it is in use (as Windows defragmenters do).

Re:What the hell are you talking about?

[cheater512]

But they do use techniques to prevent fragmentation.
Trying to get a high fragmentation % on Linux is a lot harder than it sounds.
On Windows its stupidly easy on the other hand as it does nothing to stop fragments.

Re:What the hell are you talking about?

[drinkypoo]

For example one of the features ext4 will have over ext3 is an online defragmenter, meaning you can defragment the volume while it is in use (as Windows defragmenters do).

Nice to see it catching up with XFS, which is more resistant to the effects of fragmentation in the first place than ext3.

Instead of continually extending a silly filesystem, why not work on one that's here now and has features ext4 doesn't even plan on? There are several examples. (Rhetorical question - a better one is, why would you care about ext4?)

No, there's something else

[Sycraft-fu]

It's SIMPLE. FAT is more or less a linked list. You have a table that tells you where files start, if a file has to split, it just points to its next section. Not a particularly clever way of doing it, but real simple and easy to implement. This is of great value when you are talking file systems that will be used with embedded devices. You don't want to have tons of processor power and many lines of code devoted to messing with a complex file system. That is just going to cost you money.

What's more, you aren't likely to see any gain. You aren't dealing with something that's doing lots of simultaneous reads and writes. You are dealing with something like a device that writes pictures one at a time, one after another.

So picking a complex file system is just a recipe for problems. You add more cost and complexity for little to no gain. Something like FAT is perfect. Not only is it supported everywhere, as you noted, but it is extremely simple.

It's about Bluray, not pictures.

[symbolset]

There are some hints here.

I wrote about this here some years ago. Toshiba wants to sell movies on your chip from kiosks. They think they can put this together with SD, because of the onboard security. Unfortunately that's not going to work unless they can get 64GB SDXC chips under $5. Actually, that last isn't as unlikely as it sounds the way things are going, and then they might as well sell you the chip with the video instead of separately. Best would be for them to figure out a home server that can securely host the movies you bring home on chips, but will still serve the video streams to any of your Toshiba Media Network enabled TVs or set-top boxes.

The processor tech required for HD is getting low power enough to put inside the LCD TV, and this media makes a good format for transportable video. And Sony loses a media format war, again.

On the upside, your SDXC enabled SLR should have the bandwidth to take several hours of 1080p if they can bump the processor speed high enough to handle it. You'll want the backpack style battery though. Think of it as home movies with lens effects.

BOOM, there goes the filesystem

[Dwedit]

There is no reason in this day and age to use an extended version of FAT for any reason. FAT and FAT32 are only used because they are ubiquitous, and compatible across most operating systems. They are technically inferior, and it is very easy for a software bug to overwrite the File Allocation Table with garbage, effectively killing a lot of files on the disk. There is no guarantee that the files will be stored contiguously on the disk. Even the typical use case of a digital camera will eventually enlarge a directory cluster. So you have a non-contiguous filesystem and suddenly some bug kills the FAT, your filesystem goes kaput.

Using some descendant of FAT is only asking for data loss.

Yet Another Conspiracy Theory

[rdnetto]

Wake up people! The popularization of 'ibi' is clearly an evil plot to popularize chibi in order to rejuvenate the anime market after the damage done by poor english dubs!
---
</sarcasm>

WTF is an exbibyte?

[DragonTHC]

you mean exabytes?

horrible editors on /.

Re:WTF is an exbibyte?

[nycguy]

Why don't you try clicking on the provided Wikipedia link for exbibyte, smarty pants? Then you'd find it's a different, though closely-related, concept.

FAT 64

[fru1tcake]

a theoretical file size limit of 16 exbibytes

That's almost enough to store a picture of yo mama!

Re:FAT 64

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah? Yo mama so fat her picture crashed my RAID array!

Better than FAT....

[Joce640k]

>"Who cares? There are better filesystems than FAT"

Um, yes, but how many of them are supported in Windows? You think people will buy cards which don't work directly in Windows machines?

FAT64 only for digital cameras

[wikinerd]

What file system comes with an SD card only matters if you use the card with a device like a digital camera. If you use it on a PC equipped with GNU/Linux, there is no reason to use any version of FAT. You are much better off formatting the card with a free GNU/Linux file system.

Re:FAT64 only for digital cameras

[maxwell demon]

Of course, if you don't use it on a device like a digital camera, there's no reason to use an SD card at all.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What's the URE rate?

[aztecmonkey]

I've read that with HDD's there is a URE rate of one in 6 Tb. What is the URE rate with SSD's?

Is this the end..

[mobsmf]

..to Blue-Ray? (Why not?)

The developers are wimps

[bradbury]

There is nothing special about a file system storage technology. It reads bytes, it writes bytes. That is all it has to do. The developers catering to the FAT or extended-FAT paradigm are examples of suck-ups who do not believe that "information should be free". If one had cajones one would propose an open source file system storage system.

And I am making this statement, clearly and open to the public, to the developers of exFAT file system and anyone who deals with it. You are EVIL, Wikipedia clearly states "Extended File Allocation Table, aka FAT64) is a proprietary file system". Why are you working on such evil plans?

Now, if we were moral people we would name the perpetrators. We might gain the advantage that if you think you are shrouded in secrecy -- that secrecy is hidden -- for now. And you need to ask how long is it before we catch up with you?