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

[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 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: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).

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!