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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."
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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?
640k may be enough, but only if not many people talk about it. /. could end up being > 640k -- the 36 comments that this page is up to take 112k.
I think that some sets of comments here on
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
No license stream if you pick a sensible filesystem, sorry. Instead you get Microsoft further extension of FAT. Ack.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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?
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?
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).
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%.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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)
Reiser jokes are not funny. Woman is dead, man is in jail, kids without a parent.
It's tragic. but NOT funny.
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.