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

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

[MrCrassic]

Stupid?

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

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

[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.