Slashdot Mirror
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."
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>
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.
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?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
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?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Given that ZFS has been optimized for flash, why bother with FAT?
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.
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.
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.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat