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Panasonic Working On 2-Terabyte SD Cards

Posted by timothy on from the never-delete-another-snapshot dept.

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."

34 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. They're talking about address space by seanadams.com · · Score: 5, Informative

    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....

    1. Re:They're talking about address space by sexconker · · Score: 5, Funny

      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!)

    2. Re:They're talking about address space by Shrubbman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:They're talking about address space by CaptainPatent · · Score: 4, Funny

      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!

      --
      Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
    4. Re:They're talking about address space by CaptainPatent · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
    5. Re:They're talking about address space by sidyan · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    6. Re:They're talking about address space by jmorris42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > 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
    7. Re:They're talking about address space by grumbel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

    8. Re:They're talking about address space by sentientbeing · · Score: 4, Funny

      Peter Piper, from the Peck of Pickled Pepper organization.

      --

      ------
      beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
    9. Re:They're talking about address space by vlad30 · · Score: 5, Funny

      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

      --
      Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
    10. Re:They're talking about address space by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    11. Re:They're talking about address space by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      Slacker.

    12. Re:They're talking about address space by biryokumaru · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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!
    13. Re:They're talking about address space by karnal · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      --
      Karnal
    14. Re:They're talking about address space by Lorien_the_first_one · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
    15. Re:They're talking about address space by Linker3000 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I use micro-SD cards for my midget porn!

      --
      AT&ROFLMAO
    16. Re:They're talking about address space by gbjbaanb · · Score: 3, Funny

      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 :-)

  2. 2TB? exFAT? by Anthony_Cargile · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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>

  3. FAT by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:FAT by Amouth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

      --
      '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
    2. Re:FAT by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:FAT by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 4, Informative

      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).

      --

      "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    4. Re:FAT by MrCrassic · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Stupid?

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

    5. Re:FAT by slimjim8094 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
    6. Re:FAT by innocence18 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Anonymity of the internet is responsible for the views expressed in my post.
    7. Re:FAT by PitaBred · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
  4. They tried RieserFS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    But it died on the table.

  5. I, for one... by banffbug · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    1. Re:I, for one... by banffbug · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  6. Waste of time by ickleberry · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. More proof it's too late for copyright. by w0mprat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

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    After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
  8. ZFS? by argent · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  9. SDHC can already do 2TB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

  10. FAT 64 by fru1tcake · · Score: 5, Funny

    a theoretical file size limit of 16 exbibytes

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

    --
    It's not a bug, it's a lepidopter!