Slashdot Mirror
SanDisk, Nikon and Sony Develop 500MB/sec 2TB Flash Card
Lucas123 writes "SanDisk, Nikon and Sony are jointly developing a new Compact Flash card specification for the professional photography and video markets that boosts data transfer rates from 167MB/sec with today's 6.0 specification to 500MB/sec. The newly proposed specification would also offer up cards with a theoretical maximum capacity of 2TB, which would be conducive to recording high-definition video."
A spec is quite reasonable(though, so is pointing out that their spec is essentially a set of references to existing interconnects, which is again a perfectly reasonable way to build a spec. There don't seem to any major complaints with PCIe, the PCIe SIG is providing steady advances in bandwidth per lane for nearly free(to the CF guys), it exists in both PCs and embedded devices, making transfer easy, and you can always add a "pro" variant which contains two or more lanes if you really need the extra bandwidth)...
The only part that doesn't make sense to me, especially if they are shooting for the Serious Pros market(since SD has basically devoured everything from 'just expensive enough to populate the expansion header' up to 'mid-level DSL') is the 2TB limit. That limit has already very nearly been reached in 3.5inch and 2.5 inch SSDs, and the Large Format Digital(why yes, I am shooting 50 megapixel RAWs, because I'm better than you) and DSLR HD Video (Yup, full 1080p with the limited compression provided by a camera ASIC...) markets are certainly reaching the point where the idea of 2TB is more of a "workable, if irksome" limit rather than a "Please pick my jaw up from the ground where it has fallen, oh magical miracles of the future" type of thing.
On the other hand, the "reader" should be as simple as a mechanical adapter for your Expresscard slot or some sort of PCIe card+extender cable for your desktop, since both options already provide a native PCIe lane, and at least the former is definitely hot-pluggable and the latter might well be...
Technically, CF cards were in a similar position vs. IDE; but since IDE freaked out and dropped its marbles if you tried to hot-plug something, this was really only useful for building cheap, small, low-end SSDs for x86 embedded devices(a fair few embedded motherboards actually came with CF slots directly, replacing one of the IDE slots, to save you the trouble of the pin adapter. Super useful when building firewalls and stuff that needed more punch or professionalism than a hacked WRT-54G; but didn't want a bunch of spinning disks sucking power just to store less than 128MB of M0n0wall...)
2TB seems pretty pitiful for pro equipment, and 500MB/s is a complete waste for consumers.
SD(SDXC) currently maxes out at 2TB, but the first cards using the current spec shipped a year and a half ago. They can only do 104MB/sec, but it takes less than 5.5 hours to completely fill up 2TB at that speed.
I thought CompactFlash was moving over to SATA soon in the form of CFast. I know PCI-E would result it more robust IO devices but we already have a standard for that in ExpressCard.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
> the 2TB limit. That limit has already very nearly been reached in 3.5inch and 2.5 inch SSDs
I can't help thinking you've shifted a decimal point or something. 2 TB is the sweet spot for 3.25" magnetic drives (3 TB drives came out fairly recently, but cost more per TB and seem to sell out quickly). 2.5" magnetic drives max out around 1 TB.
Flash, though? 2.5" flash drives still live in the 16-256 GB range. If the Moore's Law advances hold pace, we're still a good 6 years away from 2 TB 2.5" flash drives. And SD cards just reached 64 GB.
Looking up filesizes, DSLR HD (1080, at 24fps) seems to chew 4 GB in 12 minutes. Let's round down to 10 minutes for easier math. 2 TB would get you 83 HOURS of video. That's not "workable, if irksome", that's incredible.