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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."
They didn't DEVELOP anything. They're working on the specification to allow for growth. Nothing more.
Specification... My car's tires are specified to 147mph. *Can* they go that fast?
Wake me up when there is an actual 2TB, 500MB/sec compact flash card out there. I will promptly curse you for requiring me to buy YET ANOTHER compact flash reader.
I wonder how smart it is to design a spec now with the upper boundary in size equivalent to a normal hard drive. Why stop at 32bits addressing when 48 probably doesn't make much of a difference (the 16 extra will be all zero for a while after all, close to no cost on the card and negligible on the controller) and would match (s)ata that way with its far more future-proof 128PB limit.
Flash cards seem to move as fast as HDDs, they only started later.
OG.
The move from PATA to either SATA or PCIe was pretty much as expected(PATA being a dead end, development wise, and lots of pins and traces not doing your BOM costs any favors). The 2TB limit surprise me, though. Obviously, you can save a few bits here and there by reducing the maximum address size; but(by virtue of exponential growth and powers of two) you can absolutely blow the roof off the maximum size limit for just a few bits more here and there.
If this standard were promulagated in 1995 or something, when 2TB hard drives were basically science fiction, and 2TB solid state drives not the size of entire rooms and costing the GDP of one of the smaller European nations were also basically science fiction, I could understand a 2TB limit(just as the old-school sub-48-bit-LBA HDD size limits are annoying but understandable in context). However, you can buy 1TB SSDs right now. They are not cheap; but they cost less than a decent car. 2TB devices that are basically the PCBs of the 1TB devices with a cheap RAID chip in there somewhere are also in existence. If you are developing a new standard, one that completely changes the electrical substrate and will thus never be backwards compatible(unlike earlier CF standards bumps, which, with the exception of 5v/3.3v changed nothing on the physical side), why would you set a limit that will probably be exceeded in the lab inside two years, and available to the more-money-than-sense crowd in 5? Are the few extra bits that would take you from 2TB to a zillion Petabytes so expensive?) It wouldn't be cheap; but you could(using bare dice and clever stacking and the case as a heat sink) get roughly 1TB worth of flash silicon, plus a controller of some kind, into the size constraints of a CF card right now. Doubling that can't be too far away, unless we hit some nasty wall, and interconnect standards have a way of sticking around for years. Why hobble this one?
Wait, did you just assume he was arguing against a new specification?
He's pointing out the headline states one thing and the summary states another. When I saw the headline, and did not see anything about specification, I assumed the headline was literal. Upon reading the summary, I read something completely different but related.
I think the problem is the wording in the article.
I pee'd a bit when I read the title... oh... I did again when I read it for the second time... look, there I go again!
I thought maybe, just maybe Sony and Nikon have developed some amazing new technology that they kept secret up until now and are blowing the doors off the solid state storage market.
But no... bit of a let down... they're just writing a spec, not developing an actual card... booooo
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.
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.
These cards will be more bulky and slower than high end SDXC cards. And SDXC is already in use today.
Larger and (slightly) slower may mean cheaper, cooler, and/or more durable. A slightly larger form factor may also mean that we get larger actual capacities (rather than the theoretical maximum from the specs, which neither technology is going to reach for a while yet) sooner.
~Idarubicin
SDXC is shoving exFat down everyones throats. exFat is heavily patent encumbered (yes.. they really did patent the idea if going from fat32 to essentially fat64).
Getting exfat support in kernel will likely be akin to getting patent encumbered codecs is on linux now. A small inconvenience but it won't work out of the box.
Going back to the days where you can't just read anything anyone gives you is a pain in the ass. I blame software patents.
Why stop at just 16TB? Go up to 100JB (Jiga Bytes), Marty.
-Doc. Brown from the future
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.
Nikon's D7000 does 1080p30 at 26.56Mbps which is 9.56GB/hour, if you can fill a 2TB flash card with video doing anything productive you must be shooting an entire nature documentary on one card without offloading the video (bad idea!). Heck even raw 1080p30 video would only be ~.5TB/hour. You're right though that large format backs could eat through it fairly quickly shooting RAW.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You really don't want to see the price sheets, which is why the SSDs that actually sell are still in the 16-256GB range; but 1TB SSDsare at or close to commercial availability in 2.5 inch sizes. You can already get 2TB, possibly 4, out of the larger PCIe expansion card type ones. Again, you'll be looking at 10k+ for toys like that; but they exist, and they can be expected to keep shrinking until the solid state physics guys come back with very bad news...
Hardware: SanDisk, Nikon and Sony are Developing a 500MB/sec 2TB Flash Card specification
There, fixed that for you.
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
Why stop at just 2? Up the ante and go to 16.
Because they figured no one has that much porn.
In the beginning, there was null.
Nikon's D7000 does 1080p30 at 26.56Mbps which is 9.56GB/hour, if you can fill a 2TB flash card with video doing anything productive you must be shooting an entire nature documentary on one card without offloading the video (bad idea!).
Hmm I could imagine a '5400p30' video camera which you set up pointing at a habitat and leave it running for a day. Come evening you pull the card and scan it to see if you have caught the mating dance of the Marsh Wombat (or anything else interesting) and if you have, you can do x5 zoom in and crop out a nicely framed 1080p video of the action.
A wild life photographer could be in 2-3 different places at once.
When are they going to switch to a different filesystem? The fat32 4GB file size limitations makes HD video a pain to deal with as well. Currently canon cameras stop recording when the file size reaches the maximum and the user has to see the recording light stop, and hit record again. A better interum solution would be to fill the 4GB file size, increment the filename by one, and keep going. I don't understand why they don't do that... it would be a simple firmware fix.
That's overly compressed video. Completely unusable from a professional perspective.
What the pro needs (and also the semi-pro) is ability to record uncompressed HD (or "visually lossless" HD using codecs such as Cineon).
Huge difference in throughput
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
DSLR HD is 4gb for 12 minutes because of the cf card limitations for speed and size. Professional HD is uncompressed, which puts you closer to 1 hour of HD at 1tb. File size and transfer speed limitations are the reason why compression exists in recording devices. Remove these limitations and you can achieve much higher quality.
CF cards at 64 GB are quite a bit further from 2TB than 2.5" SSDs are. CF is a really small physical format. Small enough that you can carry a bunch in your pocket, and swap them out each time you fill your 2TB with data. Which, if you're recording uncompressed 1080P video at 60fps and 32 bit color (500MB/sec) will still take you over an hour.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Hey, Lucas123! Just how much of a flaming dumbass are you?! Are you too stupid to know the difference between "developing a 2TB flash card" and "developing a 2TB flash card specification"? Jesus Christ! Someone ban this idiot from posting ever again. If you can't tell the difference, you shouldn't be reading SlashDot in the first place.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
There have been chunks of hollywood movies and full episodes of tv shows (including House) shot with the Canon 5D mk ii and that's 38Mbps including uncompressed audio (1.5-2.3Mbps depending on if it's 16 bit or 24bit) so I would say your claim is false.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I think that's way too "good enough for now" a view for my taste. Computers moved across the board to LBA48 nearly a decade ago (2002). LBA48 can support up to a 144 petabyte (128 pebibytes) drive capacity. Even if disk space continues to increase at the current pace without slowing, that was almost three decades of expansion room when it first came out. Yet in the consumer space, we're still stuck with ridiculous limits because the camera manufacturers would rather design obsolescence into their gear. So when you buy a piece of camera gear, it supports the current standard of flash card. In about two years, that standard will hit a capacity wall, and a new standard will be created. Within two to three years after that, it becomes significantly more expensive in cost-per-gig to buy flash cards that still work with the old cameras because the price-performance curve has shifted to larger flash cards that aren't compatible. That's a pretty sad compatibility story.
I'm firmly of the opinion that the $1,000 DSLR camera you buy now should be compatible with any new media that comes out for at least a decade or two. That shouldn't be much of a stretch. Just STOP tweaking the standard a tiny bit at a time. It's way past time for camera makers to bite the bullet and design a real, extensible standard now that will continue to work in the long term. We should never have had an SDHC standard or an SDXC standard. We should have had a single SD48 or even SD64 standard. Similarly, they should be working on CF48, not CF32. Adding four bits worth of capacity at a time is a copout. It's not like it takes that much extra work to toss around one extra data word per block number.
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I'm firmly of the opinion that the $1,000 DSLR camera you buy now should be compatible with any new media that comes out for at least a decade or two.
What's the point? In twenty years, a present day camera will just be an antique toy collectable. I doubt that you'd want to use a digital camera from ten years ago now
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it