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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
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.
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...
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.