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A New Global Memory Card Standard

Posted by kdawson on Sat Jun 02, 2007 04:11 PM
from the coming-this-year dept.
Data Storage Hardware
Lucas123 writes "The MultiMedia Card Association has approved a new memory card standard called the Multiple Interface Card (miCard). The card will make transferring pictures, songs, and other data between electronic gadgets and PCs easier. Twelve Taiwanese companies are preparing to manufacture the new miCard. 'The compatibility with both USB and MMC slots means most users won't need separate card readers anymore. MMC cards fit most consumer electronics, while USB connections are built into a wide range of IT hardware...'" Initial cards will hold 8 GB; the maximum the standard supports is 2,048 GB.
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  • But does it have DRM? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Would the RIAA and MPAA approve of this ease of use? And would SONY approve?
    • And would SONY approve?

      That's a better question than you probably intended.

      This new memory card format marks a major shift in who's leading and shaping the market for electronics. The companies involved in setting this standard are all what used to be second-tier manufacturers - companies like Asustech and BenQ. In the past, it's been Sandisk, Sony, Siemens et al who've decided what shape our storage cards will be.

      I think it's pretty revealing that this group of second-tier Taiwanese manufacturers has come up with a unifying design instead of fragmenting the market even more, as has been the habit of Sony et al. Your DRM comment becomes more relevant when we realise it's this same group who've been providing us with inexpensive DVD players that support way more standards, with less restrictions than the old guard Euro/America/Japanese based electronics companies.

      It's probably a good sign for those of us who despise DRM.

  • Finally.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by rustalot42684 (1055008) <rustalot42684.gmail@com> on Saturday June 02 2007, @04:17PM (#19365859)
    A new standard that will unify ALL the others... where have we heard this before?

    • Re:Finally.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by samtihen (798412) * on Saturday June 02 2007, @04:23PM (#19365911) Homepage
      I found an image showing what these things apparently look like:
      Link to Image [chinareviewnews.com]

      The image shows that they can be used with an adapter to fit an existing SD card slot.

      Can these things just be stuck strait into USB slots?

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The image shows that they can be used with an adapter to fit an existing SD card slot.

        Or probably more accurately, an existing MMC slot. MMC is an older spec that SD is compatible with. The form factor is nearly identical [wikipedia.org].
          • So you didn't bother to look at the image the parent posted? Apparently all of these cards can be plugged into USB ports, unlike special SD cards that need to have an internal USB plug.

            No ... the parent was talking about the difference between an MMC (that's "MultiMediaCard") and SD ("Secure Digital") cards and slots.

            Many people think that they are the same, but they are slightly different. MMC came first, and was a pretty neat format, but Sony and the other big music companies decided they hated it, because it didn't have built in features that made it DRM-friendly. So they "upgraded" the format and made SD, which includes an extra pin on the connector, an area of the card's memory that's not user-accessible (for storing the media keys, according to some never-widely-implemented DRM scheme they were cooking up), and a lock/unlock switch. They somehow got the manufacturers to kill MMC, by not producing many large-capacity cards for it, and replace it with SD.

            From a consumer's standpoint, we got a lock/unlock switch, higher prices for a while, and lost some capacity to the key-escrow area. (The latter is hardly noticed now, but it really sucked back on 32MB cards). MMC seems to have come back from the grave lately, though, mostly because of the reduced-size card implementations. (Maybe it's easier to implement in hardware and software than SD? I'm not clear on that.)

            These new memory cards are compatible to both USB and MMC, not SD. However, most SD card slots are backwards-compatible (IMO, that's a misnomer; SD was hardly a step "forwards" for anyone except the content monopolies) to MMC, so to the consumer it's "same difference."

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by whitis (310873)
              Manufacturers produced SD cards that were more or less upwards compatible with MMC (there are some slight differences in initialization) some older devices need a firmware upgrade) in 1 bit SPI mode. SD also allowed the option of thicker cards so cards don't necessarily
              fit in older MMC slots. But it is possible to support add SD card support, without licensing fees, to a device by basically treating it as an MMC SPI device and using the newer sockets but speed is reduced (though fine for cameras, MP3

      • Can these things just be stuck strait into USB slots?

        Seems like that is the idea [extremetech.com]. Would be very neat, no longer any hassle with memory-card readers supporting a zillion different standards.

      • Link to Image [chinareviewnews.com]
        The image shows that they can be used with an adapter to fit an existing SD card slot.
        Thank you very much, this is exactly what I wanted from this thread :)
        That article was useless without it.
    • Well the obvious advantage here is USB support.
    • One Card to rule them all, One Card to find them, One Card to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them?
    • "2,048 Gb should be enough memory for anyone"... where have we heard this before?

  • pictures ? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 02 2007, @04:18PM (#19365861)
    computerworld could use some of these, so they can store some pictures:
    http://images.google.com/images?q=miCard [google.com]

  • "Compatibility", or "planned obsolescence"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pla (258480) on Saturday June 02 2007, @04:21PM (#19365881) Journal
    The compatibility with both USB and MMC slots means most users won't need separate card readers anymore. MMC cards fit most consumer electronics, while USB connections are built into a wide range of IT hardware...'" Initial cards will hold 8 GB; the maximum the standard supports is 2,048 GB.

    ...Of course, since most older MMC card devices can't read anything over 4GB, you'll still need to upgrade either your storage or your devices (or both).

    I applaud the direct USB compatibility and the increased capacity, but don't kid us with claims of backward compatibility. Everyone already has 2-4GB MMC/CF/SD/XD cards in all their devices nowadays, and the industry needs to find an artificial reason to upgrade. Nothing more, nothing less.

    • Licensing saves big bucks. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by twitter (104583) on Saturday June 02 2007, @04:44PM (#19366093) Homepage Journal

      Of course, since most older MMC card devices can't read anything over 4GB, you'll still need to upgrade either your storage or your devices (or both).

      Why? Have your old devices stopped working? Mine have not and I've got more than enough flash cards for the forseeable future. Time marches on, sometimes things get better. My six year old CF based Cannon camera is still a champ, but it shipped with a 16MB card! 64 MB cards were just enough for a weekend, 256MB cards were nice and the 1GB card I have is strictly overkill. My newer of the same takes MMC and I knew it's limitations when I bought it. 1GB cards are enough to get as much video as the device has battery. I'm looking forward to HD video devices that will tax this new card.

      The big reason to move seems to be licensing. FTFA:

      Officials expect local companies to save $40 million in licensing fees thanks to the card, in addition to profiting from sales. Taiwanese companies will not have to pay royalties to make miCards or related technology.

      Slam, that's a lot of money. Hopefully, they see the same logic for OGG and friends. I'd really like it if my next camera did not come with a CD full of Windoze shit and that everything worked out of the box.

    • you're confused (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nanosquid (1074949) on Saturday June 02 2007, @06:22PM (#19366711)
      This is the upgrade of the MMC standard to beyond 8G. That was "planned obsolescence" in the sense that everybody knew that eventually, we'd need a new standard for that. But every other flash standard has done the same because it didn't make sense to design a standard for 4G+ cards in the days of 8M and 16M cards.

      "Backwards compatibility" means that you can use your old cards in new devices conforming with the new standard. They also gave you a small card format and direct USB compatibility. Those are nice features; if they didn't care about backwards compatibility, they could just have chosen a new, small format that was incompatible with all your old cards.
  • Please, lets do something other than FAT.
    • FAT is ubiquitous and can be read by nearly all operating systems, so it is hard to displace. However, given such a high capacity, these cards will have many video recording applications and hence something besides FAT is needed because of the 4GB limit. I doubt the format is a problem because you'll be able to just format it to whatever you need.
            • That's assuming you don't have any shots longer than 10 minutes. And without knowing the latency of the card who can say if it is suitable for video editing or acquisition. And some of us like to work uncompressed which brings up even more issues. It's got the bandwidth for one, maybe two, streams of uncompressed SD, but not even close for a single stream of uncompressed HD. I'll stick to my RAID.
    • There's always RAW. But personally I prefer to have my meat trimmed and cooked.

    • Re:Yes, but does it have a 30 year old file system (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pchan- (118053) on Saturday June 02 2007, @08:31PM (#19367425) Journal
      Many posters are commenting here that FAT works across all operating systems and that's why it's being used. If these manufacturers came out with a new file system specification (say, based on BSD UFS), I doubt it would be a big deal for Microsoft, Apple, and the Linux Kernel developers to include it in there.

      The reasons we are stuck with FAT is:
      1. Simplicity. This is huge for embedded devices (IE, the things that do the writing to all of these cards). A read-only FAT driver can be implemented in a few kilobytes of (compiled) code. It requires trivial amounts of memory to operate (only a few hundred bytes). I've written a bootloader for an embedded product that could load an OS from a FAT partition and it was under 10 kilobytes. A read-write implementation is not much bigger and the memory requirements are similarly trivial. No other major file system out there can claim this. Particularly, modern file systems like NTFS require huge amounts of memory (comparatively) due to the complex structures they need to maintain, and have massive, complex code to read and write.

      2. Reliability. I know this seems counterintuitive for such a lousy file system, but FAT is fairly resilient both to power failures (or card yanks), and more subtle corruption such as bad drivers or media defects. Sure, it may corrupt and lose your file, but it very rarely destroys the entire file system and lose the rest of the files on there. This is again because of the simplicity of the structures and the fact that very little needs to change on disk when a modification is made. Remember how many times Windows 95 crashed? How many times of that did you get major FS damage? Compare and contrast with Ext2.

      So, yes, FAT is a terrible file system compared to modern ones. But there's a reason everyone uses it.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Miffe (592354)
        I use ext3 on my portable usb harddrive. Works fine in windows using FS Driver [fs-driver.org].

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by JustNilt (984644)
          Sure but how many users have that installed already? It's a matter of native support if they want mass adoption, not some third party option being available that grandma won't or can't figure out how to load.

          They're competing with essentially plun-n-play stuff now. If people have a choice between plug-n-play and "install drivers, hope it works, reboot and then plug" there's no need to guess which one the average consumer will go for.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by jZnat (793348) *
            That's what the driver CDs are for. "Grandma" still has to use those in order to use her camera (or so she thinks), so it can be easily included with the installation process.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by thc69 (98798)
              A driver CD doesn't help me when I walk into the local public library, hoping to use webmail to send a picture to a friend...
      • unfortunately, to be universally accessable it needs to be fat. ntfs for windows would work but write support is not complete across platforms or is in a functional beta state. ext2 would work but drivers would need installed on a number of OSs to use it. if this is released @ 8GB, i wonder what system then plan on using?

      • Is there anything else, though, that's read/write on pretty much all OSs?

        Ask those idiots at M$ why Vista only works with FAT/NTFS and ignores better, royalty free formats. Ext2 was common when they got XP out the gate six long years ago. While you are at it, you can ask them why their format tools can only make a 32GB FAT partition and file system. Steve Jobs may have some questions to answer too, but I don't know what file systems Apple works with.

        Oh, I see [wikipedia.org], M$ has a FFS2 system that does wear l

  • Is that a 2048GB miCard of porn in your pocket; or are you just glad to see me?

    Anyone know what the physical form factor specifications are?

  • What does this do that previous ones don't? Why is this so much better than existing technology that it will supplant it?

    The USB interface is a nice feature, but a USB nub is pretty clunky, and is, in and of itself, bigger than competing media cards. XD and microSD are both smaller than a USB connector. Every format is flatter (CF, XD, SD, MMC, MemoryStick). How is this going to be better than any of those? If it doesn't have a standard USB nub, then is it going to need an adaptor, therefore defeating

    • Re:Yet Another Media Card Format (YAMCF). (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jeff DeMaagd (2015) on Saturday June 02 2007, @04:37PM (#19366037) Homepage Journal
      This one looks smaller than XD. It looks like it is about the same size as the piece of plastic inside the shell of a USB connector. It might be the same as MicroSD, I don't know. It's not the first card to offer USB compatibility. There are standard SD cards that can fold in half to present a USB connector to the user, but that's not a standard.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tmack (593755)

      What does this do that previous ones don't? Why is this so much better than existing technology that it will supplant it?

      The USB interface is a nice feature, but a USB nub is pretty clunky, and is, in and of itself, bigger than competing media cards. XD and microSD are both smaller than a USB connector. Every format is flatter (CF, XD, SD, MMC, MemoryStick). How is this going to be better than any of those? If it doesn't have a standard USB nub, then is it going to need an adaptor, therefore defeating the while "card reader not required" argument?

      Actually, I dont know either, since MMC/SD cards with built-in USB connectors already exist. See Here [engadget.com]. I know microcenter around here has been carrying them for quiet some time now. Basically, you fold the card in half and the tab that sticks out has the contacts for a USB plug. Its not a full USB plug form-factor, just a card large enough to hold itself in place against the USB jack's contacts. Maybe they are making the interface the same so that there is only one "plugin" side, and it can determine if

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by itzdandy (183397)
      the make this clear, the USB interface does not have the plug casing and is therefore very small. this is the same thickness as an sd/mmc card. it is electronically compatible with sd/mmc via contacts on the card as well as with USB by a seperate set of contacts. this is essentially MMC2.0(it is lacking the 'secure' part of the SD name, no 'write protect' switch) and looks to use the same type of logic for memory access as mmc rather than sd. the idea here is that this card will fit in a modern digital

  • Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)

    by Colourspace (563895) on Saturday June 02 2007, @04:30PM (#19365965)
    2048 Gigabytes *should* be enough for anyone...

  • Thank goodness (Score:3, Interesting)

    by teknokracy (660401) <teknokracy@telu s . n et> on Saturday June 02 2007, @04:32PM (#19365989)
    I think it's great that SD/MMC has taken hold as a "standard" of sorts. CF was once the king, but is too big by today's standards. SDMMC is good because it's not TOO small (i.e., I'd expect my own mother to lose a microSD card but not an SD card), and it has a wide range of applications like SDIO cards for wi-fi and other uses. And, the adapters for micro/miniSD make sense too.

    Now, if only they can convince Sony to at least stop making their OWN formats obsolete...

  • Christ, Not Another One (Score:4, Insightful)

    by segedunum (883035) on Saturday June 02 2007, @05:20PM (#19366335) Homepage
    We already have to put up with different memory card formats when we switch devices and phones, Mini SD, SD, XD, MMC etc. etc., and these people are creating a totally new format that we can all call a standard and not have to worry about it all any more?!

    Forgive me for being a tad sceptical at that logic.

  • Don't need another "standard" (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dan East (318230) on Saturday June 02 2007, @05:38PM (#19366457) Homepage
    We don't need another standard. A few days ago at Wal Mart I saw Wii-branded product that is really slick. It is an SD card, but the back of the card has been notched out so that the last few millimeters are the width of the little PCB that is in the connector part of USB. So the card fits in SD slots as normal, and the back side can be directly plugged into a USB slot.

    Here it is. [walmart.com]

    Here is a similar product [engadget.com] with a slide on sleeve. I assume that might be needed for physical compatibility with some SD slots?

    Here is a SanDisk combo SD / USB memory card [engadget.com], but I don't like it as well because it has moving parts which can break.

    These products are pure genius. Personally, I think the SD standard should be updated to increase supported capacity, so we can use a ubiquitous form factor long into the future. I don't know about the rest of you, but I have these worthless PCMCIA memory cards lying around, which I replaced with now worthless CF memory cards, which I've now replaced with SD. I don't want another change, and we don't need anything smaller than Micro-SD. So only bandwidth and capacity need to increase, which the SD standard can be modified to support (while maintaining backwards compatibility) as the technology improves.

    Dan East

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by imsabbel (611519)
        SD cards are CHEAPER than CF cards of the same capacity, and have been so for at least a year.
        Thats because few companies bother supplying that dying market anymore.

        Add to this the fact that (HD)SD cards are now at 8GByte ($80, cheaper than compareable SD).

        Result: THe only people buying it are those contrained by legacy hardware, and dumb suckers like you.

  • The important part (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tribbin (565963) on Saturday June 02 2007, @06:35PM (#19366779) Homepage
    Although it's sort of a technical duplicate; it looks simple and sturdy. But more important:

    "Officials expect local companies to save $40 million in licensing fees thanks to the card, in addition to profiting from sales."

    If enough companies use this, it will be the standard for, say, at least ten years. So everybody complaining 'great, just wat we need; another standard'; please think again.

  • ahh so... (Score:5, Funny)

    by JustNiz (692889) on Saturday June 02 2007, @07:32PM (#19367069)
    I wonder how long it will be before Sony release their "similar enough to fill the same needs except more expensive and totally incompatible with anything except Sony hardware" version.

  • Will this be propriatory just like SD, MMC etc? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jonwil (467024) on Saturday June 02 2007, @10:56PM (#19368157)
    What the industry really needs is a memory card standard that is totally open with absolutely no fees required to produce memory cards, card readers or software for it (unlike SD where you need to pay license fees). Or failing that, develop a standard where you only need to pay license frees if you are producing the physical hardware (i.e. the memory card or socket) and where the software is totally open. Motorola for example were caught between a rock and a hard place a while back because they had released a phone with a driver for the included SD slot built into the linux kernel instead of being a module and were stuck between "GPL violation" and "violating the SD association NDAs" (at the time they had to choose "GPL violation". It was all cleared up when the SD card people were convinced to release the "simplified specs" and Motorola could release the code in question)
      • MMC is the same physical layer as SD but has different logic for memory access. SD has typically been much faster. this is essentially MMC2.0. doesnt look like it has the "secure" part aka 'write protect switch' but has improved on the speed to be the newest and consiquently the fastest memory card.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by nbritton (823086)

        "Most devices don't support CF, btw.

        You mean most of your devices. Professional photographers have standardized on CF. We've dumped millions into CF gear and it will be around for a very long time.

          • Re:Yeah! (Score:4, Informative)

            by adolf (21054) <adolf@phreaker.net> on Sunday June 03 2007, @12:44AM (#19368569)
            Such adapters exist, and aren't too hard to find. Here [amazon.com] is an example.

            Things like this will keep CF around for a bit longer, but I do suspect that its days are numbered. Flash is currently improving faster than CF-sized hard drives, so the little disks which made CompactFlash so desirable as a pro standard are no longer important.

            And, there's something about the big, fat, durable, and mostly self-cleaning contacts on an SD card which makes the insertion process a whole lot less scary than the 40 pin (!!!) socket connector of CF.

            Other than that, it's just a lot more compatible. My PDA, laptop, cell phone, car stereo, and consumer digital camera all have SD slots on them.

            I'll miss CF when its gone, though, because the format's inherent ability to act, pin-for-pin, just like IDE hard drives makes for some useful (though probably not very interesting) hacks, which is something that none of the other flash formats are currently capable of. I've currently got two diskless computers here booting directly from CompactFlash cards which are plugged directly into the IDE bus, which has so far worked quite nicely. One is an old 386 laptop which now has zero moving parts (and which should last indefinitely), while the other is a K6-2 box that is doing some audio DSP work (which is now almost silent).

          • But the Canon 1DS Mk II (or at least one of the high end Canon's) has an SD slot along with the CF slot.

            You missed the point of the SD slot on the 1Ds Mk II. It's not meant for primary storage. It's meant so you can have simultaneous JPG+RAW. Finish a card, give an art director the SD card so they can quickly look through the JPGs.

            CF will be around for quite a while yet, for one simple reason. Large cameras have "plenty" of space available. CF cards are physically larger than SD, ergo, CF card sizes will

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