4Gb CF Card Announced

An anonymous reader writes "Lexar has today announced that it now shipping a 4 GB 40x Compact Flash card. The card's claim to fame is the ability to store 600 RAW images taken with a 6 megapixel digital camera. This card also features Lexar's WA (Write Acceleration) technology which can improve performance further with WA enabled cameras. Because this card is larger than 2 GB, you will need a camera which is FAT32 compliant. This card is available now at the heady price of $1,499 ($0.37/MB). It looks like Lexar has managed to be faster then Hitachi (Former IBM storage division) with their 4Gb Microdrive."

$1500?

[Sheetrock]

Flash is getting expensive nowadays. I thought IBM had a tiny harddrive that (at the time) stored 1GB of data on it; couldn't something like this be incorporated into a 'memory card' design for cameras and the like? That seemed to be the whole point of it, anyway.

4Gb or 4GB

[insulator]

The title says 4 gigabits, but the text says 4 giga bytes. 4 GB is impressive, 4Gb is not (512 MB).

Why?

[afidel]

You are never going to be able to take that many pic's without changing batteries so why not have a couple of cheaper 1GB cards and swap em out with the batteries? 1GB CF cards are as cheap as $228 you are paying a more than 50% premium for the denser storage.

Al though

[frodo from middle ea]

This is good news for most professional photographers, Use amatures would rather have a cheaper portable 20GB+ backup OPtion.
Plus what is a typical life of a CF card ? I sure hope its more than 5 years If I am putting 1000$+ in it.

Plus the very though of loosing those 600 RAW images , if i loose the CF card is disturbing.

I would rather have a portable labtop with 20GB+ memory and a 1GB flash card.

Just get 4 1GB Microdrives

[BoomerSooner]

That takes care of a single point of failure and it's $500 cheaper.

Too big

[nbarr]

Experts say you should never use a card bigger than 512Kb. Why? Imagine loosing one card? You'll loose 2Gb of image information. If you use 4 cards of 512Kb, and you loose one, you will not be loosing that much info. Dont put all the eggs on the same basket.

Re:Too big

[mekkab]

But if you only have 1 card- its in your camera. If you lose that card, you have FAR greater problems on your hands!

Conversely- if you are juggling 4 different little pieces of plastic, the ability to lose one is a lot easier!

Why paging is necessary

[dodell]

Paging is implemented in most main-stream operating systems to support legacy environments (even now some computers, namely laptops, come with 128MB RAM -- WinXP is the market OS... see below). There are several good reasons for this for every operating system.

• Windows is RAM-intensive. I have XP and 256MB RAM. 128MB was definitely not enough, and 512 would be the lowest amount that would cut it without paging on my box. Problem is, my laptop doesn't support that much (it's an older Dell Latitude model). I would rather have paging turned on here than not be able to execute more applications/type more text/move my mouse to free an application.
• UNIX and Linux systems obviously are used in many server environments. Without paging, it's not useful in stressful server environments.

Many hobby OSes are not using paging in their development. While it is a well documented part of OS design and development, most new hobby OS makers are simply leaving it out with the reason that, if their OS ever did evolve to take up that much RAM, it's so cheap that one could easily buy more.

For the multi-tiered model to work, there would need to be specific slots for swapping memory, which would cost space on the motherboard. Then OS developers would have to start supporting this model.

While this is a fun idea, it isn't practical because:

a) Memory is *CHEAP* and if you run out of it, you can always page to the hard drive,

b) All modern systems and OSes support 1-4GB RAM, which is definitely enough for most (any?) consumer (at the moment),

c) If you have 4GB of RAM being used, you should be upgrading to a more powerful computer, not adding 256MB swap. Chances are you're going to need a lot more swap space than that if you're doing work requiring more than 4GB RAM.
d) Finally, if you use this extra 256MB RAM, you're still swapping anyway. So why not just make systems support more RAM in the first place?

I hope I adequately answered your question :).

Re:4Gb or 4GB

[schmink182]

Before further bashing the Slashdot editorial staff, you may wish to note that editors rarely submit the stories. Slashdot readers submit the stories, along with the headlines.

Re:Unlimited storage support by using FORTH!

[arkanes]

CF cards are used for more than cameras. If you want anything else to be able to read your pictures, you need to have a standard way of representing the files on the card. Suprisingly, we call this a "filesystem". If you want every camera to have it's own proprietary storage that only that camera can use, and can only be read by a special hardware adapter with special software, then by all means, then by all means, keep pushing the use of Forth(!?) as way of writing files.

The *real* boon in high-capacity CF (etc.) cards

[tambo]

...will be the elimination of the MP3 player market.

It frustrates me to no end that I carry around a rather remarkably-specced PDA that could handily play MP3s... but I'm hampered by limited storage. It's like being unable to drive your Corvette because you can't buy enough gas.

The high-capacity portable-medium format will obsolesce one device from my gadget arsenal. One less battery to recharge; one less file store to maintain; one less device for firmware, driver updates, and connectors.

David Stein, Esq.

yes, but probably not in a 4GB chunk

[alexander m]

in retrospect there are some advantages to getting two 40x 1GB cards, but i went for the 2GB for convenience' sake - off on a long holiday soon, want to shoot RAW, don't want to have too many bits to lose! :)

according to the numbers, speed-wise, the transfer rate is 1.5 - 2x faster. however, this doesn't take into account the faster instant response - my camera (eos d60) feels noticeably more responsive compared to the 1GB microdrive i've been using (though i'm sure this improvement is true of most solid-state cards). so, yes, a 32x or 40x does seem a good step-up from the microdrive.

other good investment - a USB2 multi-card reader (LaCie Universal Media Drive) for dumping the images off the camera. when you fill up one of those cards you really DON'T want to have to dump all the RAW images off the camera over USB 1! it's pretty much hours vs minutes for a large card like that...

maybe a 1Ds user will see the point in a 4GB drive, but even then you're better off getting 2GB cards instead. as the other posterd mentions, a single point of failure isn't a great idea if you're professional...

Re:best quote

[tinrobot]

unrelated note... I wish all PCs would come with CF slots on them standard. i think its the best alternative to the floppy.

I use those USB pen drives. Very handy, and a similar concept. They're about the same price as CF, and most PCs have USB slots.

40x?

[hendrix69]

What's the deal with measuring speed as multiples of ancient cdroms? How long is this gonna go on? Am I supposed to walk around with a pocket calculator in order to figure out what the actally speed of merchandise is? Quick: how many MBps in 48x?
It's like measuring the power of a space shuttle's lunch rockets using horse power. "Oh, you mean if we tie down 1 million and a half horses to the shuttle we'd be able to get it off the ground? Impressive..."

Re:$1500?

[NormalVisual]

However, the Microdrive is more appropriate in situations where there will be a lot of writing to the media - I'd much rather have a Microdrive mounted as a swap partition than a CF card on my CerfCube. :-)

For pretty much all other uses, I'd agree that CF is probably the better choice.

Re:Cool, but...

[BostonPilot]

I fly aerial photographers. Most of them are still shooting film. We spend more time on site while they fumble to change film, than we actually do taking pictures. It's especially bad when the doors are off and the cockpit is being buffeted by wind. In my mind, digital, with a storage module big enough to hold the entire shoot, is the way to go. I had one guy with a Canon digital, using a 1 GB drive. He had to reload during the middle of the shoot. Simultaneously, Logan tower is hinting that we better finish up soon i.e. we had about 1 more minute before we got kicked out of the airspace. Bigger drive would have been much better in this case.

I'm also a semi-pro with a Nikon D1X. I currently have the 1Gb IBM Microdrive. Shooting raw NEF pictures (which is all I ever shoot) I get about 130 pictures on a drive. I hate opening the camera up in the field, so bigger is defintely better. Using jpeg that same drive holds 400 pictures, but I NEVER use jpeg. When you're printing large, you can definitely see the artifacts.

BTW, the battery use in a pro camera like the D1X is very good. Since you can shoot lots of pictures without using the battery draining LCD, you can literally shoot all day on a single battery. I usually carry 1 spare. So, "film" not battery is defintely the limitation in this case.

Re:Just get 4 1GB Microdrives

[CracktownHts]

Except Microdrives are susceptible to environmental issues (e.g. altitude) and are more fragile. 4 1GB CF cards would be the way to go if you're paranoid.

Re:Why paging is necessary

[r55man]

I hope I adequately answered your question :).

This shouldn't have been modded up so high. It didn't answer the question at all.

The original poster wasn't asking why we don't do away with paging, he was asking why does the paging have to be done on the hard drive.

High-end RAM, the kind you want sitting on the motherboard, is still expensive compared to yesterdays cheap PC100/PC133. But the older RAM is still *way* faster than the hard drive.

So what he was asking was: Why can't we figure out a way to use this old, cheap RAM for swap space instead of the hard drive. In other words, he wants stick a bunch of old PC100/PC133 modules together, and make it look like a swap partition to the OS.

He's not the only one either. A $50 PCI card, or an extra $30 tacked onto the cost of the motherboard would pay for itself many times over if you could load it up with a few GB of RAM on the cheap. For big applications, servers, or users who run many apps at once, you could get away with buying a lot less of the expensive RAM if the swap penalty wasn't so great.

Now, there *are* people making PCI cards that can be loaded up with RAM and treated as a disk by the OS, but they are not common, and last I checked they certainly weren't cheap. But that's probably just because there's not much demand and little competition.

Compact Flash for Video

[andygrace]

This is not nearly *enough* storage for the next major application of Flash - Video. Panasonic is currently working on a Pro Video Camera with an array of similar speed Flash working in parallel to replace DVCPRO 25Mbps video tape. (Final product should be at NAB in April) There are high quality audio recorders (Marantz and others) already using Compact Flash cards for radio stations and they work great. The things will make a huge difference to people like me in the professional media industry. No capturing video before editing - just copy it across.