SimpleTech Announces 8GB Compact Flash Card 279
alterego writes "Digital Photography Review is reporting that SimpleTech has announced 2, 4, 5 and 8GB Type II Compact Flash Cards utilizing its patented IC Tower stacking technology. This comes just a month after Hitachi announced its 4GB HD in under an inch, and less than one year after Lexar announced the first 4 GB CF card, marking a huge leap in drive density. And at only $5,999 it is sure "to meet budget and performance requirements.""
Digital Camera/Camcorder dilemna (Score:5, Insightful)
You know... (Score:5, Insightful)
How long until we see the obligatory "Yea, but how much pr0n can it fit" posts?
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:reliability? - an after thought (Score:5, Insightful)
SanDisk brought us SanDisk Ultra, rated at 60x speed. Then they reminded us that if we really want it to keep it's memory at low temperatures (such as outdoor photography in winter) then we really need to buy SanDisk Extreme (same speed, higher temperature tolerance).
Seems to me these hardware manufacturers are taking a clue from the software industry. The "implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose" is intended to protect consumers against such crap. But then, if you can shrink-wrap the product with all sorts of disclaimers of warranties (even implied warranties) then hey, why not? Cheating is cheating, and everybody is doing it, so it must be ok.
When will it all be solid state? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only uses for this - (Score:5, Insightful)
And in regards to using this for video, why would you? There are DVD-based DV Cams out there that will write to 4.7GB discs that cost $1.5 each, so why bother spending 6 grand on something that can be done for $3? Plus, DVDs can be read almost anywhere these days, whereas you need to carry a special reader for CF.
What I really want to see is an 8GB thumbdrive for CHEAP!
Hard drives makers should take note... (Score:5, Insightful)
With Flash getting more and more mainstream, and with the now high volumes being made available, hard drives are becoming less and less necessary for commodity products such as desktops and notebooks. The latter especially will make the switch from HDs to Flash, to lighten up the power and physical load.
If Flash sees overall performance and shelf-life improvements rivaling HDs (more so than what it does already), HDs may well be relegated to a place in history/tech museums... right next to the analog cameras.
Yeeesh, take a chill pill people! (Score:5, Insightful)
But I digress, lets consider other technologies that we all thought we could never afford, and consequently never use. About 10-15 years ago, wouldn't our 256MB+ RAM and 30+ GB HDs run in the thousands or even millions for that stuff then. Give it time, and it will hopefully be cheap for all
What is the failure rate like? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
That would be pretty cool (and silent!), I'll admit. But by then I'll have a hard time justifying it when I can get an 800GB+ platter-based HD for the same price.
Who's gonna buy it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking at an extreme case: assume a pro photographer has a 12M pixel camera, and takes only TIFF files. That would get approx 750 pictures (I think; it's pretty late here!) on a 8Gb card. That's a hell of a lot of pictures to be carrying around with you, and a lot you're risking if the card dies or your camera gets stolen. I just can't believe that someone would need that capacity; surely they'd backup to some other, more sturdy media well before they got that quantity of pictures.
IIRC, high-quality digital video would produce data faster than these these cards can store it. DV would conceivably merit the capacity, but the media would be too slow.
Is there any other likely reasonably widespread use for these enormous flash cards? Something I've missed?
great news all around (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Digital Camera/Camcorder dilemna (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:reliability? - an after thought (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:8gig CF cards!?!?!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you compared the prices? The mini-iPod is aomething like $199, this is $5,999. Disk is likely to beat silicon in $/mByte for a very long time. Where CF beats disk is access time. And streaming players don't need good access time: once they are on track, they have better performance than CF.
In a dedicated device, this kind of capacity is going to be cheaper in disk. This wins where you need interchangeability (nobody had a good CF format hard disk drive, as far as I know), or ruggedness, or low power, or ultra-low noise. Specialist markets all.
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Insightful)
I read somewhere that at least some flash disk devices will remap writes to evenly 'wear' the flash chip even if the writes are supposedly 'physically' in the same location. But I don't know how well that mechanism scales to 8GB or how it affects speed. I also don't know how long such a wear-managed device would last under a typical workstation or server load, but at least
On the other hand, for a filesystem with few updates and many reads (some web servers and a few databases--think LDAP), this device could be neat for a low-latency but faster-than-network throughput network server. But I'll wait until the price drops a few thousand.
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Insightful)
they could have 80 next week if they needed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
They could easily bind 10 of these CF cards together and have roughly the same form factor as the sleekest slimline notebook drives. It'd really just be a matter of addressing if they wanted to release an 80GB solid-state drive.
The first problem though, is the transfer rate bottleneck. CF has access times an order of magnitude lower than even the fastest disk drives (0.000256s vs 0.006s), but its transfer rate is ~25% of current consumer magnetic disk drives. (20MB/s vs 80MB/s)
likely they could work out the transfer rate problem (and in under a year if there was a market), but then we're left with the other major problem. The relatively low write lifespan of flash memory. (between 100k and 1m writes/block)
A system swap file would likely burn through that much faster than the consumer market would tolerate.
The bottom line though, is that it's patented technology. Even if they released an 80 GB drive in a couple years, it wouldn't be priced for the consumer market. Not until a competing technology moves in.
You and I will likely still be waiting for a solid state storage alternative for the next 5 years. Sad but true.
NOT a bad price (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not targetting people with a $1000 consumer point-n-shoot, and CF is not good for HD replacement in most cases due to low bandwidth and rewrite lifetime issues.
Having to stop shooting to change media half as often is WELL worth it. You don't want to have to tell your editor "There was a pulitzer-prize shot, but I missed it because I had my head down changing CF cards right at that moment."
Why not have a RAID array of flash cards? (Score:5, Insightful)
What are they going to use for a filesystem? (Score:3, Insightful)
That price point is for early adopters and professionals only, and professionals are not going to be happy about losing 8GB of photos to a corrupted file system. I hope the camera makers are planning something more robust than FAT.
Re:NOT a bad price (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What are they going to use for a filesystem? (Score:1, Insightful)
Quote:
EOS-1D Mark II supports a maximum capacity of 2,048GB for CF as well as SD media.
--------------------
Chuck Westfall
Director/Technical Information Dept.
Camera Division/Canon U.S.A., Inc.
That's 2 terabytes, but this is Slashdot, I don't need to point that out.
Re:Boot from USB/Flashcard (Score:3, Insightful)
The next step is to move all device driver software from the operating system to a dedicated flash ROM embeded on the motherboard.
There are so many problems with this that it's silly. Most operating system kernels (including Linux and Windows) require drivers to be recompiled whenever the kernel is updated. Thus, you would have to make sure that the kernel on your USB drive is the same as the one that installed its drivers into the flashROM. Even if you could get around that problem, this sort of solution is just asking for DRM. Once drivers are no longer under the control of the operating system, one loses a LOT of the freedom that Linux and other such systems provide.
Much better solutions would be:
A) Standardize hardware interfaces. This is already done with IDE, as well as OHCI/UHCI USB and others. One IDE driver will work with all existing IDE hardware. Theres no reason we coudn't apply the same thing to network cards, sound cards, or whatever else you might need. In fact, hardware is already so standardized that most Linux distributions can ship a single disk with drivers supporting every piece of hardware found in most systems.
B) Get bigger USB keydrives, and put more drivers on them. Such drives are already available with 1GB capacity, which is far more than you would need to store every single available Linux kernel module.
Re:trouble with CF is that... (Score:3, Insightful)
A friend of mine made that mistake after installing ZipSlack on a 128mb CF card (in a CF->IDE adapter)
I think he was using it on a 32mb machine... so 2 weeks of heavy swapping... that's a LOT of reads & writes.
CF video (Score:2, Insightful)
Panasonic's DVCPRO P2 Flash based camcorder and playback decks are set to be launched at NAB in Vegas in April. (pro broadcasting show) It's based on four SDCards working in parallel.
The advantage of flash? You dont need to dump footage off DV tape before editing it. You can even edit in the camera. In a news environment those extra minutes can mean the difference between getting the story on the air or not.
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
You are thinking of the D70. While it is able to write fast enough to keep taking pictures in normal JPEG 3 pictures pr. second without filling the buffer, it does not have room for 144 pictures in the buffer.
Nor is the D70 the top of the line Nikon. That honor goes to the D1x or D2h depending on what you want. Those have buffers in the 40 picture range. (Depending on the resolution). With 8 pictures pr. second for the D2h, this might be useful. (The D2h can alo be equipped with a 802.11b card and set to upload pictures via FTP as they are taken)
As for using huge CF cards. I would think that most photographers would not like to put quite that many eggs in one basket. Those who require extreme capacity can also go for a X-drive or a laptop.
Then again. For sports events, as you say, there may be some purpose to this. With pro-level optics for this purpose (Super teles and Super tele zooms) costing in the $1000-$5000 range the sticker shock might be slightly less.
Re:Can I replace my Bootable CD (Score:3, Insightful)
God, it never seemed like such a good deal before.
quick, send one to the mars rover (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Storage and memory keep increasing--implication (Score:2, Insightful)