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.""
reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)
can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Interesting)
(yes, I know it takes six grand)
what would the access times be like? comparable to a 42000 rpm drive? 5400? 10,000 sata?
WHAT??!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, who the hell needs this?
Even professional photographers couldn't possibly have a use for this instead of two 4GB disks.
But hey, I guess this means that mass solid state storage for hard drives really isn't far off, at least for PDAs.
Replace Hard drives (Score:4, Interesting)
Main point is, quiet computers are the new trend, and quiter than this is impossible. So, when do you think this will replace hard drives?
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore since flash has limited flash cycles that is much less than that of a hard drive, your
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Interesting)
embedded / military systems (Score:4, Interesting)
Sam
http://www.iamsam.com
Can I replace my Bootable CD (Score:5, Interesting)
What are we waiting for again?
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Interesting)
But for most operations on a normal desktop system, access time is 99% of total transfer time. Most disk transfers are of the order 4-16kb - less than 1 millisec while transferring. Whereas disk average access time struggles to reach 4 millisec. Excluding, of course, things like streaming video.
Furthermore since flash has limited flash cycles that is much less than that of a hard drive, your
Much more relevant. You would have to do without a swap partition (buy morE dram). I think some flas drives are clever wnough to map out bad blocks invisibly, so
But for $6k, how many complete disk based system can you drop/lose?
Boot from USB/Flashcard (Score:5, Interesting)
I know its not an option currently, but with all the advances in personal storage recently it would make sense for motherboard manufacturers to consider adding some kind of ASIC that allows the USB to be used as a boot device.
The next step is to move all device driver software from the operating system to a dedicated flash ROM embeded on the motherboard.
These two advancements would then enable people to carry around an entire OS on a flashcard/portable USB disk. You could simply slot in your flashcard and boot up your own OS (be it windows or linux) on any PC, at home/work/hotel. You dont need to carry a bulky laptop, all your data (and applications) can be on portable storage.
I imagine making the device driver software update a motherboard embeded flash chip is the most awkward part, but it makes much more sense to me to have the hardware drivers linked firmly to the hardware they drive (and not part of the OS as they are currently)
Just something I've been thinking about for years, but with all the recent advances recently I think its slowly becoming more possible?
Re:reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:what about life span of these things? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hard drives makers should take note... (Score:3, Interesting)
I get the impression that Hard Drive manufacturers are heading towards making their drives smaller, lighter and with less power drain (for portable devices, eg. new iPod) than they will making them have a greater capacity.
A tiny compact flash sized HD with very low power drain and good price point would be excellent. Something like the IBM Microdrive - but one that won't drain your PDA batteries after 30 minutes.
Although bear in mind I know as much about Hard Drive technology as I do Russian Line Dancing.
Re:Digital Camera/Camcorder dilemna (Score:5, Interesting)
At the consumer level, that may well be true. Most people with point and shoot consumer digital cameras never print their photos, and those that do don't often print anything much bigger than a 4x6 or a 5x7. So, having the extra resolution of a still camera doesn't really do much good for them anyway. The resolution of a video camera would handle their still images just fine.
However, an 8GB $6,000 CF card is not a product for somebody buying a $299 consumer camera
Maybe an 8GB card will be practical when DSLRs all have 20MP (which probably never will happen...) but in the meantime, it's expensive overkill.
* My shots/card figures assumed JPEG capture, not RAW. For RAW, cut my numbers in half.
Re:Only uses for this - (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Boot from USB/Flashcard (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if I could boot a PC from ~firewire~, *that* would be cool.
Battery Technology vs Storage Technology (Score:3, Interesting)
CompactFlash is meant to be portable. I don't know of a portable battery on the market today that could allow a machine to fill up (or read all of) this 8GB memory card before the battery dies.
I replace/charge my batteries much more often than the memory card. How would this ever help me?
Sports photographers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:1, Interesting)
It might even be ideal for embedded situations where you need the capacity of a medium sized hard drive, but you don't need to write and erase a whole lot--and you need the added reliability of solid state storage.
Couple that with a filesystem that's designed to spread out data, and keep the flash cycles about even across the entire array, and you've got a winner.
Re:Why not have a RAID array of flash cards? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why not have a RAID array of flash cards? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're going to Alaska to take pics of bears, moose, and whales for three months then you'll want a bag full of these 8GB monsters. The top line Nikon has a buffer that lets you take up to 144 pics in a row by holding down the shutter button. At 5 megapixels, that will eat up any size CF module in a big hurry. You'll want to do that if you're covering a sporting event. They won't pause the game while you swap cards or use the preview to delete pictures you don't want in order to save storage space. And as an expense for the photographer's job, they're deductable anyway.
Re:NOT a bad price (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:reliability? - an after thought (Score:3, Interesting)
The point here is that hardware is still regulated under UCC Article 2 -- sale of goods -- which pretty much prevents effective denial of implied warranties.
For an implied warranty of fitness of a particular purpose the person selling the goods is supposed to have a reason to know of the need. Here there is no actual conveyance of that need so most likely there is no implied warranty.
It is somewhat debatable whether the creation of a good for a particular market [the extreem market] would not actually make this a violation of express warrant of merchantability.
Under the merchantibility argument if these cards could not be used in "extreme" environments then they would not be merchantable as goods in their class should be. Problem is that express warranties can be disclaimed.
So really what we probably have is a case where the memory providers are in line with the law but it looks pretty slimey.
Only $5,999? (Score:3, Interesting)
In terms of immediate cost, it must be a ratio of about 300, given that you can't buy an 8 gid standard HDD any more, but if you could it would be about $20 or less if it was proportional to larger disks.
It has always been so, to a fair approximation, and no doubt some corollary to Moore's Law says that it will always be so.
Pity, because I could use one of these right now if it cost under $100.
Sometimes the old ways are best. Within its rated operating life (say 5 years), a reputable brand of HDD is also more reliable.
I don't see this changeing any time soon, there are lots of new ideas around for storage devices but none of them seem to come to fruition. This is just an extension of yesterday's technology, more of the same (not to belittle the achievement, these things take money, hard work and expertise in abundance), but not a radical breakthrough.
IMHO holographic memories, with lots of inherent redundancy, and therefore reliability, are the way forward, but we have been hearing that for at least 10 years now. I think there will be a real breakthrough of some sort within 10 years, what it will be is not immediately obvious. What is certain is that this is not it. But, in about 6 years, when my income has doubled and 8 gig costs $200, I will buy one, if nothing better comes along. Of course, it will then only hold about 2 picturtes from the latest gigapixel camera, which is what I would likely use it for....... The problem will move, but will not go away.
possible improvement (Score:2, Interesting)