World's Fastest Flash Memory Card?

ResQuad writes "Digital Photography Review has an article about what is claimed as the fastest MMC Memory Flash Card. Not only is this new card 200% faster than any current SD card (rating it at about 22.5MB/s read), its also 2GB. Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA?"

Re:What's interesting...

[MJOverkill]

What they usually mean is that you will be able to use the card in older MMC devices, just not at full speed. You will be able to use the card at whatever speed your older device can attain. In your case though, it may have been a defect in that particular device. I have used newer memory cards with my older cameras and slot readers without any trouble.

Re:Good News...

[bestguruever]

I'll buy the noise aspect, but flash is only good for a limitted number of writes so the failure rate is much worse.

Flash wear leveling

[tepples]

Aren't there a set number of accesses that a flash memory device can handle before they're toast?

Isn't there a set number of revolutions that a hard drive's bearings can take before it's toast?

An individual sector on a quality flash card will last for 100,000 writes. The competing "multi-level" flash technology, while slightly leading binary flash in capacity, lasts only about 10,000 writes. If you're curious, here's the difference [samsung.com]. Don't worry too much: CompactFlash cards perform wear leveling, which uses some spare sectors to make sure that no single sector gets overwritten overly often.

Re:Flash wear leveling

[Erwos]

I suppose if you're really worried about write limits, you can also use JFFS (I think that's the one!), which also tries to minimize/spread the writing. I really doubt you'll have too much of an issue, especially if you use the CF for the OS and apps, and an ultra-quiet hard drive for data.

-Erwos

Re:Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA?

[grendel_x86]

They arnt doing this w/ iPod minis, they are using CL muvos. The iPods HDs are modified physically to prevent this, the muvo's on the other hand, is not.

So can buy a $400 mp3 player, for the $500+ hd for your DSLR, and then ebay off the mp3 shell for $50.

If somebody has figured out how to rewire the iPod, it hasnt been on any of the photo forums, unlike the muvo guides.

Re:quick cards

[tupps]

The Canon EOS 1D Mark 2 is probably the fastest camera I have heard of for continous shooting. It can burst 40 jpeg shots (20 Raw) before it needs to write them to the memory card. While this is impressive it is also capable of 8.5 frames a second so it could be all gone in just under 5 seconds. This is also a 8.2 mega pixel camera as well so there must be a fair bit of ram in the thing.

http://web.canon.jp/Imaging/eos1dm2/html/specifi ca tions.html

Re:Flash Memory

[Silver222]

A large RAW file on a Canon D10 is about 7 megabytes. She shot almost 600 images in 15 minutes?

Re:Slightly OT: RAW image cameras

[emorphien]

Yeah, a ton of them. RAW files are usually compressed, but it's lossless. Just look for RAW in the specs and you've got your answer.

Some may shoot TIFF, but that's less common.

Re:Music?

[Snarph]

Of course, I'd assume it will play Ogg Vorbis, right?

Depends on the application. I think the not-so-free version of PocketMusic will play Ogg Vorbis files.

PocketMVP will definitely play them (I'm listening to one right now)

Re:What's interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

CF memory cards can be put into a mode known as "TrueIDE" where they can be directly hooked to an IDE controller, but it's not always operating like that.

However, CF is really PCMCIA which is really ISA...and IDE was meant to be "AT attachable" via the ISA bus...so they're pretty closely related. A CF memory card typically responds to commands which are basically IDE commands too.

The file system on the card is of course dependant on the camera...

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

IDE/ATA is 133MB/sec, not 133Mbit/sec.
SATA is 150MB/sec.
The current SCSI is 160MB/sec.
These current HD interfaces run 6-7 times as fast as the MMC card described.
Of course, the drives themselves are MUCH slower than the interface, the fastest drives have a sustained rate of around 30MB/sec, with burst up to 150MB/sec, depending on their internal cache.

Re:Flash wear leveling

[vadim_t]

since I'm quite interested in this I've investigated it a bit. Turns out JFFS is useless for CompactFlash, since it does its own wear levelling already. JFFS is something like what CF does internally, and is supposed to be used on raw Flash chips. I think some of the other memory cards are pretty much flash chips with a plastic case, and that's where you'd use JFFS.

Pocket Digital Library, Read or Die!

[monopole]

Project Gutenberg recently released a 4.7 GB DVD Image containing the 10,000 books scanned so far so i figure I should be able to squeeze at least 3,500 books on a 2 GB SD. i.e. 97 yards of books. A good start! Put this on a next generation e-ink unit like the sony libre and you have a "read or die" level bibliophiles dream.

You'd be better off...

[blorg]

...buying something like this [dpreview.com]. The FlashTrax is probably the nicest portable hard disk card reader but you can also get cheaper ones without the screen; for example I got a USB2 X-Drive 20gb, which reads all memory formats but xD card, for around €150. Which is a lot cheaper than 20gb in memory cards.

Yes, absolutely

[bokmann]

> Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA?

Yes, absolutely.

This weekend I was at Hershey Park, and practically filled a 4GB flash drive with photos from my Nikon D100 (photos in raw mode, shooting 3 a second of some action shots eats storage space fast).

With my current camera, 16GB would be comfortable.

I can remember, the year was 1984, and I was walking down a hallway in high school talking to a friend of mine about 'Apple's new Macintosh', which came in two flavors - 128k and the 512k 'Fat Mac'. I remeber, clear as anything, saying "Why would you need 512k? You can only fit 400k on one of its floppies...". I will never, ever make that mistake again. I can remember staring, dropjaw, at the first 400Mhz Pentium II we got in my office, thinking it was amazing. No matter how high I (realistically at the time) raise my expectations, they are always beaten.