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?"

Media Playing

[anamexis]

Both these speeds and large capacities will become more and more important as we see better video capabilities come to the PDA market.

Good News...

[Piranhaa]

This is really good news for mini- formfactor systems. Some people just want to have a quiet PC without the noise and failure rate of a hard drive. The main thing holding people back is the performance of these cards, on top of the pricing. I wonder when entire computers will start switching to the fast access times of solid-state media like these!

Flash Memory

[ctwxman]

Ask any digital photographer. Memory is like closet space. One can never have enough - never

Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA?

[saha]

Not yet, but people are ripping out the 4GB Microdrive from the iPod minis for their digital cameras. One of the biggest bottleneck for digital photography is the write speed. The XD standard is an attempt to address this issue. This new fast memory is a step in the right direction. I'd like to see 25MB RAW images generated by a camera shooting 4fps writing without delay onto memory. Thats when I'll sell my Nikon 90s and fully convert to digital.

More tech info needed

[hdd]

Move on guys, this is nothing more than a press release. Unless someone one can provide more info on exactly whis is inside that is making it faster or some REAL benchmark results.

Re:Good News...

[rodgerd]

What's wrong with a diskless client booting off a server? Especially in this day and age of NZ$300 gigabit switches...

one giant leap for PDA media

[antimatt]

In five years, when everyone has a PDA with 50GB of solid state storage space, we'll look back at this and wonder why we ever wondered about it. Yes, we WILL eventually need (or at least perceive that we need) this much space.

As things stand, it frustrates me that I can only store approximately one movie trailer on my PDA. This is just the expected step forward. There will be more to come; I anticipate it all with great anticipation.

quick cards

[SKPhoton]

Is there a need for speedy memory cards? Absolutely!

Think about sports photographers. They definitely need quick cards to save the last picture and be ready for the next play. Never underestimate the importance of timing in digital photography.

Music?

[moberry]

Mot only video, but with 2GB or more of storage. a PDA will make a fully featured music player. Windows Media player is fine for this. Quite possibly in the near future manufacturers will market PDA's not only for office, and email use but for portable auido.

Memory card as computer storage

[fembots]

Recently I have been pondering about using my 512MB SD card as a permanent storage for my computer, so that I can install applications and games and run off it.

However, after further investigation, and the stats from this article, memory card is still too slow for day-to-day computing usage.

USB2.0 is about 480mbps (~60MB/s), so the bottleneck is now with the memory card.

So I guess the fastest is still not fast enough.

I've got an HP IPAQ 2215

[ranger714]

And i will freely admit to lusting after the cheapie 4 gig microdrives in the nomad mp3 player.... the greatest benefit to my IPAQ and the primary reason that i purchased it was the fact that it has both CompactFlash and SDIO expansion slots...

i had planned to get the 4 gig microdrive for storage of media files (maybe a couple gigs of MP3s, a few hundred megs of ebooks and a few movies) and a SDIO wifi card for wlan. I hadn't thought of movie files, but you can get a 256meg rip of a dvd with stereo sound and full-PDA resolution... pretty nice for travel! I just burn a few to cd/dvd for longer trips and transfer then around when necessary.

So if someone just wanted to gift a 2gig SD card to a poor technician, i sure wouldn't look that gift horse in the mouth... ;-)

Re:Music?

[kbranch]

Flash cards are inconvenient compared to a hard drive based player, but the niche is there.

How can a flash card possibly be more inconvenient than a hard drive based player? Is drawing more power and breaking after a fairly minor fall now convenient?

Are you referring to the need to insert the card after you buy it as opposed to the iPod where it comes with the hard drive already installed? If so, how can the ability to easily upgrade the storage compare to the minimal effort of putting the card in for the first time?

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

[Hatta]

Does anyone need a PDA? We need food, water, air, and shelter. Anything else is optional.

Re:What's interesting...

[Ark42]

Honestly, this is why I stick to CF. Recently bought a new digital camera and my method of picking the camera out was to just walk in to circuit city and eliminate all the non-CF cameras. Ended up with the Canon Powershot G5. My very old 1 megapixel camera takes CF and it has no problem seeing any CF cards I have, even the brand new ones. Isn't the pin-out for CF the same as IDE, and the file system just a basic FAT16? Sure it might run into a limit at 2.1G if the device doesn't support FAT32, but I think most CF devices will use FAT32.

Re:quick cards

[rgmoore]

Having a big cache is nice, but it's not a substitute for fast write speed. Your picture taking speed is ultimately limited to how fast you can write the pictures to your memory card. If it takes 2 seconds to write one picture, your average speed can't be faster than 30 pictures per minute. A cache might let you take those 30 pictures in a single 4 second burst, but then you'll have to wait to write the cache out to your memory card before you can take another one. Fast write speed is still very important.

FPS doesn't just mean 'first person shooter'

[SethJohnson]

You're exactly right. For action photography, a lot of people like to shoot sequentials. This is especially true in skateboarding. With film cameras, sequentials were expensive, so now that digital is really becoming prevalent, photographers are eager to leverage the cost-benefits and shoot sequentials. Even with the buffer memory, the CF speed is a bottleneck to how many frames per second you can shoot and for how long you can shoot them. The goal is 9 FPS, but I think even the highest-end nikons are stuck at around 6 or 8.

That's a silly argument

[lingqi]

so, your hypothetical 50GB storage PDA of the future (let's assume for a moment that PDA has a future, which I doubt) costs how much in the future? and how much now?

see you can't say "we will need it one day therefore we need it now." That's bullshit because the economics don't come out right. 2GB card costs a (hefty) premium today, and there are not so many conveniences that justifies this premium. After all, if the darn thing was free then we'll all stock up with hundreds! "What would I need this for" is actually a shortened question for "What would I need this for, at this price?"

I think for the price premium, I cannot find any good reason why I would spend so much money for it - SD / MMC card based cameras are mostly storing stuff in JPEG (every camera that assumes to be pro-oriented and stores raw has compact flash for storage, even SONY!), so for cameras it's moot. for PDAs, sure - but like I said, do you really need 2G of storage on the go for the price of another PDA or even a fully funcitonal music player that stores 10x as much?

Re:DNA

[dnahelix]

I carry billions of copies of mine.

Re:Flash Memory

[squaretorus]

I'm not meaning to question your wifes abilities, but taking hundreds (maybe 500 if my maths is right) photographs of an empty home seems to smack of a 'shoot now think later' mindset. And the 500 assumes you are taking relatively high res shots - something I can't imagine being important on 'sell my house' shoots.

Much better to spend those 15 minutes working out which 6 photos to take, then taking a small burst of each than to simply walk around being Miss Snap Happy.

Portrait shoots are similar - spend a bit of time working out what your going to aim for - and then take aim. Don't just shoot until you explode.

The Austin Powers piss-take of David Bailey isn't too far off the mark - apart from he misses the part where Bailey interviews and observes his subject for an hour before his 5 minute burst of 'yeah baby yeah'.

Re:Music?

[nametaken]

I think the mp3 / pda hybrid concept isn't being worked like it should. It's a great idea that isn't getting pushed hard enough. On the email and browsing front however.. I think we need better, faster, cheaper connectivity options. I'll buy a new pda when pdas become small palmtops with fast, CHEAP wireless and tons of storage for my music. The storage part looks feasible now... so we just need way better connectivity. Seeing as you can't FIND a good cellphone company as it is, I don't see a serious wireless access option coming along any time soon. C'mon, streaming internet radio and complete mp3 library in one device would be pretty wicked if I don't have to mortgage my house to pay the wireless bill.

Go flash memory!

[TwistedSpring]

I love this stuff. 2Gb at 22.5mb/s is incredible - you could easilly do a high-res movie on that.

I'm yearning for the absence of all of the moving parts in my machine except for possibly CD/DVD drives. I can't bear the fact that my hard disk has spinning platters and incredibly fine-precision moving heads which could fail at any time (I leave my machine on all the time and consequently I'm now terrified to turn it off in case it'll fail when I power it up again). I want peltier coolers instead of fans, and I want solid state memory instead of hard disks. Once this happens, not only will my machine be ultra-silent, it'll also be much more robust.

It's a shame flash memory still costs so much, but the prices are pretty much where similar sized hard disks were several years ago, so I'm confident that we'll get 40gb flash memory in the next four or five years. God knows where hard disks will be then.

The world really needs a new storage paradigm. Mechanical magnetic storage is the oldest concept still alive in home computing, and is as archaic as the system BIOS. Intel are busy with getting rid of the currently outdated and rubbish BIOS and replacing it with something fancy and new, I just ooze over the same thing happening to data storage. For gods sake, the HDD is the biggest bottleneck in any modern home computer.

Re:Flash Memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, that's a 4.55MB photo every second for 15 minutes straight. I don't think so.

Re:Flash Memory

[jonhuang]

Look it up on the web---the ipod combo has horrid transfer speeds and user interface. Better to get a dedicated solution!

Re:Flash Memory

[Anonymous Coward]

She'll go through at least 5 GB of pitcures and this is just for shots of homes that people are looking to sell.

That is insane. if her photos are for the listing printouts, web or even TV ad's then she is shooting at way too high of resolution.. even a Canon D10 can reduce the image size to 1 megapixel equiliviant allowing you to shoot thousands of photos in a single 2gig CF card.

coming from someone that works with the people that have to deal with the photos taken of houses to be sold... the number one complaint is "why do these photographers feel that we need a 8 megapixel photo of something that we are going to scale down to less than 640X480?? it wastes time and bandwidth!"

I reccomend your wife talking to the people that actually have to deal with those photos, a much much lower res shot is more desireable than a 20megapixel behmoth.

finally there are CF card downloaders out there for around $300-$500US pop in the memory card, and it downloads the card to the internal 20 gig drive and erases the card. the photographer needs only 2, 512 meg cards to shoot like a lunatic all day long.

Re:Music?

[anonicon]

Call me silly, but outside of its possible use for video storage due to its high-speed transfer, this 2GB MMC card is completely frigging DUMB when compact flash cards are already available at 4GB and soon 12GB.

Research and development into Compact Flash cards is already kicking any other flash format's butt, with low-cost, under-$200 4GB cards on the shelves today via the Muvo 2, and the recently announced 12GB compact-flash card that's finished testing and will move into the market by late 2004. That's 4GB you can already stick into any Type II compact-flash compatible PDA, and you'll have a "PDA (that) will make a fully featured music player" today.

As far as manufacturers who will market PDAs for portable audio, maybe, but every PDA dealer I've spoken with (over 5 of them) in the last year+ hasn't made that connection between their PDAs and multi-GB CF storage at all. Methinks they know the PDA field well, but have issues thinking outside the PDA field.

Music is just the beginning

[yog]

A Palm with multimedia features (Tungsten, Zire 72, etc.) works nicely. I have a 512MB card in my T|T that is good for a few CDs' worth of MP3 music, but I have a few other things that I like to keep on the card that take up a bit of space: my entire wedding photo album viewable with Acid Image, BackupMan backup images, a few documents, dictionaries, Voice Memo recordings of various events.

I would love to put a few more CDs on the card. Actually, even 2G seems a bit small and I hope they bump it up to 4G in a year or so. That would start to be a serious library of music.

Flash storage is a synergistic part of a PDA and can grow arbitrarily large as you think of more ways to virtualize your life onto the card. For example, physicians are already loading upwards of a dozen large medical references and databases. Lawyers are carrying electronic law libraries around, and I could see real estate agents putting hundreds of houses with images and stats into a nice handheld database that they sync with a desktop every day.

Now combine this monster with an email-enabled phone and you have an all purpose personal information device. Bring it on!

Re:Music?

[glesga_kiss]

upwards of 10 GB, and some of my friends have more than twice that much on their computers

Twice that? I'm pushing 70 GB now, too big for even an ipod. Choosing what to convert to my 256MB SD-card is a major pain!!

Of course, I only carry one device with me, that acts as a PDA, organiser, mobile phone and internet device. Despite being a complete gadget geek, I like to travel light and combining everything into my phone, which I've carried everywhere for 10 years anyway, makes perfect sense.

I genuinely believe devices like ipods are a passing fad. Not that there won't be devices like them in future, just that they'll converge with other things. Lets face it, there's a lot of common functionality between your phone, PDA and ipod. Each has a battery, processor and memory. The cost of including new features will always be preferable to separate devices. Once you have the hardware to do this, all it takes is the right software to do different things. Carrying all this including a laptop hard-drive just to play music seems insane to me.