Panasonic Working On 2-Terabyte SD Cards 270
An anonymous reader writes "SD cards with a theoretical maximum capacity of 2TB are in development by Panasonic and the SD Association, it has been announced. The technology is called 'Secure Digital Extended Capacity', or 'SDXC', and Panasonic has announced it will soon show off a 64GB SDXC card. Using the new technology, read/write speeds are set to hit 300MBps. SanDisk and Sony are using the same standard to develop Extended Capacity cards in Sony's Memory Stick Pro and Memory Stick Micro range. SDXC utilises Microsoft's new exFAT file system — AKA 'FAT 64' — which first appeared in Windows Vista SP1, and has a theoretical file size limit of 16 exbibytes."
Reader xlotlu adds a note about the "proprietary exFAT file system, which is available for licensing under NDA. There are currently no specific patents on exFAT, but its legal status is uncertain since it's based on FAT. The FAT patents have been previously upheld in court."
FAT (Score:5, Insightful)
The only, ONLY good thing about FAT is that it is very well understood and supported everywhere. Why on earth would someone license a proprietary filesystem based on an awful filesystem when they don't need to?
Oh, and why on earth would a SD card manufacturer need to license a filesystem in the first place? It's not like it'll care what data is on there.
Re:FAT (Score:5, Insightful)
because they ship them formatted because 90% of buyers are stupid.
it is cheaper for them to pay a fee to licence a file system - preformat the card than it is to ship them blank only to have the consumer call in saying it is broke + the costs associated with said consumer returning perfectly good products thinking they are broken.
users are idiots - if they ship them non formatted then people will think they are broken
- yes it's sad - yes its true
Re:They're talking about address space (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the file system may support it but the SDXC standard will top out at 2TB. That way, after you buy all new kit this round they can get you to buy something else when they come up with their NEXT standard. It's called planned obsolescence, see the previous transition from SD to SDHC and this forthcoming transition from SDHC to SDXC. You really think they aren't planning to milk this cow every couple of years for as long as they can, rather than do it right and just come up with ONE standard that'll have headroom in the hardware logic to match that 16 EiB limit on the file system.
Re:They're talking about address space (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I came in here to point out how silly this is. There's no announcement about any hardware in the pipeline. They're planning on using a filesystem built on FAT but with a 2TB theoretical limit? Who cares? There are better filesystems than FAT with theoretical limits much higher than 2TB.
In fact, the bigger question in my mind is, why is Microsoft coming out with a new version of FAT to support bigger filesystems? Wouldn't the effort be better spent on figuring out how to kill FAT once and for all and replace it with something that doesn't completely suck?
Re:FAT (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupid != not wanting to waste mental bandwidth on how to prepare a digital medium for use.
The world is too amazing. and life is too short, for all intelligent person to waste time worrying about that crap.
Re:They're talking about address space (Score:3, Insightful)
640k may be enough, but only if not many people talk about it. /. could end up being > 640k -- the 36 comments that this page is up to take 112k.
I think that some sets of comments here on
Re:They're talking about address space (Score:5, Insightful)
> Wouldn't the effort be better spent on figuring out how to kill FAT once and for all and
> replace it with something that doesn't completely suck?
1. NTFS is to complex and undocumented to be used in embedded consumer electronics.
2. Microsoft needs to keep control over the file system used in consumer electronics. If they hadn't offered this up (for a small fee of course) vendors might have been forced to look elsewhere... at the many filesystems in Linux or BSD that easily scale to the sizes required and have free reference implementations available, although the GPL would preclude many embedded vendors from directly using many of the more popular ones's code.
If I had to guess Microsoft will give em a sweet deal on the license fees so long as they give desktop linux some patent hell on implementing support, thus allowing SuSE to ride their trojan horse again.
And from the 2TB upper limit I'm guessing the are not reworking the maximum block size so there will still eventually have to a "LBA48" style incompatibility breakage at some point. Because 2T on a full size SD card isn't decades away.
Microsoft does not own ZFS (Score:3, Insightful)
No license stream if you pick a sensible filesystem, sorry. Instead you get Microsoft further extension of FAT. Ack.
Re:FAT (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Pop the card in...
2. Windows tells you that it's unformatted...
3. You format it...
4. You're done!
Re:They're talking about address space (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't the standard came *after* the HDD manufactures used to abuse the 1000/1024 for their benefit?
Re:FAT (Score:2, Insightful)
You're talking to an audience of people who would buy shirts with RTFM in bold caps on them.
While a part of it is a smug hubris, we do wear them to make a statement about people who "don't have the time" to read simple instructions or a guide. We especially hate it when people with that ideology then start to run their fucking mouths off about how much something sucks because they had to read a manual. We also hate it when by their din of whining cries we are forced into industry standards that treat us like lazy morons.
For that lazy consumer who is the reason we cannot have nice things I wear that shirt. Also, NO I WILL NOT FIX YOUR COMPUTER!!!
Re:FAT (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Stupid is returning a product that works because you're too stupid* to read the back of the package that says THIS MUST BE FORMATTED.
All digital cameras have a format option.
*And I meant stupid, not ignorant. Ignorant would be 'well I didn't know I had to do that, but now I do'. Stupid is not even checking.
Re:FAT (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:2TB? exFAT? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ext2.
There are plenty of available drivers. :(
If MSFT wanted to roll their own, they could base their ext2 driver off of the one of the ones in one of the BSDs. Why the fuck is MSFT reinventing the wheel again?
Re:FAT (Score:1, Insightful)
What the hell are you talking about? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you have a file system that simply refuses to do a write when there is no contiguous block large enough you WILL have fragmentation. Go do some brief searches if you don't believe it. For example one of the features ext4 will have over ext3 is an online defragmenter, meaning you can defragment the volume while it is in use (as Windows defragmenters do).
Re:They're talking about address space (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They're talking about address space (Score:1, Insightful)
I think you have it backwards.
they ARE working on 2TB and 64GB. Capacities are generally in base 10, not 2. Pretty stupid, I know, but they take advantage of people wrongly associating TB, GB, MB with base 2 because it makes their drive seem larger.
64GB = 64,000,000,000 bytes -what people get (base 10)
64GiB = 68,719,476,736 bytes -what people THINK they're getting (base 2)
Re:They tried RieserFS (Score:1, Insightful)
Reiser jokes are not funny. Woman is dead, man is in jail, kids without a parent.
It's tragic. but NOT funny.
Re:FAT (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:FAT64 only for digital cameras (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, if you don't use it on a device like a digital camera, there's no reason to use an SD card at all.