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."
2TB? exFAT? (Score:4, Interesting)
But still, I would buy one just so I could take it out of my pocket whenever I was having a problem so I could say, "Well, this was possible, so...." despite never using it.
</humor></criticism>
Waste of time (Score:4, Interesting)
SD is just a RIAA-approved version of MMC with extra DRM features added. Maybe I'm just a bitter old sod but I find this continuation of the SD standard and it's DRM suspicious, perhaps they are waiting for a good time to re-introduce DRM on a massive scale and since every SD card ever made already supports it they will have no problem implementing it
I bet most the supposedly hardcore RIAA-hater nutjobs don't even realise SD has the built in DRM. They have been selling DRM-enabled cards for about 10 years now and just because the SD DRM hasn't seen any widespread use nobody batts an eyelid.
More proof it's too late for copyright. (Score:5, Interesting)
You could say piracy moved to the internet because floppy disks were useless and CD/DVD burning costly, even when it's now rather cheap. Generally piracy has been scaling with availability of bandwidth and storage. But is there a point where it gets so stupidly cheap and powerful that old world business models become completely untenable?
Re:FAT (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it certainly is sad, and most likely true to some extent, but seriously I'm only 31 and I recall easily the days when all disks were shipped unformatted. I would like to think that ^most^ consumers could get the hang of formatting disks fairly quickly.
But then with ^most^ users using Windows, wouldn't they format it with FAT anyway?
ZFS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that ZFS has been optimized for flash, why bother with FAT?
Re:They're talking about address space (Score:3, Interesting)
It could be *much* worse.
It could be based on NTFS.
I still cant understand why Microsoft is the only company who hasnt been able to make fragmentation resistant file systems
Hell OS/2 had HPFS which didnt fragment and that was ages ago and made partly by Microsoft.
Or maybe they desire the 'gradual slow down' effect that fragmentation causes.
So they release a new version of Windows just in time and advertise that its even faster, and it does actually seem faster.
Re:More proof it's too late for copyright. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.
Re:They're talking about address space (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't worry.. In the coming years, fragmentation won't matter nearly as much. On will come the log-structured filesystems and their ilk to replace the heavily disk-tuned mainstream filesystems we use today.
Re:2TB? exFAT? (Score:3, Interesting)
Think Personal Life Recorders.
Stick 2TB card in a audio/video/photo/data/navigation/internet device - record EVERYTHING.
You could store about a years worth of video in more than a decent quality PLUS have a shitload of space left for everything else.
Attach a portable viewing device and make nearly every form of artistic entertainment delivery model obsolete.
Movies? In theaters? Why? There are going to be so many cams on the day 0 that SOME of them must be watchable.
Most people have no sense for quality anyway. And at ~1GB per movie you could have about 160 DAYS of non-stop video content on 1 card.
Get a couple of cards and you could have every movie you will ever see in the palm of your hand.
About a 100 cards will record your entire life anyway.
Music? Sure. Paying for it? Umm... again.. why? For a CD? You like the artist - send him a buck or two through his paypal account.
Every single live event in the world will soon be captured by someone, somewhere.
Books? Scannable by just flipping the pages.
Lectures? Seen one, seen em all.
Privacy? Very soon non-existent.
What we will start seeing a shitload of as a result?
Various digital watermark/thumbprint technology in EVERYTHING. And simple ways to bypass them.
No jewelery zone suggestions and attempts in enforcing.
Criminalization of EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE and resulting paranoia.
Accountability of everyone, everywhere for everything they ever do. Personally, I would love to see something like this mandatory for politicos.
Clash of need to spy on everyone, everywhere by governments with entertainment lobbies that would like to ban any and all digital recording.
A shitload of amateur porn.
A lot more problems with (better) identity theft.
Death of keys, passwords, and any locking system not featuring encrypted data on a chip not readable by a human.
End of the world as we know it.
Re:2TB? exFAT? (Score:2, Interesting)
exFAT has been reverse engineered by some Japanese guy here
http://bbs.znpc.net/viewthread.php?tid=5366&page=1#pid33197 [znpc.net]
The downside is that he seems to have used Google translate to translate his document into English. I hexdumped some exFAT volumes and he seems to be correct about what the fields in the boot sector and directory entries mean.
Executive summary. exFAT has, at least when Vista formats a disk, one FAT that is basically the same as FAT32 except that all 32 bits of the entries are used rather than the upper 4 bits being reserved.
The boot sector layout is new and the main difference that the volume size in sectors is now a 64 bit entry. Cluster size is a byte allowing upto 2^256 sectors per cluster, though the Microsoft implementations have a limit of 32MB.
So you could have 2^32 clusters, upto 32MB each. For a reasonable cluster size of 64KB you can have 2^48 bytes or so sized filesystems.
Directory entries have a new layout with no short filenames. The file size is 64 bit, to allow files bigger than 4GB, which is the most pressing limitation with FAT32. There are also special nameless files. One is a bitmap of free clusters, the other is a table to convert Unicode characters to uppercase, since this is part of the filename hashing.
Adding a bitmap is to speed up free space. Finding free space in FAT requires reading the FAT until you find a free cluster. Each fat entry is 32 bits, and the FAT would grow to 16GB on a 2^32 cluster volume. Adding a bitmap with one bit per cluster makes the worst case read a mere 512MB, perhaps 10 seconds or so on a modern drive. Of course the normal case is that you search from the last cluster allocated and find a free cluster much quicker than this. In fact you could cache the bitmap and most likely you find a sector in the same cache line that you found the last one. With a smaller device of course, the bitmap will be smaller too. If you were really feeling adventurous you could compress the bitmap into extents of free clusters and use those to allocate free space instantly most of the time.
So it's more or less FAT32 with the legacy stuff removed, volume size in sectors and file size in bytes fields widened from 32 to 64 bits and a cluster allocation bitmap ( Tanaka-san calls this KURASUTABITTOMAPPU, a sort of Japanesified version of cluster bitmap ) added to speed up free space searches. You can have volumes of upto 2^32 clusters or 2^64 sectors and files of upto 2^64 bytes.
Windows CE supports a transactional version of exFAT. I'd guess this has two FATs and switches between them to get transaction safety.
Incidentally, if this ends up part of something like SDXC it will be quite cheap to license, so I'd expect consumer electronics devices that need to support big files to start to use it as well as or even instead of FAT32. It wouldn't be hard to write a driver that supports both. The Microsoft exFAT driver in Vista works fine on XP. I'd guess someone will write a Linux driver once the reverse engineered internals become well known. It's not clear what patents Microsoft have on this. My guess is that they won't sue end users for using it, but they may approach Linux vendors like they did with Novell.
Re:FAT (Score:3, Interesting)
Surely the point is that with various different file systems the chances are quite high that you'll insert SD-shaped-card-with-new-disk-format into your consumer device, it'll try and read it and assume it's unformatted, and pressing Y at your prompt results in it trying to write FAT32 all over it, wiping the contents?
Assuming the camera pops up that message whenever it can't read a card, that's going to happen whether cards come preformatted or not.
On the other hand, it isn't exactly hard to tell whether a card is unformatted (all the bits are on or all the bits are off) or has data on it that you don't understand - looking at the first 512 or 4096 bytes should give you a pretty good clue. So the camera should really only present a "this card is unformatted" message for blank cards - if the card has data on it then something more appropriate should be displayed, such as "this card can't be read by the camera, it may contain data in another format. Do you want to format it and erase this data?". Yes, some people will still press yes and lose all their data, but there is a limited amount you can do to protect idiots from themselves.
Re:FAT (Score:3, Interesting)