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)
Re:reliability? - an after thought (Score:5, Insightful)
SanDisk brought us SanDisk Ultra, rated at 60x speed. Then they reminded us that if we really want it to keep it's memory at low temperatures (such as outdoor photography in winter) then we really need to buy SanDisk Extreme (same speed, higher temperature tolerance).
Seems to me these hardware manufacturers are taking a clue from the software industry. The "implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose" is intended to protect consumers against such crap. But then, if you can shrink-wrap the product with all sorts of disclaimers of warranties (even implied warranties) then hey, why not? Cheating is cheating, and everybody is doing it, so it must be ok.
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
Re:reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Only $5,999? (Score:5, Funny)
Being a
And to all the naysayers... (Score:5, Funny)
It's at just the right price point for those who might be on the fence with CF cards. Although you can, of course, get an extra 11GB for only $50 more...
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?
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not have a RAID array of flash cards? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Funny)
hmmm.... Registered Trademark Pending?
trouble with CF is that... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:trouble with CF is that... (Score:3, Insightful)
A friend of mine made that mistake after installing ZipSlack on a 128mb CF card (in a CF->IDE adapter)
I think he was using it on a 32mb machine... so 2 weeks of heavy swapping... that's a LOT of reads & writes.
what about life span of these things? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what about life span of these things? (Score:5, Informative)
Flash is still on the order of 100,000 writes, but good software will write evenly and manage bad blocks. The big problem is still the 10^2 cost difference. Notebook drives are around $0.33/MB.
Re:what about life span of these things? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:what about life span of these things? (Score:2)
Filesystems like JFFS2 designed to deal with this (Score:3, Informative)
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)
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?
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Insightful)
I read somewhere that at least some flash disk devices will remap writes to evenly 'wear' the flash chip even if the writes are supposedly 'physically' in the same location. But I don't know how well that mechanism scales to 8GB or how it affects speed. I also don't know how long such a wear-managed device would last under a typical workstation or server load, but at least
On the other hand, for a filesystem with few updates and many reads (some web servers and a few databases--think LDAP), this device could be neat for a low-latency but faster-than-network throughput network server. But I'll wait until the price drops a few thousand.
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can I replace my Bootable CD (Score:5, Interesting)
What are we waiting for again?
Re:Can I replace my Bootable CD (Score:3, Insightful)
God, it never seemed like such a good deal before.
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:2)
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:3, Informative)
You do NOT want to do that (Score:2)
Sure, 500,000 writes seems like a lot, but not if that's your swap drive. The thing will be dying in 6 months.
Re:You do NOT want to do that (Score:4, Funny)
So using flash RAM as a swap partition is replacing cheap and fast volatile RAM with expensive and slow non-volatile RAM that has a limited lifetime. Hmm. Time to put on my thinking cap...
I know! How about making a RAM disk in cheap volatile RAM for your swap partition. Then it will be almost as fast as normal memory. Oh, hang on a moment...
CF is much slower than a hard drive - max 10MB/s (Score:2)
My own personal experience with a '26x high speed' card in a PC-Card adapter (a pretty fast interface) bears this out, CF is dead slow compared to even a 4200RPM HD (like the one in my lapto
Re:can I replace my laptop hard drive now? (Score:3, Informative)
Doesn't matter, because the transfer rates for a 3gig $1100 CompactFlash Type II Card [mobileplanet.com] are so incredibly slow (3.5mB/sec) [dpreview.com]. You can buy a 80gig IDE drive that transfers at 58mB/sec [tomshardware.com] for $66 [pricewatch.com].
That's 16 times faster for 1/16th the price. Anyone still want to replace your hard drive with a CF card?
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.
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
That would be pretty cool (and silent!), I'll admit. But by then I'll have a hard time justifying it when I can get an 800GB+ platter-based HD for the same price.
they could have 80 next week if they needed it. (Score:4, Insightful)
They could easily bind 10 of these CF cards together and have roughly the same form factor as the sleekest slimline notebook drives. It'd really just be a matter of addressing if they wanted to release an 80GB solid-state drive.
The first problem though, is the transfer rate bottleneck. CF has access times an order of magnitude lower than even the fastest disk drives (0.000256s vs 0.006s), but its transfer rate is ~25% of current consumer magnetic disk drives. (20MB/s vs 80MB/s)
likely they could work out the transfer rate problem (and in under a year if there was a market), but then we're left with the other major problem. The relatively low write lifespan of flash memory. (between 100k and 1m writes/block)
A system swap file would likely burn through that much faster than the consumer market would tolerate.
The bottom line though, is that it's patented technology. Even if they released an 80 GB drive in a couple years, it wouldn't be priced for the consumer market. Not until a competing technology moves in.
You and I will likely still be waiting for a solid state storage alternative for the next 5 years. Sad but true.
Re:Sounds like a job for (Score:3, Informative)
Using it for secondary storage, as I said - is already possible. You can just plug a $20 USB card reader into your machine and put whatever CF/SD/etc media you want on there as secondary storage. Or you could skip the middleman and buy a USB mem
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:2, Informative)
The 'stacking' description immediately made me think of 'prior art'. I recall articles back in the '80's on how to double the RAM in Apples and other microcomputers by stacking more DIP RAM IC's atop the existing ones and running wires for the additional address lines.
So then I skimmed through the patent referenced... to be honest, I didn't study it in detail, but I'm left confused. I didn't see anything in to that had much to do with stacking memory IC's. In fact, I honestly don'
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:2)
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
You are thinking of the D70. While it is able to write fast enough to keep taking pictures in normal JPEG 3 pictures pr. second without filling the buffer, it does not have room for 144 pictures in the buffer.
Nor is the D70 the top of the line Nikon. That honor goes to the D1x or D2h depending on what you want. Those have buffers in the 40 picture range. (Depending on the resolution). With 8 pic
Re:WHAT??!?! (Score:2)
Digital Camera/Camcorder dilemna (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Digital Camera/Camcorder dilemna (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Digital Camera/Camcorder dilemna (Score:2)
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?
One day... (Score:4, Funny)
It needs to be said... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It needs to be said... (Score:2, Funny)
---
You know... (Score:5, Insightful)
How long until we see the obligatory "Yea, but how much pr0n can it fit" posts?
Re:You know... (Score:2, Funny)
4GB Hitachi for around $200 in mp3 players (Score:4, Informative)
post [fatwallet.com]
Finally, a flash card big enough... (Score:2, Funny)
When will it all be solid state? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:When will it all be solid state? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When will it all be solid state? (Score:2)
IANAEE, but it seems like someday we could make a computer that is basically an LCD/Tablet sort of thing, with all the chips of a computer on the back. Maybe one massive IC of something like EEPROM and Flash RAM. Upgrades are just a hardware issue. Maybe even programs could hard-wire things? Maybe it can be made reversible so that it uses very little energy, too.... and have a solar panel on the back. It would have a multi-
two words... (Score:2)
Static electricity.
Zap! Poof! Fsck!
Only uses for this - (Score:5, Insightful)
And in regards to using this for video, why would you? There are DVD-based DV Cams out there that will write to 4.7GB discs that cost $1.5 each, so why bother spending 6 grand on something that can be done for $3? Plus, DVDs can be read almost anywhere these days, whereas you need to carry a special reader for CF.
What I really want to see is an 8GB thumbdrive for CHEAP!
Re:Only uses for this - (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Only uses for this - (Score:2)
Hard drives makers should take note... (Score:5, Insightful)
With Flash getting more and more mainstream, and with the now high volumes being made available, hard drives are becoming less and less necessary for commodity products such as desktops and notebooks. The latter especially will make the switch from HDs to Flash, to lighten up the power and physical load.
If Flash sees overall performance and shelf-life improvements rivaling HDs (more so than what it does already), HDs may well be relegated to a place in history/tech museums... right next to the analog cameras.
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
$6000 (Score:3, Funny)
- 20 x 160GB harddrives
- a bunch of 80GB notebook hardrives
4GB of data:
- 1 DVD
- 6 CDs
So why would someone wants (not even asking about *needs*) this!!!
The $$$ per GB is $1250... reality check anyone ?
Oh, I see, I can put one of this on my digital camera that I bought for $500, and could take 1 million photografs.. that's cool.
or does it have a Ferrari logo, and makes the sound of filling gas when plugged to your ferrari notebook ?
Re:$6000 (Score:2)
Yeeesh, take a chill pill people! (Score:5, Insightful)
But I digress, lets consider other technologies that we all thought we could never afford, and consequently never use. About 10-15 years ago, wouldn't our 256MB+ RAM and 30+ GB HDs run in the thousands or even millions for that stuff then. Give it time, and it will hopefully be cheap for all
Re:Yeeesh, take a chill pill people! (Score:2)
"Oh, I bought my new car for $1000 and spent $6000 buying a new wheel... it's so cool
Amen! that was my contention, I too cannot justify buying add-ons that are worth more than the equipment (well except printers and ink/toner, cause those consumables can kill ya.
Re:Yeeesh, take a chill pill people! (Score:2)
What is the failure rate like? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What is the failure rate like? (Score:2)
Snide remarks aside, I feel your pain, as stuff i thought I backed up either ended up not getting backed up at all, or the backup media fucked up. Of course, when its my personal backups, I consider it a PEBKAC error
If I recall correctly, the biggest show stopper of CF-style cards is that it has a finite number of writes before it craps out, but I could be wrong as I havent heard too much about it. Then again, we're talking about IF all these shortcomings
Who's gonna buy it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking at an extreme case: assume a pro photographer has a 12M pixel camera, and takes only TIFF files. That would get approx 750 pictures (I think; it's pretty late here!) on a 8Gb card. That's a hell of a lot of pictures to be carrying around with you, and a lot you're risking if the card dies or your camera gets stolen. I just can't believe that someone would need that capacity; surely they'd backup to some other, more sturdy media well before they got that quantity of pictures.
IIRC, high-quality digital video would produce data faster than these these cards can store it. DV would conceivably merit the capacity, but the media would be too slow.
Is there any other likely reasonably widespread use for these enormous flash cards? Something I've missed?
Re:Who's gonna buy it? (Score:2)
Re:Who's gonna buy it? (Score:2)
Re:Who's gonna buy it? (Score:2)
My current 3M pixel camera gets approx 160 pictures onto a 256Mb flash card; that's with minimal compression of the JPG files. Doing a bit of maths, that means approx 5000 pictures per 8Gb flash card - a bit much to be carrying around with me!
It not about how much you can get on compressed. It's about how many images you can get on **UNCOMPRESSED**. For professional work, that's how you store images. My sister is a pro photographer and she is always buying the next larger faster CF card. It's a pain in
great news all around (Score:4, Insightful)
embedded / military systems (Score:4, Interesting)
Sam
http://www.iamsam.com
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:Boot from USB/Flashcard (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Boot from USB/Flashcard (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if I could boot a PC from ~firewire~, *that* would be cool.
Re:Boot from USB/Flashcard (Score:5, Informative)
> I know its not an option currently, [...]
Actually, it's been in lots of PC BIOSes in for a few years now. The problem is that it is still not as reliable as floppy/hd/cdrom boot: some usb devices work, some don't. Also, there seem to be a number of different usb boot standards, usb-fdd, usb-zip, usb-cdrom, usb-hdd.
Re:Boot from USB/Flashcard (Score:2, Informative)
What it said. You're not feigning ignorance are you? Boot KNOPPIX from an USB Memory Stick [uni-karlsruhe.de].
Re:Boot from USB/Flashcard (Score:2, Informative)
- Dan
Re:Boot from USB/Flashcard (Score:3, Insightful)
The next step is to move all device driver software from the operating system to a dedicated flash ROM embeded on the motherboard.
There are so many problems with this that it's silly. Most operating system kernels (including Linux and Windows) require drivers to be recompiled whenever the kernel is updated. Thus, you would have to make sure that the kernel on your USB drive is the same as the one th
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?
Other accessories (Score:3, Informative)
However, this is still all eggs in one basket - you loose the thing, no pictures left. I guess the ultimate solution is to simply bring a portable with me for my photo expeditions and transfert my pictures on a daily basis on my computer and then either on CD-ROMS or on my web site.
Loosing pictures is not an option for me - these moments almost never come back.
Actual, factual information. (Score:4, Informative)
New 8 GB Card Utilizes Company's Patented IC Tower Stacking Technology
SANTA ANA, Calif., Feb. 9 PRNewswire-FirstCall -- SimpleTech, Inc. (Nasdaq: STEC), a designer, manufacturer and marketer of custom and open-standard memory solutions based on Flash memory and DRAM technologies, today announced the industry's highest capacity CompactFlash with an 8 GB Type II card using the Company's patented stacking technology. The Company also announced 2, 4 and 5 GB Type I cards and a significant increase to the write speed of its entire ProX line of CompactFlash cards. The products will be unveiled at the PMA (Photo Marketing Association) trade show held at the Las Vegas Convention Center from February 12-15, 2004. SimpleTech will exhibit in booth N-64.
"We combined the latest silicon with our patented IC Tower stacking technology and produced the highest density CompactFlash card available in the world," said Ken Roberts, director of product marketing at SimpleTech. "This card also uses a high speed controller with 10 MB/sec write speed -- the fastest on the market today."
SimpleTech's IC Tower(TM) stacking technology allows multiple NAND Flash components to be stacked together to provide increased memory and storage densities that provide enhanced capacity in its 5 mm Type II cards.
Delivering a breakthrough write speed of up to 10MB/second, SimpleTech's ProX CompactFlash cards enable images to be saved faster to the CompactFlash card and significantly reduces the wait time between digital photography shots.
ProX CompactFlash cards incorporate Xcell(TM) technology, with a new advanced controller that provides an exponential increase in throughput for writing the picture file, delivering fast, accurate recording of high-resolution images and outstanding reliability.
SimpleTech customers are offered a free trial of PhotoRescue software. Customers can download the photo recovery software onto their computer, and either insert the Flash card into a reader, or dock their camera, and view thumbnail images of their pictures. If one of the images on the card is corrupted, the rescue software allows the image to be recovered.
All SimpleTech CompactFlash cards come with a lifetime warranty backed by SimpleTech's reputation for quality and support.
Pricing and Availability
Manufacturers suggested retail pricing for ProX CompactFlash cards ranges from $89.99 to $5,999 to meet budget and performance requirements. Samples of the new ProX CompactFlash Type I cards in 2, 4 and 5 GB capacities and the 8 GB type II cards are expected to ship during the first quarter of 2004, with production anticipated during the second quarter of 2004.
Sports photographers (Score:4, Interesting)
NOT a bad price (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not targetting people with a $1000 consumer point-n-shoot, and CF is not good for HD replacement in most cases due to low bandwidth and rewrite lifetime issues.
Having to stop shooting to change media half as often is WELL worth it. You don't want to have to tell your editor "There was a pulitzer-prize shot, but I missed it because I had my head down changing CF cards right at that moment."
Re:NOT a bad price (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NOT a bad price (Score:3, Interesting)
expensive and slow (Score:3, Informative)
What are they going to use for a filesystem? (Score:3, Insightful)
That price point is for early adopters and professionals only, and professionals are not going to be happy about losing 8GB of photos to a corrupted file system. I hope the camera makers are planning something more robust than FAT.
That's quite an extraction (Score:2, Informative)
quick, send one to the mars rover (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Just what I've been looking for. (Score:3, Funny)
Something to go along with my $750 hammer. You know what I like best? The fact that they priced it at $5999, not $6000. That makes it seem so much more affordable.
Dang marketing weenies.
Re:8gig CF cards!?!?!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you compared the prices? The mini-iPod is aomething like $199, this is $5,999. Disk is likely to beat silicon in $/mByte for a very long time. Where CF beats disk is access time. And streaming players don't need good access time: once they are on track, they have better performance than CF.
In a dedicated device, this kind of capacity is going to be cheaper in disk. This wins where you need interchangeability (nobody had a good CF format hard disk drive, as far as I know), or ruggedness, or low power, or ultra-low noise. Specialist markets all.
Re:8gig CF cards!?!?!! (Score:2)