Memory cards get massive expansion; hard disks face funeral
By Gareth Powell
The trade group SD Association has shown the future for memory cards and it is huge. Massive. Beyond understanding. The association says that the first ‘extended capacity’ (SDXC) memory cards will be launched before the end of this year.
The road map is that these cards will in less than five years hold two terabytes of onboard storage. As in four 500 gigabyte hard disks squeezed on to one card. Or, if you would like to look at it another way a two terabyte (2TB) card can hold, say, 100 HD movies, 480 hours of HD recording or 136,000 fine-grade photos.
The mind boggles.
The president of the SD Association, James Taylor, said that the SDXC specification ‘leapfrogs memory card interface speeds’ yet keeps to the popular SD interface.
Specifications for the this open standard will be released in the first quarter of this year. The first cards will probably be a miserly 64GB, twice as much as SDHC memory cards, with a maximum transfer rate of 104MB/sec but that will increase to 300MB/sec in the nearish future.
Meanwhile, keeping tightly in step, San-Disk has announced that its latest line of solid-state drives start at 60GB (US$149) with 120GB ($249) and 240GB ($499) also available. They can, of course, easily replace standard hard-disk drives in notebook PCs. It is, at the moment, just a question of price. As the prices come down so the hard disk will die.
At the moment SanDisk’s G3 series is based on less-costly MLC (multi-level cell) Nand flash. It has a drawback in that it does not perform as quickly nor does it have the endurance of SLC Nand which costs serious money and tends to be seen in enterprise-class SSDs.
However, SanDisk is promising some big performance enhancements such as sequential read performance of 200MB a second and write performance of 140MB. Which means that they will be five times as fast as the fastest 7200rpm hard disks.
We have seen the future for memory and it is totally solid. Yes, the illustration is a very bad mock-up. But that is the way it will be.
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January 13th, 2009
exciting news, but I hope they also build a GPS locator into the thing, because losing a 2GB card is one thing, losing 2TB of photos / movies etc will hurt a darn-side more!!!
January 13th, 2009
Chucking out all my space-hungry discs
(and all their bulky cases, storage units etc etc)
for a handful of 2tb Flash drives or SD cards is extremely appealing to me
(and my wife in particular).
BTW @ CES they were talking about keeping the same interface but exppecting to increase transfer/bandwidth to 300Mbps, not 200Mbps.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/accessories/0,39101000,49300513,00.htm
So, that’s a total storage ability & bandwidth far beyond anything Blu-ray storage can offer, even those lab-specials the 200gb & 400gb disc - s’funny to see the pro-Blu-ray boys turn into Luddites over anything not Blu, eh?
January 13th, 2009
Yes, it is exciting news and, yes, I would get paranoid about losing one. There is a market opportunity for a card holder with, as you suggest, a GPS, or possibly an RDIF, locator built in.
An increase to 300Mbps would be paradise and I checked the URL and that is what they suggest. It really will be a Brave New World.