SDXC memory card spec launched for 2TB capacity
Write speed to rocket
CES 32GB SDHC cards too small for you? How about 2TB? That's what the SDXC memory card format is designed to deliver.
Announced today at CES, the XC - for 'eXtended Capacity', but what's wrong with EC? - the format also ups read and write speeds to 104MB/s. The SD Association - the organisation that oversees the SD card standard - said it's looking to up the data-transfer rate to 300MB/s.
The format used Microsoft's exFAT - aka FAT 64 - file system. exFAT was introduced with Windows CE 6.0, and appeared in Vista in Service Pack 1.
The SDXC spec will be published later this quarter, and the SDA implied that existing specificiations, including SDIO and SDHC, would be updated to support the higher data throughput.
There's no word on when SDXC-compatible devices and cards will go on sale. Not until the end of the year, we'd say - and the cards won't be cheap when they do. ®
COMMENTS
Hmm
People are complaining about using the FAT file system seemingly because Microsoft were behind it... it always annoys me their only reason is "evil crappy Microsoft did it".
The comparison you are making by saying SD cards took 10 years to reach 32gb isn't quite valid. The first hard drive was (according to wikipedia) introduced in 1956. A brand new technology that didn't reach 32gb until the 1990s, 40 years later. SD cards are also a new technology yet have increased to 32gb four times faster, if your original figure is correct.
If you look at the speed that hard disks evolved too... 10 years ago I had a 2gb seagate hard disk in my computer. Now you can buy disks that are 1TB. Is it unreasonable to think that SD cards might go at least that same speed? That would give us say, 6 years to see them at an affordable (although expensive) price at the same rate...
The technology behind them though is vastly different. SD cards have no moving components, and far complex circuitry and tricks required to make them work. Improvements in hard disk capacities came from all kinds of different breakthrough because there were so many aspects that could be improved... but SD cards only have one or two ways in which to fit more data in them. I suspect that the expanding sizes will start to taper off much later than their hard disk counterparts. Plus, what we are forgetting is, we could easily have a new format called Big SD which is a card twice as thick and twice the size, like a credit card, which would give you 8 times the capacity at least on the spot... and that's before we consider that microSD is not that far behind SD in terms of capacity...
100GB by the end of this year? Easily. We'd have 64GB already if it weren't for the way they are handling the HCSD card spec. I reckon half a TB by the end of the year at the very least.
Optical devices are horrible, the world just needs to realise that you shouldn't have to buy a huge ass player, or several hundred quid for a blu-ray device to read media, when a five quid thing I bought off ebay will read SD cards of greater capacity, SD cards that are smaller, damage resistant, easy to store/label, and are compatible with virtually any device - you can't stick a blu-ray player in every gadget you want to read high capacity media, but an SD slot and what powers it is tiny.
SD for RAID and movies
Does SD, and flash media in general, have any issues with read/write/re-write cycles as compared to hard drives for example or has this been ironed out?
I think HD movies on blu-ray could potentially be sunk by this if, say, 50GB flash cards came down to commodity pricing. Go to blockbuster and get a movie slapped on the old SD card - not sure about protection and rental period enforcement but the devil's always in the detail.
Sales of movies would be simple enough as you could no doubt put a movie on one of these that had the same protection as a blu-ray disk. Maybe new players would have a card slot that could/should read these?
I predict soon...
a PC form factor based on AMD CPU+GPU on a chip, 8 GB RAM on the same chip and a 10TB SD-whatever RAID 5 array, an as yet unannounced mini-jack-to-128-USB-port-expander-cable and a HUGE power connector for a power brick cable. The 'pro' model will have 128 SD-whatever slots for storage expansion on the underside of the case.
It will look like this: a two foot tall by one foot square passive heat sink with a one cubic inch slab of vitreous enamel stuck to the bottom encasing the silicon.
Case vendors will be reduced to competing in terms of the shininess of the surface finish of their heat sink or the air resistance of the add-on product legs to lift the beast off your shag carpet. PSU makers will try to compete on the aesthetics of their PSU bricks. Both sectors will soon become bit players when punters realise that "it's just a power brick, mate!" and "it's just a heat sink, you wanker!".
Shortly after that the LCD vendors will offer 42" LCD screens with heavily knurled fascias to dissipate the heat from the one cubic inch of vitreous enamel hidden behind the screen. Soon followed by n*7" screens where n is an element of the natural numbers greater than six.
Soon after that Intel will offer a completely pre-engineered solution with 1/5 the CPU power and 945 graphics but marginally lower cost of production of finished product. All the names will switch to the Intel solution. AMD and it's ecosystem will vanish into the depths taking a massive swath of value owned by true believers with it. As a result average resale value of houses will drop by 10 per cent. A flame war will ensue on USENET about the good old days.
Every market player but Intel will be left to compete based on the quality of their industrial design and universities in Europe, the Americas, Japan, Taiwan and China will eliminate their science and engineering faculties in favour of faculties devoted to teaching how to design pretty things.
Apple, seeing the gates of hell open beneath it's feet, will sue everyone and everything in sight for patent infringement for offering an all in one vertically oriented form factor PC. A religious war will ensue on USENET.
Seing this, and the intrinsic likelyhood of revolt, the US Congress and EU whatever and Chinese politburo will all fund research into sounds that can kill from a distance.
The Internet will melt down under the pressure of the wars and blog posts about black sound projects. Microsoft will emerge supreme because online software provision has become impossible. Google will, with the failure of the Internet, fade into obscurity and it's share price will fall so low that the exchanges de-list it. Debt value removed by the failure of Google will push the current market crisis over into total destruction of the capitalist system. Microsoft hegemony will encourage and ultimately complete the transition to purely corporatist economics and politics. The last vestiges of the democratic dream will fade into the background noise of the gnashing teeth of overclockers and the howls of disenfranchised Starbucks customers. Without open markets finally Microsoft will collapse, unable to sell even DOS 6, as consumer cynicism sinks to 1980's era USSR levels.
At this extremity the rump capitalist and technological polities, having no consumer disposable product markets to sell into will be forced back to the old standby mechanism of weapons production. Global tensions will rise until WW III breaks out. Billions will die. With only a few hundred million people left our outer space overlords, knowing all along that humanity was way past sustainable population overshoot for the past 50 - 60 years, will step in and make all the weapons evaporate.
Karl Marx will then emerge from his crypt and establish a knowledge worker's paradise on earth. And at that point in humanity's history, for the first time, all first person shooter games will work equally well on all the available GPUs.
There will remain, however, in a sort of echo of the past glories and desperations, a heavily suppressed and deeply underground activity designing new samizdat cores based on a fusion of old nVidia and ATI ideas. Under the pressure of intense state and social censure great and terrible risks will be made: as a result and at the cost of many chip designers' lives GPUs will finally surpass x86 CPUs in general programmability, CUDA and CTM will be subsumed into OpenCL, which will lose the need for contexts.
A renaissance will slowly arise from the many years of blood and agony and muck of of disappeared graphics chip designers. It will be driven by a new computational model: a reformation based on GPGPU computation will take hold. Computers will become truly visual, and we will be able to frag with *both* realistic physics for the virtual shell casings *and* photorealistic gore splatters.
I give you the theory of dialectical fragaliciousism.
@E: re. Reiser FS "killer"
I can't believe I'm so sad I actually got this joke. But it was funny
2TB of memory should be enough for anybody (ha ha)
Frankly, I can't help thinking that they'll kick themselves very soon for restricting it to only 2TB. Current consumer hard disks max out at 2TB, but that's only 6 iterations (doublings) away from the current max of 32GB for SDHC. 2TB sounds a lot now, but it won't soon. The first generation of SD cards (introduced in 2000) maxed out at 1GB. They tweaked that later to 4GB, and then had to define SDHC to get up to 32G, and now SDXC to get to 2TB. Three redefinitions in less than a decade doesn't sound very visionary to me.
