SanDisk and Seagate shipping big ones

SanDisk and Seagate are shipping their largest ever storage SD cards and SATA drives respectively. Tomorrow they'll ship even larger ones.

SanDisk can deliver a 64GB Ultra SDXC memory card, SDXC being the successor to the SDHC card format. You can put more than a day's worth of high-def video on the card, at 9Mbits/s speed, and transfer them from digital recorder to PC. Its read speed is up to 15MB/sec. SanDisk says it has an exFAT - does this mean thin? - filesystem suited to long-duration video recording and the SD 3.0 format can support cards with a 2TB capacity.

Not many cameras support this format yet but more will be coming, from Canon for example.

Seagate is shipping a Constellation ES disk drive with the SD 3.0 capacity max - 2TB. It spins at 7200rpm and has either a 6Gbit/s SAS interface or the widely-used 3Gbit/s SATA one. We first heard about this 4-platter, nearline enterprise drive in November last year.

The company also has a desktop Barracuda XT rated at 2TB, 7200rpm and 6Gbit/s SAS. Western Digital has its 2TB Caviar Black with the 3Gbit/s SATA interface and the RE4-GP ditto product covering pretty much the same markets as Seagate. Hitachi GST mentioned a 2TB, 4-platter UltraStar in August last year; it's probably still sampling, while Samsung has a 2TB EcoGreen. That wraps up the 3.5-inch 2TB drive suppliers. Seagate's Constellation has the 6gig SAS lead, for now.

SanDisk's new SDXC card costs around $350 (£259.99) - it's not cheap. Seagate's Constellation ES comes in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB variants, and Span lists the 2TB model at $382, SATA gigabytes costing a whole less than SDXC ones. ®