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SanDisk and Seagate shipping big ones

SD card and SATA hard drive

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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. ®

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Latest Comments

Class 4

Class 4? WTF!

a lousy 15MB/s for a 64GB device ... pffft!

Wake me up when they come out with a Class 10 version.

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They were probably thinking of Windows.

They probably recomended exFAT so it can be read by a Windows machine without installing drivers.

That said, surely most non-technical people who buy cameras and the like install the software from a CDROM so EXT2 (or whatever) drivers could be included on this?

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SDXC with SD3.0 doesn't quite cut it

So, this is a bit like the first SDHC cards that came out before the standard had stabilized. I'll wait a couple of months for the SD4.0 standard to be ratified.

And, -tim, the SDXC has a very specific raison d'etre - namely that it is physically compatible with the SD/SDHC (and to a large extent all the flavours of MMC).

Oh, you're not forced to use exFAT, it's still just a block device, so in theory you can use ext4 or whatever you want on it. It's still a shame that the SD consortium recommend a proprietary file system.

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