Archive for February, 2010

Compact Flash 5.0 Specification Breaches 144PB Capacity

Mike McCrosky Compact Flash, Flash Memory News

Compact Flash 5.0 Specification Raises Capacity to an Incredible 144 Petabytes

The Compact Flash Organization (site) released their new 5.0 specification earlier today, and it completely blew past previous storage limits. The prior specification for Compact Flash maxed out at 137GB. Now the new spec supports up to 144 petabytes (PB).

A petabyte is a huge number — most people haven’t encountered it before. To put it in perspective, a petabyte is roughly 150 million gigabytes. Imagine looking around your home at a Blu-ray collection: six million Blu-ray titles could fit on a single Compact Flash 5.0 card.

I guess that means no more RAID boxes, right? After all, what’s better than solid-state memory with storage capacity the size of Texas?

Compact Flash card with petabyte storage capacity

We started doing the math on how long it would take a CF Duplicator to copy a Compact Flash 5.0 card, laughed, and gave up. There simply isn’t technology available today for bulk data loading of that magnitude — let alone a legitimate use case for storing that much information on one card.

While there isn’t a practical use for the full 5.0 spec yet, there are other improvements to get excited about. According to the CFA, Revision 5.0 brings:

  • An optional quality-of-service framework to guarantee performance levels and prevent dropped frames.
  • More efficient cleanup of unused space.
  • A new electrical design that better complies with ATA standards.

There’s no mention yet of when Compact Flash 5.0 cards will ship, but if you’re interested you can read more about the new spec here [PDF], or purchase the full official specification.

Source: TechSpot

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SD Class Break Down

Mike McCrosky Flash Memory News, SDHC, Secure Digital

SD cards come in all sorts of GB sizes and speeds.  Today I thought it a good idea to take a look inside an SD card along with breaking out the speed differences.

sd class

To start, the SD media is broken down into “Classes”  The Class depicts the speeds at which a device reads and writes.
 
There are different speed grades available, measured the same as CD-ROMs, in multiples of 150 kB/s (1x = 150 kB/s). Basic cards transfer data up to six times (6x) the data rate of the standard CD-ROM speed (900 kB/s vs. 150 kB/s).
 
The maximum read speed and maximum write speed may be different. Maximum write speed typically is lower than maximum read speed. Some digital cameras require high-speed cards (write speed) to record video smoothly or capture multiple still photographs in rapid succession. This requires a certain sustained speed, or the video stops recording. For recording, a high maximum speed with a low sustained speed is no better than a low speed card. The 2.0 specification defines speeds up to 200x.
 
Some manufacturers use the read speed in their X-ratings, while others (Kingston, for example) use write speed.

sd class speed

SD Cards and SDHC Cards have Speed Class Ratings defined by the SD Association. The SD Speed Class Ratings specify the following minimum write speeds based on “the best fragmented state where no memory unit is occupied”:[9]
  • Class 2: 2 MByte/s – 13x
  • Class 4: 4 MByte/s – 26x
  • Class 6: 6 MByte/s – 40x
SD and SDHC cards will often also advertise a maximum speed (such as Continue Reading

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