Compact Flash 5.0 Specification Breaches 144PB Capacity

Mark McCrosky February 22, 2010 Compact Flash, Flash Memory News

The Compact Flash Organization [site] released their new 5.0 specification earlier today.Â It just blew the cap off the lid of storage limits.Â The current specification for Compact Flash is 137GBs…now that is 144 Petabytes, or PBs. Petabyte is a big number, and most people haven’t heard of it.Â Well, to break it down, a petabyte is [around] 150 million Gigabytes. Look around your house for some Blu-ray discs, that would equal six million blu-ray titles on one Compact Flash card.Â I guess that means no more RAID boxes, right?Â I mean, what’s better than solid state memory and storage the size of Texas?

petabyte compact flash

We started doing the math on the time it would take a CF Duplicator to copy a 5.0 Compact Flash card, laughed and stopped.Â There just isn’t technology out there for bulk data loading to a device like this…let alone finding a ligitimate use of putting that much information on the card anyway. So we don’t see a practical use for the 5.0 spec yet, but there are other improvements we should get excited about.Â The CFA says Revision 5.0 brings an optional quality of service framework that guarantees a certain level of performance and prevents dropping frames, more efficient cleanup of unused space, a new electrical design that better complies with ATA standards. There’s no mention of when CompactFlash 5.0 cards will ship, but if you are still interested you can read up on the new spec here [PDF], or download the official specification for a C note.Source:Â TechSpot.

Tags: CF Duplicator, Compact Flash

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Mark McCrosky

Kicking around in technology since 2002. I like to write about technology products and ideas, but at the consumer level understanding. Some tech, but not too techie. Posting on Quora.com as well.