SanDisk's budget 2GB Secure Digital card

Let's ponder something for a minute here. When SanDisk rolled out their 1GB SD memory card at the beginning of the year, it was priced at a full $500. Now, not only are they introducing their new 2GB Ultra II SD card (which has faster than average read/write speeds) at the low cost of $240, they're going to sell their regular speed 2GB SD memory card (which should be available next month) at the even cheaper price of just $200. And that $500 1GB SD card? You can now pick that up for around 65 bucks. Progress, etc.

[XiozTzu @ Dec 19th 2005 1:47AM]

Once these SD cards break 5GB will the iPod, other HD players, cease to exist? Is this the beginning of the transition to Wireless telephones becoming our MP3 player?

[CRWhitehead @ Dec 19th 2005 1:47AM]

When the SD card was first hypothesized, their progression was only envisioned up to 4GB. The release date for all of these are running right on point actually (the 2GB really is a little late of projection). The 4GB is supposed to be out by mid next year. But i have seen nothing saying it will go further.
As for the cost, with the myriad of producers out there, and the huge demand for them, it is inevitable that the price will continue to drop. The threshold will be reached and but we arent there yet. But this is economics at work...

[Will @ Dec 19th 2005 1:47AM]

Isn't there some law somebody stated, that memory cards/sticks/devices/whatever should double in storage each year?

In that case we'll see 4GB next year, and 8GB the year after! Here's for hoping! :D

[Mike @ Dec 19th 2005 1:47AM]

Moore's law is the "everything should double in 18 months" statement.
However, because of the # of address bits sent as payload data in the SD protocol, you can only directly address 4 GB of memory space to begin with. Attempting to increase that number (directly) would mean changing the SD standard. There are ways to get around that (like bank siwtching), but they come with a performance hit :(

[Jeff @ Dec 19th 2005 1:47AM]

Yes, it would be nice to be able to break the 4gb barrier on the sd format, but the performance hit required to accomodate more than 4gb would suck... However, don't you think that by then, the device speed etc will be able to compensate for the memory card performance hit and make up for it? Or is card speed really only dependent on the card itself?

[ben @ Dec 19th 2005 1:47AM]

Hopefuly by the time they have 4GB SD cards out that the palm manufactorurs will have realised that if they up the amount of memory in the palms they probably will get alot more sells. Right now am going to buy a palm tungsten C palm which is made by palm one. But seeing that it only had 64 mb of memory (51 MB useable), I was forced to think about buying it twice.

[ben @ Dec 19th 2005 1:47AM]

Hopefuly by the time they have 4GB SD cards out that the palm manufactorurs will have realised that if they up the amount of memory in the palms they probably will get alot more sells. Right now am going to buy a palm tungsten C palm which is made by palm one. But seeing that it only had 64 mb of memory (51 MB useable), I was forced to think about buying it twice.

[Stuart @ Dec 19th 2005 1:47AM]

The oficial site/spec (www.sdcard.com) goes upto 32GB. last time I looked it was 16GB so I don't know how 'flexible' this is - or whether older readers/devices will be compatible. I have a Kingston reader that doesn't recognise a 1GB card.

[Simon @ Dec 19th 2005 1:47AM]

The original specification states that this generation of SD Card will max out at 16GB However the SD card contains its own memory controller and is not Dependant on the device operating it. With the controller point in mind, technically the card could max out at any range even 128GB or 1TB. (Why Stuart is having problems with the Kingston Reader would sound like a limitation on his OS or USB driver)