Toshiba first to market with Class 6 SD cards?
By Evan Blass 
posted August 25th 2006 1:40PM
posted August 25th 2006 1:40PM
Toshiba's got a new series of "high-speed" and "ultra high-speed" SD cards coming to market soon, and although the company claims to be the first manufacturer to introduce these so-called Class 6 cards, we think it may be exaggerating just a bit. You see, the SD Card Association recently adopted three different speed classes (2, 4, and 6), with the class number indicating the card's minimum transfer rate in megabytes per second (i.e. Class 2 cards will always transfer data at at least 2MB/s). So although Tosh's ultra-high speed cards sport a zippy transfer rate of 20MB/s -- categorizing them as Class 6 cards -- we've already seen products on the market from ADTec that boast similar speeds (and waterproofing to boot); therefore, how can Toshiba claim that its Class 6's will be the first to launch? Marketing hyperbole aside, both the high-speed Class 4 cards (with 5MB/s transfer rates) and ultra high-speed Class 6 cards will come in 512MB, 1GB, and 2GB varieties, and you can expect them to drop in Japan in October and worldwide in November. 
For the uninitiated (aside from the sd card in my camera) of us in SD tech... what type of reader/writers are needed for these various classes of cards?
id assume there are cameras and other recording devices capable of that kind of throughput, but not necessarily readers (think USB).
Tim: Ever hear of a technology called USB 2.0?
Tim: Unlike smartmedia, some of the circutry is on the card itself.
Maybe I don't understand this whole classification schema, but there have been 133x SD cards (15.5 MB/s write with 21 MB/sec read) available by Corsair for at least a year or so. I use them for recording video in my camera.
http://www.corsairmicro.com/corsair/flash_memory.html#sd
Is this speed classification just a new synonym for the 20x, 100x, 133x SD cards we see today? Or is there something special since these new cards are designated "next generation SD Cards" ?
Sandisk has had Ultra II SD cards available for several years which advertise R/W speeds of 10/9 MB/s.
Don't these qualify as Class 6 cards?
I wish Toshiba would hire a graphic artist. They have the plainest, ugliest cards out there. That Star Trek font has to go!