Panasonic's 32GB class 6 SDHC card: $699 in April

Granted, there are other 32GB SDHC cards already announced. But those pups dawdle along at Class 4 speeds. Panasonic just announced a Class 6 card, baby, blazing a 20MB/s max transfer rate when it rolls out in April. That's about four hours of 1920 x 1080i, compressed AVCHD video. Surely you have $699 lying around, right? Shirley?

[Fraggle.Rock @ Feb 12th 2008 6:49AM]

I am serious, and stop calling me Shirley :-)

[prouted @ Feb 12th 2008 6:59AM]

Would it work on the Asus EEE ?

[Wolfticket @ Feb 12th 2008 7:20AM]

It's an SDHC Card, and the EEE reader supports SDHC, so I reckon. It would mean that your SD card is worth about twice as much as your computer though.

[Bad Beaver @ Feb 12th 2008 7:10AM]

Whooohoo, February 12th, 2009: 32GB class 6 SDHC cards now free with your choice of cereal.

[strider_mt2k @ Feb 12th 2008 7:17AM]

Aww man what have I been saving these stupid box tops for???

[Curtis @ Feb 12th 2008 7:23AM]

thats probably what its coming to...

its frightening how small that sd card is for 32gb!

just need to make them even smaller into micro SD so i can have one for my n95 now! -drewls- (i'd give it about a year)

[shiba @ Feb 12th 2008 9:32AM]

SD Cards are even smaller than you think, go break some old crappy one open, just like an NES cart, only the very front is used, the actual memory part is probably like 1/6th the size of the card. The rest? Empty space, probably so its not so small you lose it.

[Crayola @ Feb 12th 2008 7:34AM]

This is so not worth the price, newegg has 32GB 133x CF card for just $165!

[tekdroid @ Feb 12th 2008 8:09AM]

The only problem being CompactFlash is really getting rarer these days. That's a LOT cheaper tho.

[Nubaeus @ Feb 12th 2008 7:40AM]

Surely you have $699 lying around, right?


People had the money to waste on an I-Phone so I'm sure they have the money to blow on this too.

[Ondra Soukup @ Feb 12th 2008 7:40AM]

That's more than the "new" iPod Touch :D

[CB17 @ Feb 12th 2008 7:40AM]

What a barjin!

[Wolfticket @ Feb 12th 2008 7:46AM]

The 8gb card I've just ordered feels tiny now. Damn you engadget :)
At least it only cost 20 quid.

[superted @ Feb 12th 2008 8:36AM]

mine too, got it today - £21 delivered... just incredible how cheap it is getting.

I really expected to get the 'wow' feeling when i saw it like i did when i unpacked my 256mb SD card and said "Christ, that's a quater of a GB there... well worth the £120"

granted that was a few years ago now

[Hany Hanna @ Feb 12th 2008 7:55AM]

I thought xp only supported cards up to 2 gigs

[Flashpoint @ Feb 12th 2008 8:10AM]

I think XP supports up to 4 GB of DDR RAM but, I've successfully used 8GB Cruzer jump drives on XP.

[Wolfticket @ Feb 12th 2008 8:16AM]

2gb (3.5 ish btw) of RAM. Totally different to storage, like wat this card is.

[Iain @ Feb 12th 2008 9:42AM]

XP (32-bit) supports up to 4GB of memory, including your graphics card(s).
So, the effective RAM you can use is 4GB minus the total combined memory of whatever graphics cards you have.

XP x64 can, theoretically, address up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,616GB of RAM however the current limitation on most consumer-oriented motherboards is 8GB.

This, however, is not memory, it's storage, as wolfticket has pointed out.
The limit on the amount of storage XP can access depends on the file system used - FAT32, which this probably utilises, has a theoretical upper limit of 8TB but a practical limitation of 2TB.

[Iain @ Feb 12th 2008 9:49AM]

Bah, apologies - that previous figure of '18,446,744,073,709,551,616' is actually bytes, not GB (I forgot to divide by 2^30).

The correct theoretical limitation of memory addressing for a 64-bit OS is 17,179,869,184GB

[Hany Hanna @ Feb 12th 2008 9:57AM]

Hey guys.....I'm not talking about RAM. The article was about SD cards. My hp Pavillion only reads SD cards up to 2 gigs. Don't know if that's the limit of my laptop or XP or what.

[Jon Acheson @ Feb 12th 2008 10:43AM]

Hany,

That sounds like it is a limitation of your SD card reader. Specifically, it sounds like it is just an SD reader, not an SDHC reader.

You might also check if newer drivers are available for your card reader. I know on Palm devices there was an upper limit of 1GB for the 16-bit SD drivers, but later models with the 32-bit driver could read larger cards.

[Wolfticket @ Feb 12th 2008 10:49AM]

Probably because the SD card read in your hp doesn't support SDHC, which is now used for most cards over 2gb. In theory, XP would be perfectly happy with a one terabyte sd card, if such a card existed.

[jynxycat @ Feb 12th 2008 11:18AM]

Windows Vista/XP x64 is limited to 128 GB of RAM.

Though the theoretical limit is much higher, I believe this is what was reveled to be the max. Not that any manufactures that much anyhow.

[Iain @ Feb 12th 2008 5:41PM]

@jynxycat: true, that is the current limit that MS have imposed but, unlike a 32-bit OS, they have the option to increase that at a later date (should it ever become necessary).


@Hany Hanna: if you've been trying 4GB SD cards that aren't SDHC (they do exist but aren't too common) then you problems may well be related to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital_card#Compatibility_issues_with_2_GB_and_larger_cards

[Hamilton @ Feb 12th 2008 9:45AM]

now if we could only get this in microSD.

[Brian @ Feb 12th 2008 10:38AM]

@ Hany Hanna
I would guess your card reader does not support SDHC. Most cards larger than 2GB are SDHC though there are a couple regular SD cards that are 4GB.

[michaelportent @ Feb 12th 2008 1:25PM]

It really is amazing how much storage they can cram into a tiny little card. $699 though? C'mon! I could finance a small revolution for that. By small revolution I mean getting several hobos liquored up enough to throw small rocks at the White House gate.

[Wolfticket @ Feb 12th 2008 2:26PM]

Loving the Airplane reference btw.

[Mike Toillion @ Mar 3rd 2008 12:58PM]

That's huge. Just a note, though, the transfer rate of Class 6 is 20 MegaBITS per second, not MegaBYTES!

[Phantom @ Mar 28th 2008 1:25PM]

Erm... no. SD(HC) Class transfer rates are measured in megabytes per second.

[lifelion @ Apr 2nd 2008 4:12PM]

Toc, toc, toc! April is now Panasonic!