SDXC memory cards promise 2TB of storage, 300MBps transfer
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Jan 7th 2009 10:55AM
posted Jan 7th 2009 10:55AM
Usually, we poo-poo any new memory card format what with the plethora of options available today. But when a new itty bitty card is announced with a ridiculous 2TB (2 terabyte!) maximum capacity (theoretical), well, we're willing to make the jump to a new format. SDXC (SD eXtended Capacity) relies upon Microsoft's exFAT file system and stores more than 4,000 RAW images, 100 HD movies, or 60 hours of HD recording with a transfer rate of up to 300MBps. The first batch of retail cards will hit before March with read/write speeds up to 104MBps in unknown capacities, though certainly less than 2TB on day one.
omg, can we use any adapter to use is as a hdd?
Seriously why even bother asking a question like that. Clearly if this product was on the market for to buy right now it would be extremly expensive.
When these cards reach 2 TB regular harddrives will be atleast 25x larger, just like they are now.
I don't know about using it as an hard drive but when it comes out I'll definitely use it for storage, as long as it's not up in the thousand dollar range.
That's amazing. If it ever does get to a 2TB size.
Getting 1GB on something that small is amazing.
By the time YOU can buy it in a store, it will have become a whole lot less amazing.
any device compatible with this card yet? some can finally carry all their p0rn0 with them now
Except for Chuck Norris of course.
Didn't realise it at first but why did you "porn" like that?
More like all the porn!
O.O!!!! what will the capacity of the first set of cards be? And how reliable are they? ... couple this be my new backup "drive"
oh didn't read the last sentence. guess I was too excited. But yea, sign me up for the first batch of 1tb and 2 tb cards
Holy Sh**! I can't believe the leap is going from 32 GB to 2TB on these things by March! I can back up every HD in my house on an SD card, that just blows my mind.
They won't be 2TB for a few years.
They will likely start at 32GB and work the way up to 2TB. Typically the past predicts the future.... when we switched from SD to SDHC did we have 32GB the theoretical maximum of SDHC.
They aren't going from 32GB to 2TB in march. The new format is coming in march. No doubt, the first cards will be no where near 2TB at launch. It's like when SDHC launched. Cards weren't released on launch day in 32GB sizes.
@Ogo
Sorry, SDHC's THEORETICAL capacity is truly 2TB as well.. However, the SD association artificially limit it to 32GB in the specs. You can make a card, albeit not following the standard, that is >32GB.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital_card#SDHC
Are there only SDXC devices that go along with this? Or will they work in a SDHC rated device?
I believe that since the card is based of a newer file system, sdhc-ready devices will not be able to read them.
I'm sure someone already beat me to it, but the hardware in SD card readers (some of the ones that don't officially support SDHC even, like the one in the Wii) are electrically capable of reading cards up to the 2TB mark. They keep changing the filesystem on them, so firmware upgrades will be necessary. I'm not sure if current readers will be able to hit the 300MB/s speed mark they've set, but firmware upgrades should allow an SDHC reader to read all 2TB of these.
That is incredible -- but the use will be limited for actual recording devices that are limited by a much (much) shorter battery life.
If it really does reach 2TB, that will be AMAZING for playback devices that allow expandable storage. Really, if they can get something the size of SD cards to hold 2 TB of info, we ought to have much cheaper PMPs featuring hot-swappable storage rather than fixed drives -- even 1/4th of that size is bigger than anything I can think of on the market!
Exactly! If these tiny babies can hold as much as 2TB, then what if you took the next step and made a tiny RAID 5 (or whatever) unit with hot-swap SD cards?
Atom chips currently suck, but what about in a couple of years?
Been shopping for an i7 motherboard and it seems RAID 5 and 10 are now common stock features of the new crop of motherboards.
Won't be long and we "could" have screamin' fast, fault-tolerant, mobile computers that fit in the palm of your hand or in your pocket.
The need for larger storage is independent of battery life. This solves the problem of, "I forgot to empty off my card." The battery problem really only effect those who a) wanted to shoot several hours of continuous video b) fail to buy/recharge extra batteries. I run into storage limitations much more often than battery limitations thanks to charging docking stations. Uploading into Lightroom requires a lot more effort than charging.
Bah, you guys are being suckered in by the marketing hype. I am sure the 2TB number simply refers to the size of the address space. It's a theoretical maximum, yes. But no you are not going to see a 2TB SDXC card any time soon.
Probably true, but still... it can't hurt to DREAM!
Marketing hype is the sole reason why I visit this site sixteen times a day. It's addicting.
640K ought to be enough for anybody...
I'm 17 and remember when flash memory size was measured in megabytes! Bring me my 2^41 1's and 0's on a pretty little plastic chip!
Gotta be 64GB or above, otherwise they wouldn't make a fuss with a new standard. I know camera shops have just got used to telling customers what cards their camera supports.
Flickr, beware! Once these make their way into cameras and trickle down to the teenage girl crowd, your servers are belong to them.
what you say!?!?
/oblig
too early
http://xkcd.com/286/
cant wait to see benchmarks, we could use 2 of these in raid0 for an ssd drive:)
SDHC has a theoretical maximum address capability of 2TB already, however their class (2,4,6) system really sucks. Why must they always change to a new format when they already have the technology to reuse the current stuff? Licensing?
Thank god! I was so surprised and worried that nobody realizes this! I don't get the point of promoting the theoretical max capacity when it's the same as SDHC.
This is really, really nice. It might very well relieve the external HDD as a backup medium in quite some cases, specifically if the user intends to continually fils up the available storage without altering/deleting previously written data and simply buys a new drive as soon as the old one is full, hence wouldn't be likely to hit the write-cycle limit on a solid state drive.
Please, please, please, be true so we can move people off of shitty lossy files.
Amen to that! Todays pmps are useless when trying to have a good flac library with you.
i bet that they wont be cheap at 2TB
have a TB tiny pendrive is my dream, but I tought I would only see one in 2020... hahhahahhaha
We seem to be getting doublings in flash memory every 8 months or so these days, that would denote a 2TB sd card in 4 years time (6 doublings). As for your 1TB flash drive, 64gb versions are available today (although they are expensive), and on that basis your could have one in your hand in little over two and a half years
I hope your dream comes true soon, it's a shared one
twinpeaked
...so I take the the "X" in SDXC stands for "X-Treme!!!1!" ?...
Super Duper Xtreme Card!
Secure Digital Xtreme Capacity
@ fieldcar
Way to ruin everyone's fun. I bet you tell little kids that Santa isn't real, too.
Super Duper Xtreeeme Card To the Maxxx! (internal name) :P
Super Donkey Xylophone Card!!!
(This will probably be the name when advertised in Japan). Plus I can never think of another work with an 'x' that's not xylophone...
Santa's not real? "tear"
This may be a dumb question, but why bother with a FAT variant? Why not simply use NFTS or something else that's probably more widely adopted than FAT?
Cause FAT is a classic and the classics never go out of style.
They told me that the classics never go out of style but, they do. They do.
Somehow baby, I never thought that we do too.
Vista supports exFAT.
As far as I can tell, Linux and OS X don't yet-- though it may be easier to extend their existing FAT32 filesystem code to read/write exFAT than to fully support NTFS. (Yes, there's NTFS-3G, but that's not really an 'official' solution for either OS.) Not to mention Microsoft might be more willing to be more open with exFAT than they would be with NTFS.
MS is very unpleasant about their filesystems, in fact it took ages for them to even allow people to buy licences for anything but FAT16 for portable stuff, and most manufacturers used FAT12 because it was license free. (from what I understand)
The question is why don't the flashmakers invent their own filesystem that isn't based on ancient rotating magnetic disks and bung it down in a standard and get it ISO certified, to hell with all those cheap big companies and their precious nonsense.
@ BJ is Gooder
Refused, ftw.
because FAT file systems can have drivers in Assembly written in Bytes... not kilo- or mega- but regular old bytes. Think how much ram old computers that used floppies had. That means there is very little overhead for very small devices. FAT 12 gave way to FAT16 in Windows and was the default for years until the nearly as ubiquitous FAT32 came along to support really large file systems. But Microsoft does/doesn't claim patents on FAT32.. they are rather flimsy, and they've been pushing NTFS for all hard drives to capture the license fees. the exFAT is just another grab at inventing something new they can make everybody pay for. Why they don't use EXT2 that is supported, wide open and free is beyond me. It's probably got more program overhead and in devices every byte is precious, even if you make 10 MP photos firmware bytes are still worth gold.
Of course neither Apple nor Microsoft would support cards with EXT2 just out of principal... it would make things free and nobody wants that.
FAT32 is limited to a maximum file size of 4GB, this new exFAT is basically FAT64 and doesn't have such limitations (some massive exabyte file size limit).
This is more important in capturing video (especially HD) where for example 4GB of HDV is only about 18 minutes of continuous record time before the captured file needs to be split. This overcomes all the 4GB file size limits in video production while still using a low overhead simple and likely cross plaform compatible file system.
I don't think anyone uses NFTS.
Probably because the long and the short of it is that NTFS isn't more widely adopted than FAT. NTFS is a pretty recent invention, Windows only format whereas FAT (and its variations thereof) have been kicking about for decades and pretty much everyone who needs to knows how to use it since it's publicly documented.
If you want to create a memory card that computers and other devices that aren't running Windows can use you're limited to the other formats. As a Windows only hard drive journalled format it's good but for a camera memory card it's much easier to go with FAT.
I call shenanigans.
Oh, yes. Let's use make use of the proprietary exFAT file system, which can only be read by Windows Vista and up. God forbid use be made of the equally(if not more) capable ext2. YAY FOR PROPRIETARY CRAP!!!
This time in 2 years we wil be saying "2 terabyte SD card?? thats nothing compared to my 16 Exabyte RAM in my laptop"
All while playing games on our PCs that have 32-core processors and 8 video cards in Ultra-super-mega extreme CrosSLi-Fire. not to mention talking on our iPhone Picos and playing music off our iPod Femtos
We *would* be using our iPod Femtos and iPhone Picos, but we can't seem to find them.
Don't suppose you have a magnifying glass handy, do you?
I assume this is much like the switch from SD to SDHC. Slowly there will be 32GB+ SDXC cards and new cameras will use them.
Wiki says:
"SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity, SD 2.0) is an extension of the SD standard that appeared in June 2006.[14] SDHC allows standard-compliant capacities in excess of 2 GB. SDHC cards are often formatted with the FAT32 file system.[15] It uses the same physical and electrical form factor as SD, but the SD 2.0 standard in SDHC uses a different memory addressing method (sector addressing vs byte addressing), thus theoretically reaching a maximum capacity of up to 2 TB (2048 GB). However the SD Card association has artificially defined the maximum limit of SDHC capacity to 32 GB.[16] SDHC cards only work in SDHC compatible devices, but standard SD cards work in both SD and SDHC devices. The SDHC trademark is licensed to ensure compatibility."
I would this is the official standard that removes the "artificially defined the maximum limit of SDHC".
The Xbox 360 supports exFAT, too.
$10 says the next Xbox will ship games on these cards, moving away from disc media and allowing growing capacity with time. Solves the problem of developers "running out of space" and removes a noisy and risky (disc scratching, failure rate) component from the system.
Problem with that is cost.
While the Cards cost will come down in the future, it won't be anywhere near the cost of printing CD / DVDs
Yeah, but I miss cartridges so much. Barely any load times could be a huge selling point for a system, would look like a huge "next-gen" feature. Even though it wouldn't be a "new" feature. Optical disc loading times can eat me.
if and when this comes out, I hope it works with my SDHC readers. I have a few 16 gig SDHCs for storage from my nikon camera and my hp mini laptop. Im still waiting for 64GB SDHC.
Why would you want this in a RAID setup? Why do some clowns want to RAID everything they see?
it sounds cool.
the application of the word in verb form makes anything exponentially cooler.
example.
I have 6 20Gb drives... lame
I'm RAIDING 6 20Gb drives, AWESOME!
At the end of the day you still only have 120Gb taking up 6 drive bays and sucking half your PSU.
Holy...Shit...Im just really happy they kept the same size and shape of a regular SD card. All other memory cards bow down and die, because I already said and this just shows that SD is the future. 2 fucking terabytes, are you kidding me, i could make a home server of just memory, lol, i wouldnt have to worry about crashing, but i know thats years out now and alot of money, but o my god, just think of the possibilities. i wouldnt complain about a HDD mp3 player anymore, you would never have to worry about running out of space on a camera or let alone a camcorder. WOW, just wow. This one right here, got me excited almost couldnt stay in my seat, this one made me happy
aaah they have the little plastic lock thing on them!
I don't sleep at night unless i have safely secured that lock in the lock position, no-one will figure that out.
Imagine, you steal a 2Tb 300Mps SD card, something that would cost thousands today, and you are thwarted by the locking system, sure you've cracked safes, you've hacked the passcodes for the Pentagon database, but polymer locking technology?
its so you dont accidentally erase your own files idiot
Im always excited for the future of these things. As an amateur filmmaker its nice to know that my rolling gear can get smaller and smaller.......
I'd rather have seen MiCard take over as the new standard. They're as small as microSDs, compatible with SD via a typical adapter, and plug directly into a USB port. I'm tired of needing card readers.
Just imagine when the card dies and you have it almost full of pictures... ;D
Yeah, Im sure the next gen videogame consoles will use similar tech rather than disc based blu ray. Flash cards will have MORE than enough capacity and the increased transfer rate will mean little or no load screens as well as real time high res texture streaming with no hiccups. Man, you gotta love technology. PS...2TB is so huge, how the heck do you fill it all?...not even porn can consume that much.
"not even porn can consume that much."
I've had to JBOD my spankbank folder.... you can never have enough space!
Wow, that is truly amazing! I can hardly wait!
Jess
www.privacy.cz.tc
NOOO It's NOT going to be on the shelves by March... READ the lead paragraph, folks! "specifications for the new SDXC standard will be released in the first quarter of 2009.". (emphasis added)
Finally. Maybe now Asus can sell something with more than a few gigs on solid state.
2TB of porn. wtf.
I could fill 2 TB of porn pretty easily. Too bad I have such a shitty (READ: North American) ISP that limits monthly bandwidth.
SDxc: Secure Digital eXtended Capacity
To all the people thinking this will be great for next-gen consoles, remember one reason the N64 was the last console to use cartridges: they cost a lot more to make than optical media. I suspect this is still true.
What kind of HD movies do you watch? Or how much overhead is there in recording HD? 100 HD movies = 60 hours of HD recording???