SanDisk ships world's first X4-based flash memory cards, humans wait for capacity increases
By Darren Murph 
posted Oct 14th 2009 5:10AM
posted Oct 14th 2009 5:10AM
SanDisk was busy trumpeting the benefits of X4 technology way back in February, and now the company's tooting its own horn once more by shipping the planet's first memory cards based on the new tech. For those who've forgotten, X4 can hold four bits of data in each memory cell, which is twice as many as the cells in traditional MLC NAND memory chips. In theory, this stuff will allow for bigger capacities in the flash memory that we so dearly love, but for whatever reason (read: cost concerns), the first X4-based SDHC and Memory Stick PRO cards top out at just 16GB. Wake us up when we can slam a sub-$50 256GB SDHC card into our D90, okay?
they should have used one of the asian models to hold it.
won't that make it look bigger
Needs more floppy.
i think x8 technology is still pretty far away, darren. i'll settle for 128gb, though.
Meh, already have a few 16GB SD Cards lying around, I want the top end 2TB Standard SD Cards as soon as it comes out regardless of the price!
no kidding...cost concerns my ass. they announced at first that the first batch of these cards would be 64gb. looks like they cut that down to 16gb to nickle and dime the consumer. every six months or so they'll double the capacity to keep prices at a maximum. that 2tb card that we all want will probably come out in 2015.
@EI8HT
Sad but true. The major downfall of a capitalist society; impeding progress in the name of profit.
@Clyzm
Huh, I thought it was withholding health care from the masses.
And I thought it was getting so damn greedy that you collapse the world's economy
But that's old hat I guess
You guys DO realize that you'l have to get new cameras first, right? The cards from 64GB to 2TB are going to be a new format, SDXC. Just like how standard SD card readers don't read SDHC, the next line can't be used by current hardware. Seriously Engadget. You should know this.
Theres a driver on XDA Developers, and many others sites, that enable standard SD card slots/drives to be upgraded to SDHC standard!
My old HP ipaq which never supported SDHC or SD Cards larger than 1GB, Now Thanks to XDA Developers It now supports up 32GB SDHC cards, Thanks to one driver
So SDXC should be no different
In fact the 32GB limitation is an artificial one in the specs. I'm not sure if this is the case, but the SDXC spec may be no more than "It's the same as SDHC, but this time you can make the cards as big as you like.", in which case supporting them would be trivial with a firmware update.
For windows XP you would also need to download the exFAT support update, since those new cards are using that as a standard according to the SD specifications.
Vista and (I assume) W7 already understands exFAT.
whats the point bringing 16gb cards out when we already have them with the old tec. at least give us 32gb micro sd's
So if MLC (X2) is ~10 times shorter life and less than half the speed of SLC, how long will these X4 cards last and how much slower will they be compared to the old MLC (X2) format?
That's the questions engadget should have answered really, but only since sandisk aren't.