Taiwanese Firms To Launch a 2 Terabyte Memory Card

Krafty Koder writes "The Register is reporting that a consortium of Taiwanese firms are to launch a 2 Terabyte memory card at the Taipei International Electronics Show (Taitronics) on the 8th of October, with mass production expected to start next year. The card will measure 3.2 x 2.4 x 0.1cm according to this DigiTimes.com report" The reports say that this is supposed to be a "new type" of card, so the details are still quite sketchy. Offical unveiling will happen in early October.

IDE interface ?

or even SCSI - it would be nice to replace all my bulky (by comapison) 3 1/2 inch IDE drives.

Re:IDE interface ?

If you read the article, you'll find that the new format "supports up to 2TB" of storage. They mention nothing about initial densities.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

Re:IDE interface ?

"Supports 2 TB" could mean "uses 41-bit addressing" (2^41 B = 2TB). Current IDE interfaces with 48 bit addressing "support" up to 256TB of storage but you're not going to see that kind of density on a single device any time soon.

As for replacement of mechanical HDDs - all current non-volatile rewritable storage has a limited number of write cycles, making them less than ideal for HDD replacement (imagine the damage your swapfile would do to one). If somebody had figured out a way to work around this, I'm sure it would be the #1 thing mentioned in the press release.

Re:IDE interface ?

Ok, but don't you think that we don't have enough information about the technology yet to just write it off. If the cards come out with sizable storage capacities, they could replace HD's on MP3 players and laptops. The fact that they're substantially faster than existing cards is exciting news in itself. Perhaps this is just one step closer to a complete solid state storage system in your laptop. I, personally, would love to get rid of my hard drive. It uses a lot of power, makes noise, takes up a lot of space, and is prone to failure.

Re:IDE interface ?

Small yet important nitpick..

"Supports 2 TB" could mean "uses 41-bit addressing" (2^41 B = 2TB). Current IDE interfaces with 48 bit addressing "support" up to 256TB of storage but you're not going to see that kind of density on a single device any time soon.

It is 48 bit addressing, but we're not addressing bytes, we're addressing 512-byte blocks. So the 48-bit ATA standard can address 144 petabytes [wdc.com].

So those 2TB are probably addressing blocks using 32 bits, a much more sensible number than 41 bits.

Please read your own post

Please read your own post:

Nothing to see here, are you insane. Depending on what the price of the card is, this could potentially replace hard drives in many applications. If its cheap enough, perhaps even in Laptops. Its transfer speed is fast enough to replace a hard drive, plus, being solid state, it won't develop mechanical problems. It'll take up substantially less space and consume less power. In this age of miniaturization, and subsequent problems with power consumption and heat output, it seems a great solution.

Perhaps there is nothing to see here, you might want to move along. Is that better?

A terabyte memory card uses a LOT of power

plus, being solid state, it won't develop mechanical problems. It'll take up substantially less space and consume less power.

You're most likely right about the issue of mechanical problems. However I'm not sure about the power issues. Hard disks use lots of power only when they are starting to spin. At idle or full speed they use little power.

Dynamic RAM memory, on the other hand, has to be constantly refreshed which means it has power running to it at all times to scan addresses. There has to be uninterrupted power to drive the RAM bank, the DRAM controller, the hot-plug interface to the PC, and the regulated power supply for the unit. This might be a significant percentage of the power that would be used in total by a low-energy magnetic storage device like a hard disk.

It's also time to start considering the possibility that Taiwan will possibly be invaded and occupied by the Communists from the mainland at some point within the next five years. This will, if it happens, disrupt manufacturing design and shipping for years to come.
If I were an American politician, I would suggest to the US State department that the USA would only guarantee to provide an efficient co-defense of Taiwan if Taiwan relocates a significant number of IC fabs and design centers to the USA employing primarily American workers. This is the way that the world works. They would surely understand. They wouldn't like it, but they would comply.

Re:IDE interface ?

If the latency is good as well then this puts hard drives to same, esp since it would have less if any moving parts.

It will have no moving parts (it is apparently Flash or some similar technology) and should have latencies in microseconds instead of milliseconds.

I note that Memory Stick also has a 2 TB upper limit, so I think that part of things is more a theoretical maximum instead of something we might see in the near term.

However, a 16 GB version might be a nice swap device for an 8 GB AMD64 box - if the price is right of course, and the max number of write operations is reasonable. ;-)

BTW the correct dimensions are 24x18x1.4 mm.

Overstated

They are not launching a 2TB memory card, they a launching a format they claim should support up to 2TB--big difference. The real news for the initial product seems to be a much faster transfer rate than the current SD format.

Re:Overstated

The original memory stick supported up to 128 MB, the 256 MB cards 'cheated' by using a switch allowing you to switch between 2 128MB banks.

WHAT?!

This has got to be wrong.

I'm going to put this down w/ the flying car and Duke Nukem Forever.

Solid state reliability?

My only objection with solid state memory like this is how many rewrites can the media sustain before failure?

I use my USB drive + MP3 player a lot but sometimes wonder how long the gadget would last...

Are there any existing tests available for perusal?

Re:Solid state reliability?

> My only objection with solid state memory like this is how many rewrites can
> the media sustain before failure?

Depends. IBM use flash ram in their printers (ie the model 4610), and it's supposed to last 100,000 writes, so I guess if the USB things use the same stuff then that means it'll last over 100 years if you wrote to it twice a day. Lets face it - you're going to lose it or replace it with a model with enough..uh, I mean more memory before that.

I'd love a usb/mp3 player but I'm not going to pay more than £50 for one and it'd have to have a few gigs of storage so it looks like I'll be sticking with my £45 diskman which plays cds/mp3s for a little while yet.

What a tiny card.

Smaller than many stamps.

I wonder if anyone has tried to send a memory card like this underneath a postage stamp.

It's not like the card couldn't hold up to the rigors [slashdot.org] of the Postal Service.

The *format* supports up to 2 TB

The title appears to be exagerating a bit in announcing 2TB cards: the article itself only mentions that the format supports 2TB, not that actual 2TB cards will be available.

Not that a 2TB memory card wouldn't be nice though :-)

Here's hoping

That this solid state memory doesn't suffer from the non-sequential write issues that current flash media has (AFAIK).

Added to that, I remember reading about a Cambridge university division developing their own solid state memory (don't have the details to hand, but AFAIK IBM invested money into them), point is they were estimating 2TB for a credit card sized media.

When the ucard (or whatever they call it) goes into "Mass Production", I wonder what the price ranges are and just how much they will produce. If the media is affordable (and it works as promised), they have a chance to wipe the floor with the entire industry!

Mind, the problem with this media, no matter who much of a data hoarder you are (like me), you'll find ways to fill it. But if the media is reliable enough, I wonder what backup solutions coming out of this?

Re:Here's hoping

Mind, the problem with this media, no matter who much of a data hoarder you are (like me), you'll find ways to fill it.

Hmm, I don't know about that. Personally, I keep everything that hits my PC, and it adds up, but still hasn't come close to 2TB...

About every two years I replace my fileserver's smallest HDD with one roughly twice as large as the current largest (so I basically append a zero to the right end of the current size, expressed in binary). Currently that means almost a third of a terabyte after an upgrade this spring.

This time, I've started keeping my CD rips in a lossless format. Next time (which will put me around 0.75TB) I will probably start keeping raw DVD rips. After that, I don't know what else I might keep that could use so much room. Until now, audio and small video clips have taken the bulk of the space.

Although I know everyone who has ever said this has later eaten their words, at the moment, I really don't think any home computer needs more than a few TB of storage.


But if the media is reliable enough, I wonder what backup solutions coming out of this?

Ah, great point. That currently seems like the biggest problem we have with storage - Not the actual online storage, but the ability to keep up-to-date backups. I've worked for the past few weeks to backup my fileserver to DVD, and still have a few more discs to go. Most likely, at least a few of the over-50 DVDs I've created have errors, and in the event my FS fries, I would almost certainly lose something. Even Blu-Ray doesn't look like that great of an alternative... 25GB doesn't suck, but it still means five discs per 100GB. After my next HDD addition, that will come out to around 30 discs, almost the same situation I have now (Yes, Blu-Ray theoretically holds a lot more, up to 100GB for dual-sided dual-layer. But keep in mind that DSDL DVDs hold almost 20GB, and we've just now started seeing SSDL burners, with media incredibly scarce and expensive).

So what do we need? A solution for making backups of several hundred GB at a time, that doesn't cost more than buying a similarly-sized IDE drive and keeping it off-site (ie, tape backups, not even counting the cost of the drive itself).

Read/Write

You have to wonder how many times you can read/write this format. Is it like CF where you have a limited number of more like a hard disk where you can use it form main storage. If the latter mass backup storage suddenly becomes very easy..

Rus

Hmm

It looks like it's a new interface which is capable of supporting 2TB, but fitting 2TB of data onto a device the size of a MMC card is a problem that each manufacturer needs to solve, and they'll solve it when Moore's law says they'll solve it. So this isn't actually exciting; they've just made the address field longer.
It does mean that devices using this standard SHOULD support cards way larger than existed at the time the device was made. But based on my experience with almost every format of storage I've ever used, this won't work in practice.

Memory card FORMAT

It's a new memory card FORMAT, not a new card. It's like saying hard drive manufacturers are making 256TB drives because they use the 48-bit LBA standard. If this standard is implemented correctly, you'll be able to purchase a uCard MP3 player next year and a 12GB uCard 6 years later, and have that card work in the MP3 player.

Just a new format

From The Register article, it sounds like it's just a new format definition. The 2TB size would just be the addressing limit. Also, the claim a 120MB/s xfer rate.. which, like ATA133, represents the upper limit - not any real xfer rate.

So, it's basically an updated format specification with no (current) practical limits.

Nice size, but

storage devices that large should have a multi-parallel division of storage.

Although 2TB is tremendous, at the 120MB/sec, it would be about 5 hrs to access the entire contents (while rare, a card-card transfer to save data might be performed).

XD picture card promise ...

Fuji/Olympus promised by the end of 2004, we'd have 1GB XD cards and assured their buyers that they wouldn't be abandoned by the format [in terms of space], like they were with smartmedia cards. A 4GB was promised by summer 2005. It looks like neither will materialize.

Who would pick up this format? It seems Fuji/Olympus would be their only buyers on the digital camera market. I suppose this will be aimed more at Mp3 players and possibly computers/laptops/PDAs, if it's fast enough.

Concerning XD cards - if anyone is interested - I'm trying a mod project for smartmedia cards - see my journal [slashdot.org]

Not the only one

According to the second link in the article (this one [digitimes.com]), Sony is coming out with 2TB storage as well in their memory stick format.

--
Will

N-k

Price range?
Temperature range?
Storage lifetime?
Erase speed?
Write speed?
Write cycle (wear) lifetime?
Bit error rate?
Power consumption?
Radiation decay?

Let's suppose this thing requires JFFS for wear leveling purposes. Mount time at this capacity range: approximately one year.

We have someone in our office here, who goes by the wholy inappropriate title "VP of Research and Development" who is *constantly* finding new technologies we should exploit, based on N-k impressive paramters.

In any case, if these ucards pan out, ucard over carrier pigeon would probably put Iridium out of business once and for all. Now if someone could breed a homesick Albatross we could stop laying all this expensive fiber optic cable as well.

Nice for my Digital Camera!

Very nice until I read the fine print. Too bad there are a lot of technologies that haven't reached their theoretical limits yet. I guess the marketeers will start us off at 10 G and move up from there each year until getting to 100 G at which time another format will obsolete this one -- which seems to be the story of my favorite CF card technology (now that 1G CF cards are somewhat affordable, I can't find many cameras to accept it now). Oh well. I guess yet another memory card to confuse things.

Still not enough space...

For my porn collection.

Hmmm, must be using really small atoms

Since it takes a couple transistors to make a logic circuit there will be several times as many transistors as bytes, possibly a minimum of 6-8 trillion transistors. At present the microprocessor lines are at around 42 million transitors, and doubled every year(moore's law is exponential) it might be 10+ years to be able to put that many transistors on a chip, but by then the chip will have to larger than the proposed standard. Other wise you'll need to use smaller parts, and I think in the space allowed you're looking at transistors smaller than the electron orbit around hydrogen. Just because you can adress a certain amount or memory doesn't mean you can make the memory to use it.

These announcements happen all the time

Companies come out with these crazy new products at trade shows all the time. Usually it's way overpriced and in very limited quantities. They are looking for investment capital to further develop the technology. Sometimes it works out (Archos), sometimes it doesn't (Indrema).

I used to get Nasa Tech Briefs, a magazine full of new technologies Nasa has developed available for commercial licensing. From the time Nasa developed a new technology to the time it comes out for commercial use is about 10 years. I'm sure the same is true for many technologies.

Uh-oh.

Dense portable storage sounds neat, but I think the form-factor needs to be reconsidered -- what if you lost it? All of your hard drives, CDs and DVDs would be gone in a flash! What's the bandwidth of a 2TB flash card slipping between the bars of a sewer drain and floating out to the waste treatment plant? Maybe they should call it a *flush* card? (Sorry -- bad pun.)

This is NOT a 2 terabyte memory card!

RTFA:

Dubbed 'ucard', the format will support up to 2TB of storage capacity within a 3.2 x 2.4 x 0.1cm card - the same size as a standard MMC unit. The new cards are said to be connector-compatible with the older format.

It's a 2 terabyte maximum, not a 2 terabyte card.

If it sounds too good to be true....

It probably is. The article is too short on details and too long on claims. The biggest memory card I've heard of is 2GB IIRC, and these guys say they're going to have 2TB in the same form factor by October? When the biggest 3.5" HD they have is 512GB? And a 120MBps transfer rate? What's the fastest they can go now? 10? Maybe 20? So what you're telling me is that some company out in Taiwan has replaced Intel's flash technology with something that holds 1,000 times more data in the same physical space. The tech world would ordinarily go apeshit over an advancement of this magnitude, given the clear violation of Moore's Law. And yet this is the first we've heard of it. And instead of rolling out solid state hard disks, or mondo RAID arrays, they are making memory cards for PDA's and digital cameras out of these. And they are going straight to market in October. And they did it all before Intel and IBM, who spends billions on R&D developing this kind of thing.

Repeat after me, everyone.
This.product.is.vaporware.

Re:Incredulity?

if something seems 'wrong' in the slashdot headline..
then read the fucking article. slashdot headlines are no good for gaining information on wtf is going on or what the story really is about.

they will introduce a card(format) that can support 2tb sizes.. a bit more believable but not so spectacular, no? now, as to why slashdot makes these shitty headlines that could be accurate instead of empty on the spot invented hype.