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Data Storage Portables IT Hardware

Taiwanese Firms To Launch a 2 Terabyte Memory Card 196

Posted by Hemos from the making-them-smaller-and-smaller dept.
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.
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Taiwanese Firms To Launch a 2 Terabyte Memory Card More

Taiwanese Firms To Launch a 2 Terabyte Memory Card

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  • IDE interface ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spiny ( 87740 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:19AM (#9919051) Homepage Journal
    or even SCSI - it would be nice to replace all my bulky (by comapison) 3 1/2 inch IDE drives.

    • Re:IDE interface ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:49AM (#9919187) Journal
      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 ? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by nmk ( 781777 )
        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.

        • Re:IDE interface ? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @09:19AM (#9919358)
          "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 ? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by nmk ( 781777 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @09:29AM (#9919425)
            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 ? (Score:3, Insightful)

              by orasio ( 188021 )
              Right now you could use a big RAID of small chips, to get rid of your hdd (like a DIMM filled with flash) . Using some intelligence at the file system level, limited writing cycles might not be an issue.

              So, solid state storage, hundreds of Gb, is feasible right now, although not cheap.

              Parent (and GGGreat parent) highlight the fact that this is not important, unless it is. Many press releases claim great storage capacities, that's not new. Something new would be some chip maker making some actual chips.
              If

              • Even using 2GB DIMMs the most ram you could get in a single 3.5" hard drive bay is about 16GB, and as you allude in your comment, it would be intensely expensive to install just one drive ike this, let alone an array. It's at least $100/GB to buy memory in 512MB sticks and very high capacity DIMMs cost more per MB, not to mention you're going to want to use ECC memory.

            • Re:IDE interface ? (Score:3, Insightful)

              by cbreaker ( 561297 )
              Every time one of these things is announced, with "Up to a zillion bazillion petabytes capacity!!" there's a bunch of people like you that insist that this new fancy thing could replace hard drives.

              If recent history has been any lesson at all, then we've already seen that initial offerings are usually 10% of the claimed "up to" capacity, they aren't as fast, and they are extremely expensive.

              Have you seen the prices on the top capacity memory cards available today? Many thousands of dollars in some cases
            • Ok, but don't you think that we don't have enough information about the technology yet to just write it off.

              They're not writing off the technology; they're writing off the news story. You're right, we don't know much about the technology, which means it's a non-story. If we posted everything that could, possibly, theoretically, maybe replace hard drives, we'd spend all day reading vapor stories.

              In the meantime, somebody has simply taken a line from what looks like a routine product announcement and blo

          • Re:IDE interface ? (Score:5, Informative)

            by ezzzD55J ( 697465 ) <slashdot5@scum.org> on Monday August 09, 2004 @09:31AM (#9919441) Homepage
            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.

          • Re:IDE interface ? (Score:3, Interesting)

            by ca1v1n ( 135902 )
            Actually, we do have non-volatile memory with unlimited write cycles. It's just a lot more expensive, so it doesn't get used much, particularly in very high volume. It sounds like this technology is sufficiently flexible that they could put whatever sort of memory they see fit on the inside and it would work the same way. You put in the expensive stuff, and you've got a replacement for the general purpose hard drive. You put in the cheap stuff and you've just replaced a media storage disk.
          • Mechanical HDDs are a current non-volatile rewritable storage technology. For that matter, HDDs don't use moving parts to read or write the data (they use moving parts to address different bits of storage).

            Anyway, this is probably a protocol (and connector quality) standard, rather than a media technology. It's essentially SD with longer addresses and faster transmission. In principle, you could have a mechanical HDD in this format (you can actually get CF-format HDDs, so why not, aside from the insanity o

            • Re:IDE interface ? (Score:3, Interesting)

              by dgatwood ( 11270 )
              Any bets on whether this is actually probe [hp.com] storage [ibm.com]? That could easily explain the claimed capacity, assuming that the technology is close enough to production quality to actually go to market.

              I first heard about this stuff back in '99 or 2000. It's pretty neat stuff. The basic idea is that the limit to hard drive density is caused by the horizontal orientation (across the platter surface) of the metallic particles that represent the bits, coupled with the need to have multiple particles for each bit to

        • Please read your own post (Score:5, Funny)

          by gosand ( 234100 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @09:46AM (#9919558)
          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 (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Simonetta ( 207550 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @11:44AM (#9920550)
          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.
          • You're assuming that it's using DRAM. If this were the case, it would either be a volatile card or would require a battery to maintain data. Since it's going to sit in the same MMC form factor and is being compared against SD memory cards, both are highly unlikely. It's probably flash or something like it, which consumes relatively little power when compared to an operating hard drive. I'll believe the 2TB capacity in this form factor when I see it though. That's probably a few years away.

            As for Taiwan han

      • Re:IDE interface ? (Score:3, Informative)

        by beef3k ( 551086 )
        Yes, Memory Stick Pro/Duo allready has a maximum (theoretical) capacity of 2TB.

        The news is the transfer rate which is more than twice that of High speed MMC cards (currently the fastest available) and six times that of the Memory Stick Pro/Duo.

        So there is something to see here, but not a stamp sized 2TB storage device.

  • Overstated (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:21AM (#9919060)
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Animekiksazz ( 653048 )
      oh really?

      On that note, I didn't realize CompactFlash supported up to 128 GB.

      And Sony's original MemoryStick pales in comparison to all of these formats. 256 MB compared to 4 GB. Yeah... Yes I know they have MSPro but nm that.

    • Yeah, cca. 2TB difference. :(
    • The real news for the initial product seems to be a much faster transfer rate than the current SD format Not quite: Also the transferrate is an "up to" figure. The write-limit with current flash-media is simply the writing to the chips that is limiting the speed. Even if you have USB2.0 480Mbps transfer medium, will not mean you can write at that speed to something....

  • WHAT?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by NETHED ( 258016 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:21AM (#9919061) Homepage
    This has got to be wrong.

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

  • Solid state reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nz_mincemeat ( 192600 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:23AM (#9919069) Homepage
    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? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Threni ( 635302 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @09:16AM (#9919341)
      > 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.
    • Surely you should be more intested in reads vs. writes. I only load songs onto my MP3 player once - but I might play each song 500 times. Maybe not a good idea as a general harddrive - but perfect for few write, many read applications.
      --
      New thinking in mobile and internet gaming. [playonthego.com]

  • What a tiny card. (Score:5, Funny)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:24AM (#9919071)
    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.

    • Re:What a tiny card. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've tested a lot of post office packages. I have tested a stamp on one side the address and return address on the other side of the stamp.

      I've also tested mailing a $1 and a $5 with no envelope to see if it would make it.

      I also tried to send a message with 50 $1 bills in it and said that everyone that touched the envelope could open it and take $1. I wanted to test the theory [because I had a problem] that NO ONE at the post office can open a package NO MATTER WHAT, unless they suspect something hazardou
  • WTF? Why can't there be a standard, outside of the Linus quote "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from"?
    SD/MMC for little devices (Zaurus, phones, etc) and CF for big devices (camera, Zaurus, etc).
    Bah, give me a $300 2TB CF card, and you have a deal.

  • The *format* supports up to 2 TB (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bastiaan ( 153444 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:27AM (#9919090)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by T-Kir ( 597145 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:28AM (#9919093) Homepage

    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pla ( 258480 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @09:52AM (#9919597) Journal
      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).
      • 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.

        But, of course, you've still got the original discs, right?? So you don't really need to be backing those up. Granted, it would be a PITA to re-rip them all, but you wouldn't have lost anything. And as a last resort, there's all those backups the MPAA/RIAA have so thoughtfully made and distributed around the country for you...

      • 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

        ... than the time taken to backup data, is the time it takes to restore it in the event of a disaster. I've come across a few clients over the years who's business would suffer a lot of financial damage if their systems were down for more than 2-3 days. And they just hadn't thought about this at a

        • A well run enterprise with good supplier agreements could get a server back up and running in that timeframe with just a backup on something fairly modern (tape most likely, or remote SAN).

          A small busniess that needs to be up in 2-3 days max would probably need redundant hardware, with frequent replication.

          Big businesses that need much faster turnarounds would probably have backup datacenters. They might not be full scale to save money (so they might have diminished user capacity for a few days).

          If a co
      • "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..."

        Two words: HD Porn.

        I doubt I'm speaking for just myself here. ;)

      • 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.

        At about 300MB per CD, I can fit my collection to below 100GB. And it grows slowly enough that HD sizes will easily keep up.
        But, my DVD collection would already take some 5TB - more than three times my current

      • I do pretty much the same thing you do except it's not every 2 years, it's about twice a year. I have a bit over a TB of storage with only 180 gigs free, I have a "FTP" site sort of. Well if it was a site, it would be VERY popular, except for my upstream. I keep all kinds of FTP related stuff on it, a ton of MP3s, a bunch of episodes of my favorite shows (well cartoon shows, I don't download x-files episodes or anything.) A lot of ISOs, all kinds of stuff, and it always fills up my drive. And if it doe

  • Read/Write (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:28AM (#9919096) Homepage
    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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ColourlessGreenIdeas ( 711076 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:29AM (#9919097)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:29AM (#9919100)
    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.
  • Don't you guys know what will happen?!?! If a memory card in a small enough form factor reaches 2TB, the universe will implode on itself! That's just too small for that much data!

  • Just a new format (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tji ( 74570 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:33AM (#9919124)
    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by grunt107 ( 739510 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:35AM (#9919130)
    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).
    • 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).

      Rare?!? How about every time I bring my digicam home from vacation and copy my 2TB of pictures to my hard drive?
      My 200GB Hard drive.
      Hrrrmmmmm

      --

  • XD picture card promise ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by adzoox ( 615327 ) * on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:36AM (#9919134) Journal
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by spiffturk ( 266880 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:36AM (#9919135)
    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 (Score:4, Funny)

    by epine ( 68316 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:41AM (#9919160)
    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! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AwesomeJT ( 525759 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:42AM (#9919162) Homepage
    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... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:45AM (#9919174)
    For my porn collection.
  • (I'm talking about the card itself, not the 2TB, as the headline is misleading), this sounds like an attempt to get around having to pay foriegn firms a licensing fee, much like EDVD, which is not used outside China. I will believe this when I see it, till then I'll remain skeptical. It could just be used as a way to leverage a lower licensing fee from SD cards.
  • Nice wording in the post, it should say a new card format with up to 2TB storage. Backwards compatability is always good but i cant help thinking 2TB addressing is not gonna be enough. Can this be used as a multi-purpose card? Things like PDAs and phones really need a couple of slots that can be used to plug in memory, wireless cards and other things and it needs to be a single standard - something like USB in a long card-shaped socket?

  • Hmmm, must be using really small atoms (Score:3, Interesting)

    by goneutt ( 694223 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @08:54AM (#9919211) Journal
    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.
  • This does offer intriguing possibilities, although the form factor just begs to be mounted on a credit-card sized carrier. Yeah, I know, SD & SmartMedia don't need to be any bigger physically, so why does this?

    Well, if it does reach the aforementioned 2TB limit, and if it's reasonably inexpensive, these things would replace DVDs in a fairly short order. At 2TB, you can have as high definition video as you can handle, bitrates be darned. Season box sets of your favorite show getting bulky? A 2TB car
    • The following is my wishlist for future computerish hardware:
      • Reliable, hellafast, terabyte solid state memory that uses very little juice.
      • High bandwidth wireless internet access in every 'civilized' place on earth. At least 56k wireless even in the boonies, or out in the woods.
        • Functionality of today's laptops packed into extremely small cell phone. I want to have a 'cell phone like' item that I use every day for ALL my computing and communication needs. It can also be my TiVo as long as I can use i
  • I really don't care about initial size. What would be nice if if you could stick say 4 of these in even an ATA raid you could expect massive perfomance gains that would go increase on the next faster interface up to SCSI320. With a 4 drive setup you could have a RAID5 for fault tolerance and failure and it would be so speedy in transfers that you wouldn't even notice. This would apply to software raid, and or hardware. Give me 4 200GB versions of these and I would be happy cause its not always siz that matt
  • Is that the one that comes pre-loaded with Duke Nukem : Forever?

    -Nano.
  • There are already something like SIX memory card formats, and these guys want to start ANOTHER one!?

    No thanks! I like to have an absolute minimum of formats. Smart Media is legacy. Sony's and Fuji's are kind of proprietary and uneccessary IMO. The only two relevant formats are CF and SD, in my opinion.

    I stick with CF just so I have all my devices accept all my CF devices. Sure, it is the biggest, but it is also the most flexible, most affordable, and I really don't think the size is too bad. I'd acc

  • These announcements happen all the time (Score:4, Informative)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @09:13AM (#9919323)
    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.
  • What they didn't say: it's about 4 feet long and weighs 300 pounds.

  • Dupe? (Score:2)

    by bolix ( 201977 )
    I submitted this on Friday?

    Is it still breaking geek "news"?

  • Uh-oh. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Asprin ( 545477 ) <(moc.oohay) (ta) (dlonrasg)> on Monday August 09, 2004 @09:33AM (#9919457) Homepage Journal

    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.)

    • Hmm, I have an ingenious solution for that. Don't take it out of your intended device. Just because a particular form factor allows for portability doesn't mean you have to use it that way. This is like saying hot swappable hard drives are bad, because what if I loose one.
  • I can't be the only one that immediately thought "iPod" when I read this news. Now if there can be another breakthough in battery technology to make my iPod last longer / not slowly die out, I would be a very happy camper.

    Yeah 2 TB would be excessive for music. But I am more interested in the tiny size than the massive storage. (Seriously, I can't imagine needing a terabyte ... but then I once thought 1 GB was an impossibly large amount of memory space. HAH! Wonder what comes after tera ...)

    With 2 TB I

  • and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter or IPO.
  • Even if initial storage densities do not allow a 2TB storage device in the first versions of the new format, 5 and 10GB devices could find a home in the next generation of games consoles. There's already been much talk of how the next XBox may not include a hard drive. Sony's plans on mass storage for the PS3 are less clear. But both of these consoles could make use of multigigabyte versions of the new memory card assuming their other specs are compatible with the console design goals.

    Granted, no one knows
  • What exactly is a miniSD [sandisk.com] card?
  • There is a slim chance that this could be the first nanotech RAM product. Any wagers?
  • Otherwise nobody is going to have enough memory to run Longhorn.

  • Don't be fooled again. (Score:2, Informative)

    by tuxlove ( 316502 )
    Notice how the article says "up to 2TB"? That doesn't mean they will be releasing 2TB cards any time soon. What it most likely means is that the hardware design supports up to 2TB of *addressing*. A 2TB memory card that size would be nothing short of earth shattering, and wouldn't be relegated to a 3-paragraph article on single website.

  • This is NOT a 2 terabyte memory card! (Score:4, Informative)

    by b1t r0t ( 216468 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @12:10PM (#9920813)
    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.

    • Just to be a bit more clear, this means that the 2TB limit probably has nothing to do at all with the physical limitations on the card, and is simply an addressing limitation (i.e. you can only address bytes up to 2TB, as the designers suspected that it was certain that nobody could ever manage to design a card with this form factor that addresses more than 2TB).

  • If it sounds too good to be true.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by retro128 ( 318602 ) on Monday August 09, 2004 @12:54PM (#9921229)
    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.
  • It sounds like a announcement of a new peripheral interface, not necessarily a memory card product announcement. And 2 tb in a memory card? Let's see .... with 1 gb SD memory cards going for $270 [gpscity.com], that 2tb card would only set me back a cool half $mil. Great! I'll take two.

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