RSSToshiba to Double SD Capacity Again
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published November 20, 2006, 6:15 PM
Just five months after it announced the production of the first Secure Digital memory cards in 4GB capacity at Class 4 speed -- capable of writing up to 4MB per second -- Toshiba is pushing the envelope even further today with the announcement of an 8GB flash memory card in exactly the same form factor.
The 4GB Class 4 rollout last summer may have precipitated a resumed freefall in prices for NAND flash components, just as retailers were starting to see the fallout from 2005 finally start to taper off. While 8GB SD cards are presently available, they're typically Class 2, which allows for 2MB/sec writes. Average prices for Class 2 4GB SD cards currently center around the $150 mark.
Doubling the speed of an SD card isn't just to reduce the number of thumb twitches during important saves. With digital video becoming a prevalent feature in still cameras, manufacturers are looking to be able to encode high-quality video at real-time speeds.
When the storage media is too slow, a still camera with video capability can't shoot footage for too long without having to pause to catch up with the saving process. A doubled speed could enable much longer video footage, especially with tricky codecs like any of the many flavors of MPEG-2.
The rapid doubling of capacity contributes a great deal to analyses such as last week's figures from iSuppli, showing that while NAND flash prices worldwide dropped in the third calendar quarter by an annual rate of 22%, shipments per megabyte grew by an astounding 44%. Toshiba is the world's #2 NAND supplier, with 27.8% of the market versus Samsung's 43.1%, though Toshiba's revenue from NAND flash grew last quarter at an annual rate of 25.6%, to $849 million.
Toshiba said today that consumers should start to see 8GB Class 4 cards in stores by January.
The real question though; how much longer do we have to wait for solid state HD's?
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Not too long I hope... 30GB models seem to have been developed... not on the market quite yet though:
http://www.tomshardware....l_hard_drive_obsoletism/
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They're already available if you wanna pay thousands of dollars for a low latency, mediocre throughput, medium-low capacity HDD replacement. Just do a search on Google for "flash ide drive".
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I guess you consider this slow?:
http://www.theinquirer.n...ault.aspx?article=28647
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No, I was talking about flash-based drives that have 2.5" and 3.5" form factors, and actually act as IDE devices (literal HDD replacements). Not an expansion card based ram-drive. Seen those before though, they sound great but I'd really rather not have a power outage wipe out all my saved data.
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TMS have RamSan drives at a little over 60GB which are available now. They've been around for a while. :P
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...they sound great but I'd really rather not have a power outage wipe out all my saved data.
Agreed on that last point. Anything saved after the last boot could be lost, but that's what my battery backup is for. ;-)
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Nice. I wonder though if they'll ever have a limit. I remember back in the day when the had only 8mb and 16mb.
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All I wonder is what do you do if you lose them. or accidentally drop them, and lose them or break them.
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You're a funny man. Please write another comment I need another good laugh.
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lol...
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well , if you loose them you loose them. what do you do? well up to you. you can shed some tears a bit mourning the loss of your data if you want. then you can either buy another one or not
simple!
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Same thing you do when you lose or break anything you paid a lot for:
Cry.
...or... you could just buy a new one, and load it with the last backup you made of the original. You do make backups, don't you?
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