RSSToshiba Announces 32GB Memory Card
by BetaNews Staff
Days after announcing the industry's largest notebook hard drive with a capacity of 320GB, Toshiba says it will ship early next year a 32GB memory card for cameras and digital audio players. In the SDHC format, the card will have a Class 4 rating, the middle level offering 4MB/sec. transfer speeds.
In addition, Toshiba announced a 16GB SDHC card that is due out in October, along with an 8GB microSDHC card for mobile phones and other small devices that will ship in January. Pricing for the new memory cards was not given, but Toshiba will likely make an announcement regarding the 32GB and 8GB cards at CES 2008 early next year.
9 Comments
Dont get to big on the solid state storage. Once those puppies go there is no way anyone can do any data recovery.
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Generally more reliable than spinning media though. And it's not like it's cheap to recover a crashed HDD, particularly if it needs to be taken apart to recover data ($1k+).
As always, backup is the cheap and easy solution.
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...offering 4MB/sec. transfer speeds
Yuck. For a memory card that size, it had better have at least 10MBps write speed. I know it's possible. I have a 2GB SD card with 18MBps write speed.
EDIT:
Lets assume you get exactly 32 metric gigabytes (1GB = 1000MB). That would mean it would take nearly 2 and a quarter hours to fill that drive.
32000MB / 4MBps / 60 (seconds) / 60 (minutes) = 2.22 Hours.
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The class tells you that the card will sustain those speeds throughout the card. I know that several cheap SD cards that will copy 15-20 MB/s sequentially but when they are read random the speeds will vary widely. A class 6 SDHC should have a minimum sustained speed of 6 MB/s. Just because it a class 6 doesn't mean that it can't read faster.
While SDHC cards generally aren't as fast as SD cards I am sure cost is certainly a factor. 32GB of flash memory isn't cheap. Getting 32GB of fast flash memory would be more than what most consumer would be willing or able to pay. Despite that caveat I wish higher speed cards were available for those willing to pay a premium.
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For the record, I wasn't talking about a "cheap" SD card:
http://www.kingston.com/flash/sdultimate.asp?id=2
I understand that putting more memory in the same small flash memory card is exponentially more expensive, and your last sentence sums up how I feel exactly:
Despite that caveat I wish higher speed cards were available for those willing to pay a premium.
If someone's going to pay a premium for more memory, they're probably willing to pay a premium to have that memory be efficiently usable.
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What kind of premium? 10 times as much? Because I suspect realistically that's the cost Toshiba would be looking at to do a limited run of these huge capacity cards for a niche market. Not to mention the technology may not even be available to make very high-speed media with large capacities.
It's easy to say that'd you'd pay extra for the next level of technology, but realistically, most people won't and those that will underestimate how much extra it would really cost.
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I may be going slightly mad, but I thought 32GB was already out.
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I might be wrong too, but I haven't even seen any 16GB cards available to consumers yet.
EDIT:
*smacks forehead*
It says right in the article the 16GB card is coming in October.
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I think it's because they announced it that SDHC can support 32gb's. But they haven't actually released it yet. I don't think 16gb is even out yet.
I remember one of my first computers having a 60mb hard drive (yep mb, not gb).
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