2 TB cards -- WHAT?!

[imtrashed]

http://www.digitalpixels.net/2009/01/photo-gear/sdxc-memory-cards-providing-up-to-2-terabytes-of-storage/

[Smitty2001]

holy cow -

"A 2TB SDXC memory card can store 100 HD movies, 60 hours of HD recording or 17,000 fine-grade photos."


Wonder how much those suckers are...

[FlyingPhotog]

holy cow -

"A 2TB SDXC memory card can store 100 HD movies, 60 hours of HD recording or 17,000 fine-grade photos."


Wonder how much those suckers are...

When it goes Tango Uniform on you and you lose every single image from a week-long trip...

Now how much would you pay? ;)

[Anke]

That is insane! Why would you need the capacity in the field for 17,000 shots too?

[ben_r_]

Ha ha! i saw that on engadget! Pretty cool stuff!

[Mystwalker]

"2TB"? UH! WHAT?!

That is sick for a SD card.

I do not even have that much storage on my computer.

[jgrussell]

When it goes Tango Uniform on you and you lose every single image from a week-long trip... Now how much would you pay? ;)Precisely the reason why I took a bunch of 4Gb cards with me to Africa instead of fewer 8Gb or 16Gb cards!

[Balliolman]

= all eggs in 1 basket ...

[talbot_sunbeam]

Some of you might be missing the point. That article is *not* about a 2TB SD card. it's about a new SDXC *specification*, which *allows* for up to a 2TB filesystem.

A 2TB SD card at this point is not practical, and certainly not affordable. However, the new spec allows for it, to give room for future expansion.

Who knows - we are routinely using 4-16gig cards now. In a few years time, we could be recording 24-bit, 50mp images as standard, and typically using 64-256gig cards.

Add to automatic HDR functions (every shot you take, the camera automatically records the -2,0,+2 exposures), and especially HD video, and you can see where the space requirements would go.

Heck, in just fifteen years I've gone from a computer with 2 megs of ram and a 20meg harddrive, to a computer with 4gigs of ram and hard drive space of 1.5 terabytes. it adds up pretty quick!

[Sasquatch41]

My smallest cf card is 2 gig, and my first computer harddrive had 580mb. What a speedy computer if it had a 2tb solid state harddrive. What advances in technology huh. oh yea, my first digital camera was a Sony Mavica which stored pictures on floppy discs, then transferred to the computer.

[Jon]

580 MB? Mine was 5 MB . . . That was after I moved from dual 90 KB FDDs, later upgraded to 180 KB DSDD FDDs.

[Sean]

Interesting. I think this is the standard that kills CF. That's my prediction, and I am sticking with it.

[zeva]

580 MB? Mine was 5 MB . . . That was after I moved from dual 90 KB FDDs, later upgraded to 180 KB DSDD FDDs.


psh my first hard drive i boought my self was a 160gb :)

[Jon]

psh my first hard drive i boought my self was a 160gb :)Well, if you really want to brand yourself as a N00B . . .

[4g63photo]

WOW! You guys are OLLLLLDDDDD!!!!!! HAHAHA. Jk. You guys rock!

[zeva]

yup i is noob! atleast i didnt say the first Drive i bought was a 1.5Tb =D i m probably 1/2 ur age though maybe towards 1/3...

[zeva]

haha i m probably same age as you if not younger... probably younger lol

WOW! You guys are OLLLLLDDDDD!!!!!! HAHAHA. Jk. You guys rock!

[Paul J McCain]

holy cow -

"A 2TB SDXC memory card can store 100 HD movies, 60 hours of HD recording or 17,000 fine-grade photos."


Wonder how much those suckers are...
LOL better thing to think about is how much the 8GBs would be once these come out... :lol:

EDIT: Nevermind, guess it's not happening now that I actually read the article. Now they can just bind a 2000 GB-size book, they still can't write it...

[teo-bingus]

Interesting. I think this is the standard that kills CF. That's my prediction, and I am sticking with it.
I hope not, SD cards feel like a plaything in my giant mitts. I greatly prefer a cf card for the simple ability to handle it easier.

[tundraman]

SD and SDHC card are here to stay. This card has already taken over most of the CF cards in other electronic markets. What will I do with all of my old CF cards. :( Dont be fooled by the speed either. SD cards will surpass CF cards in the near future. Market demand will prove this theory.

[dithiolium]

Just that the new format supports up to 2TB. Not that it will be available anytime soon. Besides it will cost a bomb in the near future with all the licensing.
I seriously doubt the current memory chip technology can support such density.
In the future P&S will have 1-2 GigaPickel sensors to warrant the need for 2TB.

SDXC may be the way forward, but a little static on the metal connects and all your data goes 'POOF!'

Life is like star trek - Make it so!

[tundraman]

Just that the new format supports up to 2TB. Not that it will be available anytime soon. Besides it will cost a bomb in the near future with all the licensing.
I seriously doubt the current memory chip technology can support such density.
In the future P&S will have 1-2 GigaPickel sensors to warrant the need for 2TB.

SDXC may be the way forward, but a little static on the metal connects and all your data goes 'POOF!'

Life is like star trek - Make it so!


Yep, I agree with most of what you are saying but take a look at the growth rate in the flash media market. You will be amazed at the growth over the past year or so. Flash media is starting to find it's way into data storage like never before. Now having said that, I see no reason why a SDHX card of this capacity would be needed anytime soon for digital cameras. Now in other markets requiring a small, large capacity storage card.....SDXC might be available before you know it. Only time and market direction will tell.

[nadtz]

What will I do with all of my old CF cards.

heh, I still have old flash cards that were used in routers and what not. For some applications CF will stick around for a good long while. Considering the size of most DSLR's a CF slot is no big deal, I hope CF stays for the majority of DSLR's for the near future.

[tkbslc]

This is just a spec design. Reminds me of the spec for the Ultrium (LTO) backup tape design. (I work in I.T.) In 1999 they came out saying that the LTO spec provided for tapes with up to 1.2TB each!. I was very excited, but then the first LTOs came out at 100/200GB. It is just this past year you can get the 1.2TB tapes. So that is almost 10 years. I wouldn't hold my breath on a 2TB SD card within 5 years. They have still not fit 2TB on a 3.5" regular hard drive yet. (although they are at 1.5TB)

[tundraman]

This is just a spec design. Reminds me of the spec for the Ultrium (LTO) backup tape design. (I work in I.T.) In 1999 they came out saying that the LTO spec provided for tapes with up to 1.2TB each!. I was very excited, but then the first LTOs came out at 100/200GB. It is just this past year you can get the 1.2TB tapes. So that is almost 10 years. I wouldn't hold my breath on a 2TB SD card within 5 years. They have still not fit 2TB on a 3.5" regular hard drive yet. (although they are at 1.5TB)

Are you sure about the 2TB 3.5's? I am in the data storage industry. You will be surprised in the near future. :) Hint hint.....

[zeva]

Id be scared to put this kinda memory in my camera... even if you could salvage it.. imagine how llong it would takE!

[tkbslc]

Are you sure about the 2TB 3.5's? I am in the data storage industry. You will be surprised in the near future. :) Hint hint.....

Well OK, they currently do not sell 2TB hard drives!

either way, it still makes my point. If we have barely hit 2TB on 2-3 3" spinning platters, how long will it take to fit it into a 1" square?

[tundraman]

Well OK, they currently do not sell 2TB hard drives!

either way, it still makes my point. If we have barely hit 2TB on 2-3 3" spinning platters, how long will it take to fit it into a 1" square?


;) What about SSD's.....

[jrm27]

Even though this is all spec, I would (currently) have little/no use for this in a camera. However, I'd take a couple of these cards, place them in a card reader, and have 4 TB of storage for my computer! Wouldn't take up space like a big external drive, and would be far more portable. Filling a laptop with these instead of a regular hard drive would really help bring portable electronics to much smaller sizes too.

I think this could be a gret development if it were to ever take place!

[zeva]

Hmmm... I know of people putting Programs on a 2gb sd with an ISO so they can use that instead of a CD drive but i think when these come back 4tb will be like nothing... we will be probably in the hundreds of t b

[StarJack]

Technology. Jeeze. My first HD was a 10 MB drive for a C-64. Anybody remember, Load "*",8,1 ? :lol:

100 MB on my first pc drive. When I hit the big time and started a BBS with 33mhz 486 CPU's (bleeding edge!) I bought a Maxtor Panther SCSI drive, 1500MB for $1500. :shock:

Now we have 2 TB data cards, and the speed, " speeds to 104 megabytes per second this year, with a road map to 300 megabytes per second."

:cool:

[rasmussen4]

Geez, I didn't think I was old, but I remember paying $120 for a 40-meg hard-card (yeah a hard-drive attached to an internal ISA card) and it being a great deal with tons of extra space. Then again, I cut my teeth on the old Commodore 64 too, which was all about the tape drives. And yes, StarJack, the old Load commands were awesome. I've played with a few emulators and had to refresh myself on the syntax. Woot woot!

[nealhumphris]

This is just getting silly now.

Memory cards with a bigger capacity than the current largest HDD, although it will be a while for compatible devices to come out, as with SDHC for a while.

[pendulum15]

Soon enough P+Ss will be 200MP, and produce massive files, and harddrives will be like 500TB+ and it will be normal to have 4TB RAM, it is just forward thinking :)

[Master-9]

My my first digital camera was a Sony Mavica which stored pictures on floppy discs, then transferred to the computer.

Me too....I thought that was so cool back then:D:D

http://di1.shopping.com/images1/pi/fe/1b/01/150132-177x150-0-0_Sony_Mavica_MVC_FD75.jpg

[superdiver]

OH BABY, the future looks bright...

anytime they come out with some CRAZY uneeded tech stuff you KNOW someones going to build something WAY COOL to fit it! I cant wait to see what it is!

[tkoutdoor]

My smallest cf card is 2 gig, and my first computer harddrive had 580mb. What a speedy computer if it had a 2tb solid state harddrive. What advances in technology huh. oh yea, my first digital camera was a Sony Mavica which stored pictures on floppy discs, then transferred to the computer.Teheee! I've got you beat. My first computer didn't have a hard drive. It had one 5.25" 1.2MB floppy for the OS and the other for the data (acting as a HDD). Having a second floppy was something of an "upgrade". :-) Computers in that day would also load the OS into RAM via only one 5.25" floppy, then pull the floppy and use that drive for the data storage. If it needed to access some part of the OS that was required from the disk it would ask you to reinsert the disk and then go back to the other disk to store the data when you needed to. It had an IBM 8088 chip so that's essentially the equivalent of a IBM "186" system I guess you could say as the next system was the IBM 286.

FWIW the filesystem on any flash device I've found so far isn't stable enough to merit holding any significant amount of data. It's always at risk of having some file system glitch disabling your ability to retrieve the data. Yes, you can format the card and be happy again to go out and shoot some more (at the same risks), but the file systems just don't merit going that high currently. I keep hoping they'll improve the file system for flash storage devices as that would be a major step in the right direction.

[tkoutdoor]

580 MB? Mine was 5 MB . . . That was after I moved from dual 90 KB FDDs, later upgraded to 180 KB DSDD FDDs.Oh yeah, I forgot about those floppies. I think there's a moth in my vacuum toobs. ;)

[strmrdr]

Teheee! I've got you beat. My first computer didn't have a hard drive. It had one 5.25" 1.2MB floppy for the OS and the other for the data (acting as a HDD). Having a second floppy was something of an "upgrade". :-) Computers in that day would also load the OS into RAM via only one 5.25" floppy, then pull the floppy and use that drive for the data storage. If it needed to access some part of the OS that was required from the disk it would ask you to reinsert the disk and then go back to the other disk to store the data when you needed to. It had an IBM 8088 chip so that's essentially the equivalent of a IBM "186" system I guess you could say as the next system was the IBM 286.

FWIW the filesystem on any flash device I've found so far isn't stable enough to merit holding any significant amount of data. It's always at risk of having some file system glitch disabling your ability to retrieve the data. Yes, you can format the card and be happy again to go out and shoot some more (at the same risks), but the file systems just don't merit going that high currently. I keep hoping they'll improve the file system for flash storage devices as that would be a major step in the right direction.

The first computer I owned used a tape drive and that was it.

[tkoutdoor]

The first computer I owned used a tape drive and that was it.What did those old Apple TRS 80's use? Do you remember? I never used one, but that's what they had in school in the 70's for those who got to "use" a computer. Found it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Hardware It's a tape drive.

[zeva]

Wow i feel like a total nub! :O o well i am hahaha you guys all got me beat!

[Karl Johnston]

That is insane! Why would you need the capacity in the field for 17,000 shots too?

National geographic wildlife photographers

[randy.wick]

Hmm... When you talk about 17,000 shots in the field, regardless the photographer, you run dangerously close to just a couple dozen shoots running past the rated lifetime of the shutter in even the 1Ds Mk III (300,000, right?). So is the answer to focus not so much on higher and higher capacity (and faster, ala SDXC) storage, but instead on other limiting factors such as a CMOS sensor that behaves more like a CCD, insofar as it captures without the need for a shutter? In other words, is developing a standard capable of handling 2TB cards essentially building a Walmart-sized parking lot at a CVS? I'm always interested to see technology develop, so this makes me excited to see what changes on the camera side to "catch up." Maybe HD video is already that...

Technology. Jeeze. My first HD was a 10 MB drive for a C-64. Anybody remember, Load "*",8,1 ?
I don't remember mine having a hard drive at all! But I was just a kid then, and my parents gave me the C-64 as a gift. I would mistype often and get "press play on tape," and be dumbfounded because I had no tape! But I sure used to play that firefighter game a lot... :)

[bwolford]

When it goes Tango Uniform on you and you lose every single image from a week-long trip...

Now how much would you pay? ;)

When it goes Tango Uniform, what the heck does that mean? Is it military?

[bwolford]

Well OK, they currently do not sell 2TB hard drives!

either way, it still makes my point. If we have barely hit 2TB on 2-3 3" spinning platters, how long will it take to fit it into a 1" square?

I did just buy a 1.5TB drive. We used to sell this to the phone company for $1,000,000. I got it for $149.00.

[tkoutdoor]

When it goes Tango Uniform, what the heck does that mean? Is it military?
LOL! It's the code that air traffic control uses (and the military to I presume) when they are trying to spell something over the air. It goes like this:

A: Alfa
B: Bravo
C: Charlie
D: Delta
E: Echo
F: Foxtrot
G: Gulf
H: Hotel
I: India
J: Juliet
K: Kilo
L: Lima
M: Mike
N: November
O:Oscar
P: Papa
Q: Quebec
R: Romeo
S: Sierra
T: Tango
U: Uniform
V: Victor
W: Whiskey
X: X-ray
Y: Yankee
Z: Zulu

I'm presuming that code is accurate, I haven't verified it. It's a quick Inet grab. Now, Imagine a colorful phrase that begins with T & U and you will start to see his point of view. I'm not gonna define that part, but let's just say it's a subtle bit of cussing that most folks wouldn't even notice. ;)

[Karl Johnston]

Hmm... When you talk about 17,000 shots in the field, regardless the photographer, you run dangerously close to just a couple dozen shoots running past the rated lifetime of the shutter in even the 1Ds Mk III (300,000, right?).

Key word is rated, remember, they last far more than that. Shutters are a cheap replacement

[thull]

I can definitely see the need for a 2 TB SD card

HD video cameras will see hours upon hours of recording

Laptops could have multi-TB RAID arrays with phenomenal speed and compact size

etc etc

Nothing wrong with extra capacity - especially when it doesn't have a downside

[pendulum15]

Key word is rated, remember, they last far more than that. Shutters are a cheap replacement

And often they last far less than that.

[zeva]

LOL! It's the code that air traffic control uses (and the military to I presume) when they are trying to spell something over the air. It goes like this:

A: Alfa
B: Bravo
C: Charlie
D: Delta
E: Echo
F: Foxtrot
G: Gulf
H: Hotel
I: India
J: Juliet
K: Kilo
L: Lima
M: Mike
N: November
O:Oscar
P: Papa
Q: Quebec
R: Romeo
S: Sierra
T: Tango
U: Uniform
V: Victor
W: Whiskey
X: X-ray
Y: Yankee
Z: Zulu

I'm presuming that code is accurate, I haven't verified it. It's a quick Inet grab. Now, Imagine another phrase that would begin each letter with T & U and you will start to see his point of view. I'm not gonna define that part, but let's just say it's a subtle bit of cussing that most folks wouldn't even notice. ;)

lol some of those are so random...

[FOX2PRO]

Ah you people, with your fancy storage. I'm still using a 2GB card, which I am forced to dump to a laptop every 100 shots or so.

[Scott_Quier]

lol some of those are so random...

Not so random. The intent is to provide a means of communicating over a transmission medium with very limited fidelity. No two words anything close to each other, thus limiting/eliminating confusion.

[zeva]

Oh that makes sense.. But i mean most of the words have no relation.. except for the greek letters

[c2thew]

whoa, this is madness. this is a HUGE jump in storage space. normally it goes 32mb, 128mb, 512, 1gb, 2gb, 3gb, 4gb, 16gb (which is where we are about now) 32 gb,.................... 2tb.

someone in the technology department finally set to cut the crap of small increments and to dominate the market with a whopping 2tb.

this might be the end for compact flash cards. if canon sticks with cf while sdxc cards are available, canon will probably be in serious trouble. especially since nikon runs on sdhc cards.

[tkoutdoor]

whoa, this is madness. this is a HUGE jump in storage space. normally it goes 32mb, 128mb, 512, 1gb, 2gb, 3gb, 4gb, 16gb (which is where we are about now) 32 gb,.................... 2tb.

someone in the technology department finally set to cut the crap of small increments and to dominate the market with a whopping 2tb.

this might be the end for compact flash cards. if canon sticks with cf while sdxc cards are available, canon will probably be in serious trouble. especially since nikon runs on sdhc cards.If one card format can do it, the other's not going to be far behind. Don't think of it as an end, think of it as a new beginning! ;)

[c2thew]

CF cards are coming out at 60 and 100gb. only 900 gbs to go.

[vibin247]

I hope they can make those SDXC cards more durable. You know how easy it is to bend an SD card? Or even expose it to static electricity? A real nightmare if you're trying to recover data from those things.

[flyinbrian]

well with oakley calming a 240+ megapixel cam aka scarlet coming out soon, 2 tb might be pretty small