Huge leap in SD memory capacity

Gosh.
Wasn't the moon landing done with less than a diskette (1.4mb).
The SD card represents alot of trips for cheese!:D

Just think how much data you could lose if you accidentally delete everything from the card or how long it will take to try and recover all that data lol

Cheers John

wow, makes the idea of a HDD in a laptiop pretty much redundant! imagine how much battery life will grow, on the back of that....NICE.

:D

No mention of likely cost then. What do you reckon - 2Tb - £2000 - £4000 ?

I think you need to read it very carefully:

In other words capacity *UP TO* 2TB, with the spec providing potentially very fast transfer speeds later this year. (Faster even than SxS, and much faster than P2, apparently!)

I expect to see max capacity doubling year on year as it has done for at least ten years, so I'd expect to see the 2TB card around 2015. (And probably then costing under £100.)

I certainly misread it as I (probably optimistically) hoped we would get huge flash storage devices later this year. However, I don't agree with your estimates for 2015 as I think that increased R+R will be going into its development and away from disk drives, wouldn't be surprised to get 1 TB in 2010.

We already seem to have hit the max limit for SDHC which is 32GB so, it will be interesting to see what sizes SDXC will debut at, probably 64GB but, hopefully it will be more.

Cheers John

I don't think the SDXC spec is really referring to any new technology in the form of the memory itself, but rther the ways of addressing and controlling it. Hence allowing larger sizes and faster reading/writing. I don't see anything in that release about a new form of storage, and in the absence of that think the doubling year on year is still probably the most likely bet.

I was recently turning out old papers and came across an old (exactly 10years) flyer and a 6 year receipt. The first talked of a huge CF card (32MB) for just under £200, and the latter was for a 512MB CF card for £149. They show quite high correlation with the doubling year on year rule, but I suppose you could argue that "past performance is no guarantee of future results". :)

Moore's Law certainly is still applying to storage and computing power. There's nothing in the news that even hints at a stop on it yet.

The capacity limit on any storage device is not the technology itself but the way it's implemented. Infocus is perfectly correct in saying that it's down to the way addresses are held in memory. 32-bit numbers can cope with up to 2G if signed, 4G if not signed. To handle bigger numbers that that needs more bits, and ways of dealing with them. 40-bit numbers can cope with 1T, and so 40-bit numbers are needed if stores are to get to Terrabyte size.

This is when I usually come in and quote my £100 half a meg ram for my amiga to bring it up to a stunning full meg. :)

Back a bit further, and I bought a 20MB hard drive for a 32k BBC Micro, for £500.

It will be interesting to visit this thread in 2010 to compare the capacities available with SDXC, hopefully I'm more right than you guys and SDXC will provide greater capacities (at a reasonable price) than would be available if following moore's law as I find flash memory one of the best advances in technology in recent years and look forward to it becoming larger,faster and more usefull.

Cheers John

Thats only £25 a MB. Mine was £200 a Mb. Am I the champ? :)

When I first went NL, having paid 2k for the "Fast" VideoMachine card I paid £4.2k +vat for the upgrade which included 2 x 4gig SCSI drives & that was in `96!

Some more info here

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/09/ssd_and_hdd_capacity_increases/

Bob, my £500 was for a hard drive, not RAM :)

The Register article seems to be even more pessimistic than me - assuming a 50% year on year increase rather than my 100%.

The actual examples I gave weren't intended as simply "look how cheap it used to be" but also as real examples of how closely reality has followed the predictions, and all with the same memory form (CF). Over the ten years I'm talking about:

Year Size Cost
1 32MB £199 (street price probably lower)
2 64MB
3 128MB
4 256MB Bought 512MB for £149
5 512MB
6 1GB
7 2GB
8 4GB
9 8GB
10(2008)16GB Around £80 on internet for 133x, dearer for faster.

and come 2009 we're just starting to see 32GB coming into the shops.

My dream machine was the 'Casablanca'
Never got one, they just seemed to vanish and I don't recall what size of drive it had.
There were two different models I think.

Cheers.

I know but we old'uns can't resist it. We will soon turn this into "you were lucky to have a cardboard box to live in" :)

My apologies, I didn't mean that critically, rather to draw attention to just how closely the examples show the real situation has followed the doubling predictions for at least ten years now.

As an old 'un myself, my own contribution to the cardboard box stories would be when I saw hard drives "only" costing about £1,000 for a full 9GB! And realising that was about 45 minutes of DV and hence editing on a computer may be becoming possible at home. But tell that to t'youth of today....

Sorry Barry but that makes it around £5 a Mb cheapskate. ;)

Call yourself old!?
Now when I were nobbut a lad, my mate confuscious created the abacus from 100 beads.
What did it cost...well in them days it olny cost...well about.. 100 beads!:D

Actually I went into IT 20 years ago with Natwest -I was aged about 30.
In those days Senior Managers in the business side of the bank were old gits, but my senior manager boss was about 24! Forthuately a good bloke and we still socialise even after seperate carear paths.

Our 'client' computers couldn't multitask - log in in one mode for PL1 mainframe programming, then log out out/in for multimate (word processing) etc.
Documenting a process would therefore be difficult as you couldn't just flick between applications like you can now. We did have a cardboard box though!

I CALL MYSELF OLD - My career in IT began (1964) by programming this machine - IBM 1401 8k memory. Note the cables draped over the top, which were used to connect punched card reader/printer/etc.

Dragging the Four Yorkshiremen back to the subject of memory cards ;) , will we see (say) 32GB cards continue in production for years, but at ever-falling prices or will we be stuck with the cheapest cards at (say) £15 but with growing capacity? I suppose the absolute price in GB/£ is the really important thing, but, as alluded to above, I'm a little anxious about risking too much precious footage on a single physical card. I'm wondering if cards really will be a replacement for tape, in the sense that you buy a dozen cards of roughly 1 - 2 hours capacity, record to them once then put them in the archive to be read back as required.

And on the subject of old technology, in my first programming job (c.1984) I used micro-computers that ran CP/M on Z80 chips. All very standard for the time, except the disc drives took 8" floppy discs. I'd never see such discs before, nor since.

Almsot 100% certain that we'll see capacity increase and price reduce at the same time. Look at what's happening in USB sticks, I still have a 256MB one that cost quite a lot 5 years ago, a 2GB stick that cost £9 at the Video Forum 2 years ago, and now there are 8GB sticks around for not much more (32GB sticks still cost a lot though).

The reason why capacity keeps going up is that technology advances allows for ever smaller single bit stores, so you get more of them on the same silicon die. Since the cost to make each die is about the same, the price should stay constant as complexity increases provided the individual device being made doesn't change size (and the format fixes that). But that isn't quite how it works because the yield goes down as the complexity goes up (some dies fail on test, usually dust). By the same reasoning, as the size of the individual storage cell goes down, the dimensions of the conductors on the chip go down, and the electrical capacitance goes down with it. This means the conductors can be driven at higher speeds, or with lower power consumption, or both. So, the bigger the capacity the faster they go and the cheaper they get, assuming that the yield problem is fixed.

You can see all this happening everywhere. The first storage cards used in Sony camcorders (the professional/broadcast ones) were like little handbags, small but very low data content, a few k. They didn't last long, and it's only in Digibetas that you still need them, but they were expensive at the time. The next generation of cameras uses Memory Stick, but the HDW range was designed to accept cards up to about 256 Meg if my memory's right. That was a lot at the time (early 1990s) but is tiny now, and it's very hard to find cards smalle nough to work in those HDWs. So Sony have had to change the software in the latest ones to accept the bigger cards. Panasonic went for SD, and have no size limitation that I've found, yet. And it makes sense to use card formats that work in several devices across the market, proprietary ones will always be expensive (P2, SxS).

Card capacity will carry on going up, prices will fall gently, and the smallest cards won't be made. Try finding a USB stick less than 1GB and you'll see what I mean.

Over the last ten years, you can reckon there has been a range of about 16:1 in the sizes of the biggest to smallest flash memory cards, and at the moment that's still holding true - approx 1GB to 16GB, and I expect the 1GB to start to fade away as the 32GB come along. Typically for CF the cost of the largest has been around the £150-£200 mark, the smallest around £15, and I've got a 10 year old flyer advertising £149.99 for a 32MB card. No, not a typo, 32 MEGAbytes, not GB! Looking at a shop I regularly use, their prices for Sandisk Extreme III CF are currently:

32GB £159.99
16GB £69.99
8GB £39.99
4GB £19.99
2GB £13.99 (and 1Gb seems to have already disappeared!)

I'd reckon the two most useful sizes at the moment are 8 and 16GB if you assume a 35Mbs data rate, as they equate to about 25 and 50 minutes. Give it another couple of years and they should have become the smallest sizes, so I'd then be expecting them to become the ones costing £10-20. That's when I'd say solid state acquisition has really come of age.

These are mid performance cards, rated at 160Mbs, and known to be capable of recording a 100Mbs video data stream - slower ones will obviously be cheaper, faster ones more expensive.