New SDXC spec promises 2 terabytes on a memory card

By Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 13 January 2009 04:07

Business IT - Technology

And it looks like the spec will include microSDXC. You really wouldn't want to drop a fingernail-sized card containing all that content!

Furthermore, the read/write speeds will also increase - initially to 104MBps, with 300MBps on the drawing board.

The Association reckons this will be fast enough to allow professional-level recording in compact consumer camcorders, as well as increasing the number of frames that can be shot per second by a digital camera.

It seems likely that the first products will arrive with 64G capacity (Panasonic has already announced such a device), but it only took manufacturers a couple of years to max out the SDHC spec with 32G cards.

As the capacity of flash memory increases, the market for disk drives in mobile devices decreases. For example, the iPod mini was built around a tiny disk drive, while its successor - the iPod nano - provides twice or four times the storage using flash memory, is generally more capable, and costs less.

And we've already seen microdrives (1 in hard drives packaged as Compact Flash cards providing up to 8G of storage) become superseded by flash memory for most applications.

The idea of a hard disk camcorder will likely soon be consigned to the clearance bin of history.