2Terabyte SD Cards! OMG!!

Just when ya thought it was amazing that we have 32 Gigabyte cards read this:

2TB SD Cards

Yes I titled it correctly - 2 terabyte SDXC cards! Aint technology amazing!!

I may never have to change cards again!

That's insane! I remember my first P&S camera came with a 32megabyte card. I promptly paid a pretty heafty sum for a 256MB card and was in heaven!

2TB doesn't really tickle my fancy all that much for photography reasons. I can't imagine ever wanting to have that much info on any single card. It does seem promising for external storage though. It would be a very compact, secure, and fast way to back up files and do away with external HD's and burning DVD's for archiving purposes. Interesting stuff though.

I showed my grandpa an ipod-touch a while back, and he was totally blown away. He said he never could have imagined such a thing. I just wonder what will have the same effect on me by the time I'm his age.

, wow. Very cool.

Holy cow!

I have more confidence in DVDs than flash memory for long term storage/backup. It's probably going to be a while before the cameras can support that much storage though...?

I would never use a card anywhere near that large. Filling it with the thousands of pictures it should hold would be as insane as mailing 1000 rolls of slide film for developing IN ONE PACKAGE. I would rather keep track of 500 4GB cards than risk the failure or loss of 1 2TB card.

Haha - in the technology sphere... never say never...

It wasn't so long ago that we were all saying that we'd rather use a bunch of .5GB or 1GB cards in preference to those monster 4GB cards because a failure of the larger card would result in more lost images. Yep, I can see where we'll eventually (when pricing is reasonable) be using the TB cards without even blinking an eye.

Meanwhile, I do like Aaron's idea for using them as archival storage. In my experience, optical media like CD/DVD are incredibly prone to damage and failure.

Just in time for your HD movies...how many minutes would that be?

Kevin

Kevin, here's a quote from an online tech journal article:

"With SD cards capable of up to 2 TB of storage, consumers can store 100 HD movies, 480 hours of HD recording or 136,000 hi-res photos and more than 4,000 RAW images on one chip"

For more reading:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sd-hd-movies,6796.html

Thanks, Geoff. I gotta say, though, that quote from the website of what you could put on the chip (read it to see what I mean). Couldn't they think of something better to keep on this new chip?

So I guess Canon's decision to stay with the CF size for the 5DM2 means owners won't be able to use it anytime soon?

I've got time to wait, I ain't buying a new camera soon (the prices of bodies drop like a rock).

Kevin

Kevin, I saw the quote you are referring to. I deliberately sped over it...

I imagine that the memory chip used in the SD formats could be designed in to a CF format package. The limiting factor is probably the CF physical interface which is currently ATA (like older hard drives) and isn't up to handling the greater transfer speeds and memory capacities of the 2TB chip. So, while you might be able to put the 2TB chip into a CF package, it will run slower than it could and you'd address much less of its available memory.
Perhaps the new CFast cards due out later this year will solve those problems but they won't just plug in to your 5DM2.

Looks like it is still about 5 years down the road though. I think this would have more relevance to the computer industry than cameras. There is a technological limit to how many mega-pixels you can theoretically fit on a small sensor or even full frame sensor. Besides the maximum resolving power of lenses that fit on SLR cameras, there is a point where more mega-pixels for the sensor size will just create too much noise to make it worthwhile. At some point photographers may not need any more storage capacity because they can already make huge prints with what they got. However, being able to store large amounts of data without the moving parts of hard drive is going to be a big thing for the computer industry. It will transmit data faster and will eliminate the risk of your laptop hard drive getting scratched if you move the computer while the hard drive is spinning. Apple already has this type of drive available in their MacBook Pro. It is called the solid state drive but it is a very expensive $500 upgrade for only 128GB of storage. The solid state drive is essentially made up of computer ram. I could also see CD/DVD/Bluray disks eventually being replaced with small removable disks which do not need to spin and have no moving parts.

I could see a lot of relevance for camera applications. Imagine if I could go on a 2 week photo trip and not have to worry about offloading my camera flash to the offline storage devices. If the camera took these microSD cards with 2TB capacity, and was able to do so such that 2 flash cards could be slotted and run in a RAID 1 configuration, I'd be a pretty happy camper. No fooling around with swapping out cards and the security of an additional data backup.

wow, an in-camera RAID... now that would be some useful innovation.

Information overload! Information Overload!
geez.....

Good grief! My brain wants to explode! OTOH I love to hear all you guys talk about this stuff and the different ideas for the application of the new technology as well as what could be in the future.