New Storage Card Standard Increases Capacities

Written by Adam Gosling

Thursday, 20 July 2006

SanDisk has released a new SD card based on the new SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) standard which will allow capacities all the way up to 32GB. The new storage cards, based on the SD Association 2.0 specifications requires different readers to access the data and can not be used with legacy equipment. SanDisk's first SDHC card is ‘only' 4GB, but this is a doubling of the capacity possible from the old standard which allowed only 2GB of data. SanDisk is bundling in a USB 2.0 card reader capable of accessing both SDHC and SD cards, but existing cameras and other devices will not be able to write to the cards. The cards look identical in size and shape, so you will need to look for the SDHC logo to tell the difference. Legacy SD host devices and SD cards (up to 2GB) are FAT 16 file system compatible, while the new SD 2.00 file system specification defines a SD FAT 32 file system for the new SDHC host devices and cards. Data corruption can occur if the new cards are used in legacy equipment. The new cards are rated Class 2 for speed and performance and can store more than 2,000 high-resolution pictures, more than 1,000 digital songs or up to 8 hours of MPEG 4 video. The SD Association has defined three speed classes for speed and performance capabilities. Class 2 = 2MBps; Class 4 - 4MBps and Class 6 = 6MBps. Susan Park, retail product marketing manager at SanDisk said, "Demand for high capacity cards continues to increase as storage-intensive applications such as digital cameras and digital video camcorders capable of taking high-resolution pictures and recording high-quality video clips come into the mainstream." The new SanDisk 4GB SDHC won't be available in Australia until the fourth Quarter. Pricing will be announced closer to the launch date. For additional information, please visit SanDisk's website: What is SDHC: www.sandisk.com/sdhc/SDHC.pdf SDHC product information: www.sandisk.com/sdhc/ www.sdcard.org Related news items ASUS A686/696 GPS PDA -23/08/2007 Optus, Vodafone Adopt A New Windows Smartphone -08/08/2007 Qantas Gets Go Ahead For Cell Phone Trial -18/04/2007 SAGEM my401C Gets Pretty In Pink -10/04/2007 Palm To Update Treo 750 OS -27/03/2007 Newer news items Flash Phone Storage Hits 4GB As It Heads For 32GB -14/09/2006 External Storage For Your Phone -21/08/2006 AOL To Offer Free On-Line Back-Up -05/08/2006 Toshiba Set To Ramp MicroSD Production -20/07/2006 Fastest CF Cards Now 40MBps Read/Write -20/07/2006 Older news items 8GB 133X CompactFlash From Lexar -19/07/2006 Solid State Drives Could Replace Hard Drives -17/07/2006 Run Windows Apps From Your USB Drive -13/07/2006 Webaroo Offers Online Content Offline -10/04/2006 TRANSFLASH APPROVED BY SDA -13/07/2005 Tag This Now: