6GB CompactFlash!?

[Janak Parekh]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://forum.sorobangeeks.com/viewtopic.php?t=1828' target='_blank'>http://forum.sorobangeeks.com/viewtopic.php?t=1828</a><br /><br /></div>Pretec, who seemed to be one-upped by <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=9584">Lexar's 4GB CF announcement</a>, is rumored to be announcing a 6GB card sometime around CeBIT. <a href="http://akiba.sorobangeeks.com">SorobanGeeks</a> has a picture:<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/parekh/news/pretec-6gb-cf.jpg" /><br /><br />I've got one word if this is true: 8O This might be just a picture of a sticker on a piece of plastic right now, but I'm glad they're not slowing down in pushing size limits.

[pocketpcdude1024]

:shocked!: This is amazing! Of course, I've opted for an SD-only PDA, but ...6GB! This is 48x the capacity of my SD card and I haven't used it all up yet! Bravo, Pretec! :D

[Sheynk]

:shocked!: This is amazing! Of course, I've opted for an SD-only PDA, but ...6GB! This is 48x the capacity of my SD card and I haven't used it all up yet! Bravo, Pretec! :D

I second that.... wow

2 of those and you got my current HD!

now make a ppc that can play any video @ 35 fps and were set!

[Jonathan1]

6GB!!! 8O This is a definitely a W?BIC? device. Then again I have about 30GBs of MP3’s so keep em coming guys. :)



From time to time I have a dream about going back in time to when the only hard drive based storage was only held by the military on these huge drums the size of telephone polls. (I think at most they held something like a few hundred KB of info.) Walked up to one of the techs that is so proud of their accomplishment and shove a 512MB CF in their face and run off laughing.
The people who were involved in the first hard drives have to feel a mix of pride that they started all this but at the same time utter astonishment at how pathetic those devices were in comparison to recent advancements.

[pocketpcdude1024]

6GB!!! 8O This is a definitely a W?BIC? device. Then again I have about 30GBs of MP3’s so keep em coming guys. :)

You need 5 of these then! :lol:

[toshtoshtosh]

Hard disk size Flash makes me think: Would be nice if there was a way to 'lock' your CF card into your device, so that a random person can't just pull it out when you're not watching.

(unrelated to size of CF maybe, but losing 10GB of data sounds worse than losing 128MB of mp3s).

[jdhill]

From time to time I have a dream about going back in time to when the only hard drive based storage was only held by the military on these huge drums the size of telephone polls. (I think at most they held something like a few hundred KB of info.) Walked up to one of the techs that is so proud of their accomplishment and shove a 512MB CF in their face and run off laughing.
The people who were involved in the first hard drives have to feel a mix of pride that they started all this but at the same time utter astonishment at how pathetic those devices were in comparison to recent advancements.
Yup, takes me back to about 1970. University of Utah. Univac 1108. FastRand Drum. Punched cards. Line printers.

And now we have all of that room full of computing power in the palm of our hand !!!

[pro_worm]

Remember every single movie about some amazing futuristic universe in which data was held on a plastic "card"? Remember how amazingly improbable it seemd? Hard to imagine that we are not only approaching that stage - we have completely and totally reached it. You can actually store everything - from several hundred rolls of film worth of photos, to entire discotecs worth of music, to the blueprints for the next Audi, on a card the size of your thumb.
And you can do it today.
Yowsers 8O

[Daimaou]

I've got one word if this is true: 8O This might be just a picture of a sticker on a piece of plastic right now, but I'm glad they're not slowing down in pushing size limits.

Well I take this Info from Reuters and form here, so must be quite sure ;)

The tapeless MPEG-4 digital camcorder from Pretec in 2003 is another revolutionary product in the industry; with Pretec 6GB CF card, the highest capacity flash memory card in the world, MPEG-4 digital camcorder can store up to 30 hours of movie with VHS TV quality at 30fps.

*Note: Pretec(TM), CompactI/O(TM) are trademarks of Pretec Electronics Corp. All other trademarks mentioned herein are recognized as the property of their respective holders.

Source: BUSINESS WIRE 02/03/2003

[Pony99CA]

The important detail was left out. What will the price be? :-D

Steve

[Janak Parekh]

The important detail was left out. What will the price be? :-D
If you need to ask... :lol:

--janak

[pro_worm]

One Miiillion Dollars :twisted:

[Ed Hansberry]

The important detail was left out. What will the price be? :-D

Steve
Oh, $2,500 no doubt. :cry:

[Gamma Ray]

Daimaou, don't get too far ahead of yourself, that camera uses SD cards so figure 512MBs if you have a lot of money, 256MBs if you have less. And before you start getting real nuts, remember that Jason just trashed Pretec on their CF Cam and someone he quoted actually used the words "Crap" and "Unmitigated poo!" In other words, you should wait until the camera is available and/or reviewed. Hey, they don't even have a picture up on their site and they just got back from a major photo show. Can you say "Vaporware?"

[Daimaou]

Daimaou, don't get too far ahead of yourself, that camera uses SD cards so figure 512MBs if you have a lot of money, 256MBs if you have less. And before you start getting real nuts, remember that Jason just trashed Pretec on their CF Cam and someone he quoted actually used the words "Crap" and "Unmitigated poo!" In other words, you should wait until the camera is available and/or reviewed. Hey, they don't even have a picture up on their site and they just got back from a major photo show. Can you say "Vaporware?"

? Sorry I don't Understant ? I am not talking about the quality of the product I do know that pretec is quite bad (owned a CF Modem from pretec and was not that wonderful) I am not talking neither about Camera, I am not arguing on price Neither, I just gave a raw information, and just wanted to stress that I am not putting out this info like I could put out a rabbit from a hat, I just wanted to let people Know that

-Pretect released a 6Go CF
-Due to copyright protection I am not authorized to give you the full article and I just copy and paste the part that stress my info.
-That info as been quoted from quite Famous Information provider Reuters, Down Jones & Business Wire

This CF should be announced officialy at the CeBIT this month... now As I told you I read something & found some info regarding this CF, so I thought that you will be ahppy to share this info with me.

[malcolmsharp]

Hard disk size Flash makes me think: Would be nice if there was a way to 'lock' your CF card into your device, so that a random person can't just pull it out when you're not watching.

Actually, that is a good idea. I wouldn't mind an 'inside' slot under a cover or hidden, and also an outside one for things like modems and network cards.

[dean_shan]

2 of those and you got my current HD!

Only 12GB! :shocked!: Where do you keep your stuff? Get one of these (http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/resellers/0-1092-311-8464348.html?tag=st.co.1092-404-8464348.box.1092-311-8464348) ASAP!

[ShivShanks]

I somehow am skeptical of this till I see this product come out in reality. Why? Because 6GB means that you are crossing the 4GB 32 bit barrier. Now for filesystems thats no big deal since they can access things using 64 bit int's but if Flash is accessed anything like memory it would need 64 bit pointers which a lot of CPU's don't support. Okay maybe flash is always used as filesystem like only then you'd only need 64 bit integers. In which case theoretically its fine since all 32 bit CPU's can simulate 64 bit int's with a performance hit. But in reality its not that simple at all. The application has to be written specially and device drivers also have to be written for it. For example do you know that even now on Windows there are apps that can choke trying to access files greater than 4GB? WinZip for one couldn't handle 4GB files last I looked (dunno about the latest version). I am very very skeptical that Pocket PC's have device drivers or software thats been written with enough foresight to support greater than 32 bit int access to filesystem etc. Why they would have never thought you'd need anything more than 32 bits for a PDA! Yes yes these things have a way of exceeding limits but then programmers are also known to be lazy :) Anyway the point is Hold your horses folks! It may very well be 6GB in capacity. Just don't expect to automatically be able to access all of that on PPC's at least. Unles someone knows for sure that PPCs can.

[JvanEkris]

6 GB = 450 hours of 32kb WMA 8O nonstop !

My loox would suffice for a professional radiostation :) This is progress.

Jaap

[JvanEkris]

WinZip for one couldn't handle 4GB files last I looked (dunno about the latest version).

Last time i've checked (two days ago) it still couldn't. Bit unpractical because we had zipped a large unix server to move to a windows machine :(

Jaap

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

... Anyway the point is Hold your horses folks! It may very well be 6GB in capacity. Just don't expect to automatically be able to access all of that on PPC's at least. Unles someone knows for sure that PPCs can.

Well, by the time this gets to an affordable range, we may have a solution!!

For now, with the cost of this card, you could probably put an entire down payment on a brand new car.

Good points though!

[alex22]

If the price is below $500 USD. I will consider to buy it :D

[Janak Parekh]

I somehow am skeptical of this till I see this product come out in reality. Why? Because 6GB means that you are crossing the 4GB 32 bit barrier. Now for filesystems thats no big deal since they can access things using 64 bit int's but if Flash is accessed anything like memory it would need 64 bit pointers which a lot of CPU's don't support. Okay maybe flash is always used as filesystem like only then you'd only need 64 bit integers.
What on earth are you talking about? There are already 5GB PC cards on the market, which use the same interface as CF. People have hooked up units as large as 20GB, as well. Flash cards are definitely mass storage devices and not general purpose memory items.

As for the filesystem, the card would use FAT32, which easily handles much larger than 4GB. WinCE 3.0, moreover, has full support for FAT32. The fact that WinZip has a 4GB file limitation has nothing to do with anything, either.

--janak

[ShivShanks]

I somehow am skeptical of this till I see this product come out in reality. Why? Because 6GB means that you are crossing the 4GB 32 bit barrier. Now for filesystems thats no big deal since they can access things using 64 bit int's but if Flash is accessed anything like memory it would need 64 bit pointers which a lot of CPU's don't support. Okay maybe flash is always used as filesystem like only then you'd only need 64 bit integers.
What on earth are you talking about? There are already 5GB PC cards on the market, which use the same interface as CF. People have hooked up units as large as 20GB, as well. Flash cards are definitely mass storage devices and not general purpose memory items.

As for the filesystem, the card would use FAT32, which easily handles much larger than 4GB. WinCE 3.0, moreover, has full support for FAT32. The fact that WinZip has a 4GB file limitation has nothing to do with anything, either.

--janak

Like I said I wasn't sure about 64bit int's support in the CE filesystems. I said "so unless someone knew for sure". Looks like you know for sure that CE supports FAT32. I used to think that all those Flash cards were formatted as FAT16. BTW are flash cards formatted by default as FAT32 in PPC or its just that there is support for FAT32 in PPC?
The WinZip example was just to show that even today there are applications on Windows that can't handle more than 4GB well so there can very well be apps for PPC that have problems. Though I can't quite imagine which app on PPC would want more than 4G files. File system being able to span 4G though is nice and of course that is seamless for the apps as long as the files they create are less than 4G.

[Janak Parekh]

Like I said I wasn't sure about 64bit int's support in the CE filesystems. I said "so unless someone knew for sure". Looks like you know for sure that CE supports FAT32.
I've formatted flash cards as FAT32 and the Pocket PC recognizes them, no problem. By default, flash cards are indeed formatted FAT16, but anything greater than 2GB would have to be formatted FAT32 (unless they use 64K clusters -- but only NT/2k/XP support that on FAT16).

The WinZip example was just to show that even today there are applications on Windows that can't handle more than 4GB well so there can very well be apps for PPC that have problems.
OK, that's true, although the maximum size of a file is a different problem as opposed to the maximum size of a filesystem. FAT32's maximum file size is 4GB anyway, so it's a moot point unless you're using NTFS; in NTFS's case, you are probably hitting the 32-bit limit, but in WinZip as opposed to the operating system.

I think my point is that we're discussing apples and oranges. Both important fruit, but different nevertheless. ;)

--janak

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

I've formatted flash cards as FAT32 and the Pocket PC recognizes them, no problem. By default, flash cards are indeed formatted FAT16, but anything greater than 2GB would have to be formatted FAT32 (unless they use 64K clusters -- but only NT/2k/XP support that on FAT16).
I've never gotten my cards to work with FAT32 for some reason (my laptop runs win2k and my desktop run winxp).

[Will T Smith]

Hard disk size Flash makes me think: Would be nice if there was a way to 'lock' your CF card into your device, so that a random person can't just pull it out when you're not watching.

(unrelated to size of CF maybe, but losing 10GB of data sounds worse than losing 128MB of mp3s).

One should ponder if there's a way that a random person couldn't just run off with your entire device while your not watching. Why bother taking out the CF when you can have the whole thing.

Beyond that, try glue. It will keep the average person from pulling out your CF, including you. I suppose you could always apply the solvent to get it out after that :-)

[ShivShanks]

Like I said I wasn't sure about 64bit int's support in the CE filesystems. I said "so unless someone knew for sure". Looks like you know for sure that CE supports FAT32.
I've formatted flash cards as FAT32 and the Pocket PC recognizes them, no problem. By default, flash cards are indeed formatted FAT16, but anything greater than 2GB would have to be formatted FAT32 (unless they use 64K clusters -- but only NT/2k/XP support that on FAT16).

So you see most PPC applications expect FAT16 file systems. And there can be subtle compatibility issues when you use FAT32 with applications even when the OS support is fine. When the first breed of Hard Disks with greater than 4GB came in, some applications had problems installing. The reason was that the free space calculation in some apps did went awry since greater than 4GB free space cannot be represented with a 32 bit number and would truncate to negative and hence it would fail to install due to insufficient disk space! Though admittedly this was with apps that weren't written properly and did not do the calculations quite right. But still it was a problem nonetheless.

The WinZip example was just to show that even today there are applications on Windows that can't handle more than 4GB well so there can very well be apps for PPC that have problems.
OK, that's true, although the maximum size of a file is a different problem as opposed to the maximum size of a filesystem. FAT32's maximum file size is 4GB anyway, so it's a moot point unless you're using NTFS; in NTFS's case, you are probably hitting the 32-bit limit, but in WinZip as opposed to the operating system.

But I was listing all kinds of problems that can happen with a move to greater than 4GB and not just one kind. And that includes any app that you might like, not working due to that. And problems can be subtle like the free space calculation example I gave.

I think my point is that we're discussing apples and oranges. Both important fruit, but different nevertheless. ;)

Actually I'm not comparing Apples and Oranges. But rather I'm talking about lets say all the various problems that can happen when you mix Apple or Orange juice with an uknown chemical. They sure are different but it can still cause unsavoury reactions in both of them if you know what I mean :) Basically I'm not pointing to or comparing just one or the other issue but in general saying that greater than 4GB flash cards need more testing in the general before we are sure there aren't any problems or subtle compatibility issues.

[Janak Parekh]

When the first breed of Hard Disks with greater than 4GB came in, some applications had problems installing.
Indeed, but not at the 4GB barrier, but rather at the 2GB barrier (signed, not unsigned 32-bit ints). A few ancient DOS and Win3.1 programs (installers, mostly) had issues with the free space calculation because they did indeed assume FAT16. However, this only comprised relatively few programs that didn't use standardized, modern APIs that worked at the file level. And if you could install those programs elsewhere, you could usually copy the program itself onto the large partition without problems.

It's important to note, though, that most applications don't access the disk at the disk level, but rather at the file level. As long as an individual file is less than 4GB, which FAT32 mandates anyway, the application is not going to barf.

The one class of PPC applications that could fail are those that do things like report free space or report space utilization, e.g., today plugins and file explorers. The remaining programs should run fine (and Pocket PC installers don't check for free space, AFAICT). This is backed up by the fact that a fair number of people own 5GB Toshiba PC cards and haven't reported problems with them.

And that includes any app that you might like, not working due to that. And problems can be subtle like the free space calculation example I gave.
No. File accesses do not change. The OS transparently handles the disk size. The application doesn't know that it's breaking the 4GB barrier, unless it's doing low-level manipulations. Such manipulations don't occur in productivity or entertainment applications.

To be more precise, most applications on a PC execute a number of system calls to do manipulation. There's the open() system call, which is given a filename and returns a handle to that file. Then there's the read(), write() and seek() calls, which manipulate bytes and positions within that file. Nowhere is absolute byte positioning used.

--janak

[Janak Parekh]

I've never gotten my cards to work with FAT32 for some reason (my laptop runs win2k and my desktop run winxp).
Weird. I never had a problem with FAT32 on my Microdrive. I don't use it on the 512MB SD, but that's because there's no real reason to. Both your laptop and desktop should have handled FAT32 on the flash just fine.

--janak

[ctmagnus]

Long, long ago, I did a backup to a FAT32-formatted CF card using the in-built (I love using that phrase :)) backup app in PPC2000 and it took over an hour 8O . I then formatted the same card as FAT16, did the same backup again and it took less than 15 minutes, iirc.