19 Dec
2009
19 Dec
'09
5:17 p.m.
On 19 Dec 2009 at 9:10, Dave McGuire wrote:
There were SO many of these made, does it really
matter? I have a
drawer full of them for exactly this purpose.
Ten years ago, the same could be said for 8" floppies. Yes, there
are private caches of them in existence (I have one) but they're not
easy to find by any means.
How's your cache of SmartMedia cards doing?
Do you expect to see Sony memory sticks being sold 10 years on?
I've not looked at (or designed with) the newer
cards very
closely; can these not simply be reformatted? Since when does the
"disk drive" (flash card in this case) define the high-level
filesystem layout? What's the story here?
It matters if you want to hew to the standards. I've got a camera
here that's a lot less than 10 years old that can't format a 4GB CF
card (I did manage to format it with Windows XP so the camera could
use it, but the camera understands FAT16 and so that's the end of the
road--most devices don't have the capability of using only part of a
memory card).
I'm not trying to be argumentative here. I've got a real problem to
address for long-term data storage that will also see very rough
(think machine shop) conditions. Do we expect to see SD media out-
populate USB flash drives? When do we expect to see SD become
cheaper than any other medium?
In a comparatively short time, we've gone from PCs having a mandatory
floppy drive to having none. You could find blank floppies being
sold everywhere; now the local computer recycle/reuse store won't
accept donations of new, unopened stock.
Compared to floppies, the speed of technological advances in flash
media has been nothing short of breathtaking. While this is good for
technology overall, it presents problems for planning.
Personally, I'd love to use SD media in designs, but I need to have
some sort of confidence that SD isn't going to become the next
SmartMedia or xD.
--Chuck