"Yeah baby. Portable porn just got easier!"

Brilliant writing, pure journalism...

sd association is short sighted again and limits the future generation of SD cards to only 2TB.

there's already a 1.5TB HD on sale by seagate 2TB limit isn't a sight to the future but solving a problem on the short run

sd association sucks someone should be fired for this joke

The memristor prototype by HP can store 100 GB per square centimeter and is 1/10 the speed of DRAM. Look up memristor on wikipedia for more information.

Shachar2, you just compared a single SD chip to a hard drive....that is just plain stupid. You never need the same storage space on an SD as you do on an HD. Setting their sights any higher would be pointless and probably impractical price wise for this standard. Considering right now they only make 32gb chips, what makes you think they can make a 2tb right now? It will probably take them quite a while to make the 2tb chip so the idea that it should be higher is just stupid.

Right now the maximum storage for a single chip device is 32GB. In 2003 the largest HD (that I can find at least) was 300gb. So over 5 years the HD increased 5 times over. If that holds true for the SD chip (which it won't, I am sure it will grow faster but still) Then we should have 160GB chips in 5 years....oh now we better increase that 2TB limit.

The chips will need to grow to 46 times their current density before running into this problem. That is 9 times faster than HD growth was, with a lot less room to work in.

So, judging by history...I think we will be just fine.

JTWrenn while I understand your argument I'm talking about the current sdxc STANDARD. a standard should have room to grow and not be limited, while 2TB seems a really high capacity right now in a few years as always been the case it won't

I've been in the industry for more then a decade now and the thing I've learned is that capacity always becomes the bottleneck and small as other technologies progress onwards

while a 2TB SD card won't be available for the time being a STANDARD should have enough room to grow and not be limited and changed every few years, that is what I don't understand about the SD Association and their desicion making.

Best Regards
Shachar2

They have a square inch (give or take). And you think that increasing the size 46 times is too little? In electronics things move fast, and more often are multiplicative rather than additive, but to increase something 46 times over takes several years, at least.

We now have 4Gb sticks of DDR3 RAM, I'm not aware of anyone who makes an 8Gb stick. 1/46th of 4Gb is ~64Mb. How many years ago was it that the biggest RAM stick you could buy (with infinite $) was 64Mb. I know it was more than 10 years ago, my Dell purchased in 1998 had a 64Mb stick.

Sure, we'll reach the 2Tb capacity, will it be in "a few years", 3-4 years isn't THAT long. Maybe, but I doubt it. Either way, they'll just change the standard. There may be some significant electronic or exFAT reason for the 2Tb. It's not likely they just picked an arbitrary amount.

LOL @ the porn comment. Nowadays it feels like they give journalist jobs to kids fresh out of high school.

Ooh THG of the 90's, how we miss thee.

I would think when these guys see comment after comment on almost every article they publish, bashing the mediocre journalism on this site, TH would do something about the quality. But that's been going on now for about 6 months with problems only getting worse. I give this site two years at the very most, if it continues down this spiral. That will be enough time for people to stop reading articles, viewing the unusable charts, stopping by the forums at all, and using this site at all. Advertisers will stop paying bestofmedia because no one is looking at their weight loss advertisements, and they'll shut the site down.

(And seriously, what the hell is up with all the weight loss ads on this site? It's a tech industry news site, none of us give a damn about dieting.)

i don't think there's something wrong with the article,
what wrong is misleading facts and opinions which i find in some articles here. tom's team should review articles before posting.

regarding sharchar2 comment, i think it's not that easy to look too far forward and create specifications especially when the limiting factor is the file system, which stated here, the microsoft exFAT system.
SD's work well compared to less popular now, compact flash.

DDR - 2 - 3 -4 - 5
USB1 - 1.1, 2, 3
1 socket CPU MB, 2 socket, 4 socket, ...32 socket CPU (Unisys)
single core, ....quad core...
PCI, AGP, PCI-X, PCIE

shachar2, I don't understand what you are complaining about. I'm sure that SD technology will improve again as market demand rises (or bottleneck is reached) like any other technologies. I doubt that any companies are willing to spend outrageous R&D money to be future proof for the next 10-20 years and make it cost effective to produce and sell to the consumers. Just be happy that we don't live in the 3rd world country with no electricity. =)

This gives me another spec to look for when looking for a new notebook/photo-camcorder.
I was wondering for a while what will happen after the 32gig limit is reached.
This is good news since I was hoping for SD cards to replace HDDs in most systems. (I like ultra portible & powerful devices)
Big news and happy I got this news from THG.

"Yeah baby. Portable porn just got easier!"

The lack of professionalism and utter disregard for the minors in the tech community is shameful. Someone of such low standards should be fired, save the writing for the smut magazines

lupen1217
ddr, usb, cpu and expension slots are different technologies some of them are pretty "new" and I can't blame them for not developping first a really fast hardware because it's impossible, you have to build up

but size limitation is mostly a software. And when a company don't plan ahead like in this case it's just dumb

Br
Shachar2

*mostly a software limitation

"Yeah baby. Portable porn just got easier!"

You see Kevin Parrish the written word can bite you in the ass. At a bar with drinks in hand it would be amusing. However, people read this article while drinking coffee as opposed to beer.

memristors at < 100MB/s will not provide the write bandwidth necessary for real professional photography when the user is now storing RAW images that can be 50MB+ each on the card, at that point you're once again limited by write speed in terms of how many photos per second you can take, most cameras, especially professional cameras are more than capable of 3-10 pictures/second. The speed is almost as, if not more, important than the capacity in these situations.

Hahaha, oh man. As soon as I finished chuckling at the porn comment in the article, I instantly thought "a few readers with a pickle up their butt are probably going to take offense to that". So, I scroll down to check my assumption, and I discover that some of you people are so predictable. Stop being such prudes; a meaningless (and funny) comment in an article doesn't mark the end of journalism. Go join your puritan mates at the Globe and Mail or the New York Times. Jeeze.

"Yeah baby. Portable porn just got easier!"

Whats funny is how true that statement actually is. The people who are crying foul should just get a hold of their lives.
One comment at an attempt at humor and all hell breaks loose.

You people are the reason your country is a garbage heap.

shachar2, just exactly which industry have you worked under for the past 10 years? It is time to change your job dude.

Below from MS site (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/core/fncc_fil_tvjq.mspx?mfr=true).

"..Sector size, another limitation, is a function of hardware and industry standards, and is typically 512 bytes. While sector sizes might increase in the future, the current size puts a limit on a single volume of 2 terabytes (2 32 * 512 bytes, or 2 41 bytes)."

Clealy the limitation is not on the software side.

Thank You for the explanation lupen1217
so I understand that HD are limited to 2TB as well (I have a 1.5TB myself) a new stadard needs to be developed

Last time I checked pornography is legal…. Perhaps the comment is out of place in a hardware column but not insulting or indecent in any way. On a personal note... the comment made me smile.

2T on a SD card is amazing… The largest card I presently own is 4GB!

Please accept my apologies if my sarcasm offended anyone. Believe me, it's not my intention to tick anyone off here at Tom's, but to be informative and perhaps crack a smile on your face (although my wife finds me far from being anything remotely funny)

Just to continue on the topic of 2TB theoretical limit, I thought that max addressing was largely due to the number of bits used in addressing sectors. Since 32 bits is what is used, that gives 4,294,967,296 addressable blocks. If sector size is 512 (as lupen1217 stated), then you have 512 * 4,294,967,296 = 2,199,023,255,552, which is roughtly that 2TB limit that is being discussed.

I can see an argument as to why don't they just increase the sector size, or add more bits for addressing. Adding more bits poses hardware issues (since, to my knowledge, most hardware interfaces standardized are using 32-bit addressing), where as increasing sector size also increases fragmentation (as in, if you increase sector size to 2048, but save a 500 byte file, then you have roughly 1500 bytes that can't be used. This isn't a big problem until you have tons of small files).

Anyways, just throwing in my two cents. I'm all for planning for the future, but planning for the next 5 is far enough for me. Normally, new standards spawn up to address issues found with the current standard, and it has been this way ever since I started following technology (1996). I'm sure it has been this way even before that time.