Hasta La Gadget!

Photo viewers have been around for centuries (give or take a few score), but few have offered the capacity and speed found on the HyperDrive Album. Produced by none other than Sanho — the same dudes and dudettes responsible for those spectacular HyperMac batteries — this here device is essentially a 640GB pocket hard drive meant to suck down photos from your SD or CF card (it plays nice with both formats) as you shoot; it can either lighten the load on your memory card or act as on-site backup, and it’s reportedly capable of downloading 2GB per minute with full data verification. Better still, it’s capable of decoding and displaying RAW images on the 4.8-inch display (800 x 480 resolution), and the internal battery will last through 200GB worth of transfers. It’s available now for $599.99 (or less if you opt for a smaller / empty model), but don’t even bother if you’re looking for SDXC compatibility.

Continue reading Sanho crams 640GB of memories into your pocket with HyperDrive Album photo viewer

Sanho crams 640GB of memories into your pocket with HyperDrive Album photo viewer originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rhett and Link (and one Bill Gates, too) may assume that 64KB of memory is “plenty,” but let’s be realistic here — it’s not. Samsung‘s fully in agreement, and it’s looking to make your next DIMM or SODIMM a lot more capacious with a new 40nm-class process technology. As the story goes, volume production has begun on a new 4Gb DDR3 module, which could be squeezed onto existing sticks in order to produce 16GB / 32GB DIMMs (for desktops) and 8GB SODIMMs (for laptops). There’s no clear indication of when this whole “mass production” thing will lead to “on sale right now,” but we’re guessing it’ll make the transition between “now” and “really soon.” Bonus video after the break.

Continue reading Samsung’s 4Gb DDR3 RAM modules could put 8GB in your next netbook

Samsung’s 4Gb DDR3 RAM modules could put 8GB in your next netbook originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It may not hold 200 years’ worth of silicon-stuffed porn, but SanDisk’s new SDXC card has one big advantage over Dylan Tweney’s desert-island-fantasy 188 petabyte CF card: you can buy it. If you have $350 to spare.

The SDXC spec was announced a year ago, and has a theoretical 2 terabyte maximum capacity. But we wonder if anyone anyone will need them. The high-end cameras which need this kind of storage for their huge files all use Compact Flash cards, and anyone else runs into the eggs-in-basket problems of having all their images in one easy-to-lose place. Another problem: Where do you put these pictures? Filling up a 64GB card means that you’ll need to find somewhere to put all those pics, and your laptop’s hard drive will fill up pretty fast.

One more tip to all SD card manufacturers: Make these tiny slivers of plastic in brighter colors. Black may be more stylish, but it sure means I lose a lot of cards. I can’t find them in dark corners, and have to buy new ones. Or maybe that’s the point?

SanDisk Ultra SDXC Cards [SanDisk]

See Also:

• Toshiba Claims New 64 GB SDXC Card is Largest and Fastest
• Two Terabyte SD Cards Coming Soon
• Panasonic SD Card Worth 8-Times Its Weight in Gold

Someday, you’ll be able to fit as much data in a small, square CompactFlash card as AT&T carries on its entire network in a week.

In theory at least, version 5 of the CompactFlash standard will allow CF cards to hold 188 petabytes of data. By comparison, that’s equivalent to 188,000 one-terabyte drives, sufficient capacity to contain 2.7 million hours of HD video (two centuries’ worth of the porn industry’s annual output) or more than 7 days’ worth of AT&T’s daily traffic, which currently averages 18.7 petabytes. With that kind of storage, you’d only need five CF cards to stash all of the data currently stored on all the hard drives in home computers in the state of Minnesota. (Data comparisons courtesy of UCSD’s 2009 How Much Information? study.)

CompactFlash cards are the chunky, heavy-duty memory cards that would have gone obsolete years ago except for the fact that they’re used in high-end cameras. All pro photographers use them, so all professional SLR cameras support the technology, in a vicious circle that will keep the technology alive long after everyone else has forgotten it. Unless, of course, they need to stash massive amounts of data.

The current standard, CompactFlash 4.1, limits the cards to a relatively paltry 137 GB, due to the limits of its addressing scheme. In practice, the largest CF card you can currently buy is 64 GB, but that’s still larger than the largest SDHC card, which is 32 GB. The theoretical maximum of the latest SD standard, SDXC, is 2 terabytes, although no one uses these cards yet.

The new CF standard uses 48-bit addressing, which raises the theoretical memory limit to an eye-popping 188 petabytes. We figure it will be quite a while before storage technology comes close to pushing that limit, however.

And by then, you’ll probably have exabytes of ultra-high-definition 3-D home videos that you’ll want to keep track of, meaning that a paltry petabyte card will look just as puny as a 1-GB card does today.

(Via DPReview)

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, poorly butchered by the author

You know what’s better than a new solid state drive? An Olympic gold medal. You know what else? A USB 3.0 SSD, of course! Active Media Products has just dished out details on its latest device, the Aviator-2 external USB 3.0 solid state drive. Available in case-only, 64GB and 128GB flavors, this one promises transfer rates as high as 4.8Gbits/sec (that’s ten times the rate of USB 2.0, just so you’re well aware), and considering the 3- x 5-inch size, you should have no issues slipping this into the chest pocket of your Members Only jacket. We’re in no place to comment on the difficultly of slipping $34.95, $259.95 or $449.95 (in order of mention) out of your wallet, though, which is essentially required in order to take one home. That’s the breaks, kid!

Active Media Products serves up Aviator-2 external USB 3.0 SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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