XQD CF cards announced- will RED ever adopt it?

[Marcos Montenegro]

The Compact Flash Association announced the new XQD CF card on Dec 8th.

Write speeds of 125MB/sec and higher

http://photorumors.com/2011/12/08/co...card-standard/

Will RED ever adopt it?

Marcos

[Brian Iannone]

Probably not. Even 125 MB/s is slow compared to the speed of the REDMAGS.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The photorumors site is missing a few details. But what this amounts to is that CF is dead and C.Fast failed to capture any significant interest. So now what the Compact Flash Association is doing is moving over to a PCI Express interface rather than IDE/pATA (CF) or SATA(C.Fast). They're doing it in a media package size that is small -- bigger than SD cards, but smaller than CF. The 125MB/s is not indicative of much at the moment, it is the targeted *minimum* read speed, but they're not going to enforce it other than in marketing and nowhere do they say they want that speed to be sustained.

Being a PCIe interface, means that it will be similar to SxS or ExpressCard media. Theoretically it can scale with the interface on the concept of PCIe lanes and nodes. Who knows what may become of it, but it seems like a logical step for FLASH media to take as opposed to adhering to interfaces like SATA, SD, etc..

I doubt RED will support it unless it can get the data rates up a lot higher and show that it can be SUSTAINED. Something that most FLASH media on the market and solid-state devices are really struggling to do. And a new interface isn't going to solve that problem. The current interfaces for media are not really the issue or bottleneck, it's the nand memory itself and the integrated memory controllers that are the limitation. But technology will improve, as always.

[Brian Iannone]

The photorumors site is missing a few details. But what this amounts to is that CF is dead and C.Fast failed to capture any significant interest. So now what the Compact Flash Association is doing is moving over to a PCI Express interface rather than IDE/pATA (CF) or SATA(C.Fast). They're doing it in a media package size that is small -- bigger than SD cards, but smaller than CF. The 125MB/s is not indicative of much at the moment, it is the targeted *minimum* read speed, but they're not going to enforce it other than in marketing and nowhere do they say they want that speed to be sustained.

Being a PCIe interface, means that it will be similar to SxS or ExpressCard media. Theoretically it can scale with the interface on the concept of PCIe lanes and nodes. Who knows what may become of it, but it seems like a logical step for FLASH media to take as opposed to adhering to interfaces like SATA, SD, etc..

I doubt RED will support it unless it can get the data rates up a lot higher and show that it can be SUSTAINED. Something that most FLASH media on the market and solid-state devices are really struggling to do. And a new interface isn't going to solve that problem. The current interfaces for media are not really the issue or bottleneck, it's the nand memory itself and the integrated memory controllers that are the limitation. But technology will improve, as always.

Wow, I didn't know that it's being based on a PCI Express interface. Now THAT is interesting.