March 6, 2009

• The memory card from hell? 666X CF…

  Obviously NOT for biblical reasons, Pretec (a pioneer in the world of flash memory technology) has just announced a 666x line of compact flash memory cards. Yeah. *shrug* Hey, I’d buy one!

  http://www.dpreview.com/news/0903/09030602preteccfcard666x.asp

  They’re going to have up to 64 GB memory cards, which I think is AWESOME! As I’ve said before- I wouldn’t dream of putting a memory card that huge into a single-slot camera and trusting that many images to just one card. HOWEVER, such high-capacity cards make a PERFECT pocket backup, especially at such high data transfer rates. (Transferring 64 GB of data at 80X, yeah now that’s my idea of an exciting night, ya know?)

  Anywho, I still envision an ultimate backup workflow: When shooting any photos of extreme importance, I’d have two options:

  If shooting a D3 or other camera that can support simultaneous writing to two cards, I could simply put a 64 GB card in one slot, and in the other I’d use whatever smaller capacity cards I feel comfortable with. (Currently at 12 megapixels I feel comfortable using 4 GB cards…) That way, at the end of the photo shoot I could simply remove the 64 GB memory card and slip it into my pocket, or anywhere else safe.

  If shooting any other camera that does not allow simultaneous saving of images to separate cards, I would have to simply download all my cards at the end of the day / photo shoot, and then re-load them back to the 64 GB memory card, then putting it somewhere safe. That would give you *3* copies of your images before you even get home from an event- your backup memory card, your laptop, and your preferred memory cards. (formatted after download of course, but you can run image recovery to retrieve images off a formatted card if necessary…)

  Anyways, I’m sure that just like when Pretec first announced a mere 80x 12 GB card back in 2004, we’ll be paying a ridiculous amount for such a card. Even extrapolating the cost of my 305X 4 GB cards at $40 each, that’s over $1200. OUCH. Considering you can get a 80 or 120 GB external drive for just a couple hundred bucks, they might have to charge as little as $5 per GB in order for such a memory card to become worthwhile in this particular backup application… (Of course I don’t know any hard disk drives that can write data at 100 MB/sec and are the size of a matchbook, do you?)

  =Matt=

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