Lexar rolls out 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB ExpressCard SSDs
 

Could be interesting. Lexar rolls out 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB ExpressCard SSDs with peak data transfer speed of 250 MB/s. At a cost of $130.00 for a 4GB and 8GB models at $200.00 respectively. I assume the 16GB should be reasonable too.




http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/02/l...resscard-ssds/

Mike

I suspect engadget should have put 250Mb/s (so somewhat over 30MB/s), not MB/s? If they really do mean 250 MegaBytes/s...... wow!

Will these be compatible with the SxS cards (or slots) recently announced by SanDisk and Sony? Seems like they should be, since they both use the ExpressCard interface.

Could I plug one of these into an XDCAM-EX camera, for example?

I'm guessing no. These Lexar cards use a USB 2.0 interface.

The SxS cards should be full PCI-Express. I doubt they will be compatible which is a bummer because the price sure is nice.

Where do you see this? I'm looking over the Engadget story above, and it clearly says "ExpressCard." I don't see anywhere where it says "USB."

Sure looks like an ExpressCard slot product to me. But agreed that it may not be compatible with the Sony SxS standard, which claims to have some specialized design features to improve performance. Speaking of which, the recent Sony announcement for SxS cards stated a transfer rate of 800 Mbps (100 MB/sec), so any claim of 250 MB/sec for the Lexar product is probably just referring to the theoretical maximum bandwidth of the PCI-Express bus. As with most things, actual transfer rates are usually lower than the theoretical maximum, but 100 MB/sec sounds good to me. Even 250 Mbps (31 MB/sec) wouldn't be bad, since that's about all a single hard drive can sustain anyway.

As far as pricing goes, if the Lexar cards are retailing for $200 for 8 GB and (say) $350 for 16 GB, hopefully SxS cards will be about the same price by the time the XDCAM EX camera is shipping. That works out to about $700 for two hours of recording capacity for the XDCAM EX, which isn't bad compared to ~$50-100/minute for P2 cards.

I have to agree. Transfering to a laptop is only going to go as fast as the hard drive you are transfering to. Even 31MB/S will be pushing it for an internal hard drive. 31MB/S is still pretty darn fast for a video format that takes up less then 5 MB/S. The only time the full bandwidth of the sxs cards will ever really be used is if you transfer to a raid setup. Some laptops can raid together two internal drives or you could add something like a G-
Raid.

As for the card working we will not know until we hear from SONY or until somebody buys a camera and tests out one of these cards. So until that point anything is just a guess.

A few weeks ago at Office Max I found a 4GB Express card for a little over $100.00. I thought about the XDCAM EX camera when I saw it and thought of the same thing. Physically the card looked exactly the same. These things are very tiny. Imagine being able to go to a computer store to buy storage cards for your XDCAM camera.

If the camera does all the work and just uses the card as a storage medium I see no reason why any express card shouldn't work. If the cards need to be formatted a certain way then maybe only the specific type of cards will work.

Hmmmm I heard about the USB from someone else and clearly they (and I) must have been confused.

No performance numbers are given but I think they'll have parts that perform very well. Kind of like those premium flash cards for photographers.

There has been Flash USB products in times past. I think the Express card interface does carry an USB interface protocol too. The Expresscard interface itself, is around 266Mbyte per second, version two of PCI Express is double that per lane, so the card might eventually follow. But how many Flash cards will actually support that speed is another question.

I might point out, that the external desktop cabled version of PCI-Express has been released, and I suspect we might eventually see a replacement for USB using the technology is a more convent form )which means a new round of USB flash sticks). The express card thing is not really needed and outdated already USB sticks could have been used instead (unless you want to record more than 300-400mb/s).

The references I've seen indicate that Expresscard has a maximum throughput of 2.5 Gbit/sec:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpressCard

This link also explains the option to use an Expresscard slot to link to the system via USB2 protocol, but I can't figure why anyone would bother to do that given the lower bandwidth.

It's also worth going to the Sandisk/Sony press release:

http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/Pre...e.aspx?ID=3770

This comfirms that: ........"PCI Express™ has a maximum data transfer speed of 2.5 gigabits per second, twice as fast as PC Card™-based storage media.2

But goes on to say that: "The target transfer speed of SxS™ memory cards is 800 megabits per second2."

Which tends to make me think that the Lexar cards being discussed here are indeed 250megaBITs/s (not meagBYTES). So although they may not match the spec of actual SxS cards, if they are cheaper and fast enough for recording, the potential lower download speeds may be a small price to pay for the cheapness.

8*around 266Mbyte=2.128GB/s close enough, and maybe the rest in overheads and packet headers etc.

One reason why they use USB2.0 is so that existing chips that use USB2.0 can be used in the card, and probably are cheaper than Express Card chips.

--

800mb/s might be their target (as 266MByte/s requires extra design/cost considerations to get slow flash to that speed) but companies can do 2.5Gb/s if they want. 250mb/s is what an flash USB stick could be made to do, and below what an fast hard drive can sustain (probably around 600Mb/s, max speeds are much higher).

Lexar rolls out 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB ExpressCard SSDs
 

For those wondering about the cost of ExpressCard 16 GB modules,
try this link:

http://www.crucial.com/store/listmod...derMay07UShtml

Can you say a tad more reasonable than P2? So can I.

Can I use this not only with a video camera, but also a DSLR?

heath

I don't know of ANY DSLR that takes ExpressCard.
So far it has been MemoryStick, SD, CompactFlash, xD...

Friendlier formats in that you can buy a USB 2.0 adapter
for reading them into your computer if it doesn't already
have a Flash Card reader slot.

Of course that can change....