Is this the beginning of the end for portable hard-drives? SD cards are extremely small, they don’t consume as much energy and they are more robust. There’s nothing like SD cards for sharing storage among different mobile devices, that is until the SDHC was invented and crashed the party.
The problem with SDHC cards is that they look exactly like normal SD cards but when you try to use one, you discover that you can’t. NO compatability. This means that it’s going to take some time until SDHC cards would be useful for normal people. Forget about your SD Card Reader, forget about your digital camera, forget about your PSD and PDA. All of them are quite worthless today when we talk about the new exciting SDHC cards from Toshiba.
Toshiba announced that the first 32 GB SD-Card-Like (SDHC) would be released by January 2008 (16GB SDHC by October 2007). This is great news for device manfucaturers because now people will have to buy everything again. Old stuff goes to the garbage. Long live the new generation that supports the SDHC format.
As for prices, the 32GB SDHC card will cost 700$. Its smaller brother 16GB SDHC will cost 350$. Like all the other SD memory cards, the price will drop a couple of months later. Both cards are classified as Class 4, which practically means that they can transfer data at a minimum rate of 4MB/s (upto 6MB/s).
Another surprise from Toshiba is a Micro SDHC 8GB memory card which will be a serious storage tool for cellular phones. Like the bigger cards, it will also require a new generation cellphone.
I must say that if I could use SDHC on my old mobile devices, I would be much happier. A couple of 32GB cards means you can carry 64GB of storage which is not so far from my 80GB 2.5″ Toshiba hard-drive.
One thing I can say for sure: 2008-2009 are going to be fabulous for digital photographers. Next step is 64GB SDHC, and by 2009 I believe we will see 128GB SDHC.
Does this mean bye-bye 2.5″ portable hard-drives? Not yet.
