Remember the good ol’ days when the only choice you
had to make in removable storage was what color of blank floppy disk to format?
Those days are long gone. Today, every time you buy a new gizmo -- camera, PDA,
MP3 player -- you have to juggle a dizzying array of storage technologies.
Should you get that Sony PDA that you’re lusting after, the one that uses
Memory Sticks, when your digital camera uses SmartMedia cards? And that MP3
machine with the PocketZip drive sure holds lots of tunes, but is PocketZip
going to be around a year from now? To help you wade through this high-tech
quagmire, we’ve put together the following cheat sheet.
|
Storage Medium
|
Description
|
Used In
|
Capacity
|
Maker(s)
|
Shelf Life*
|
Notes
|
|
SmartMedia
|
Wafer-thin card, 1.8”
x 1.4”
|
Digital cameras, camcorders,
MP3 players
|
8MB to 128MB
|
Toshiba, Lexar Media, Viking
Components, Kingston
|
2+ years
|
SmartMedia seems to be
losing some serious ground to MMC (see below), but given the number of
products that use SM, the tech should be here for awhile.
|
|
CompactFlash (CF)
|
1.7” x 1.4” in
hard plastic shell
|
PDAs, sub-notebooks,
cameras, MP3 players
|
8MB to 256MB
|
Lexar Media, Viking,
Kingston
|
Up to
1 year
|
Never really seemed to get
the market foothold that it needed. A fading format.
|
|
MMC
(MultiMediaCard)
|
1.2” x 0.9”
|
Cameras, PDAs, MP3 players,
mobile phones, GPS units
|
8MB to 128MB
|
Lexar, Viking, Kingston,
SanDisk
|
3 years
|
MMC may win the race. Many
new portable devices are shipping with MMC drives.
|
|
SD Card
(Secure Digital)
|
1.2” x 0.9”
(but thicker than an MMC)
|
MP3 players, phones, e-books
|
8MB to 128MB
|
Toshiba, SanDisk
|
1-2 years
|
A new version of the MMC
that the record industry is pushing because of its ability to secure
intellectual property. Not backwards compatible w/MMC, but you can use MMCs
in an SD drive. Look for this to be a very hard sell to consumers.
|
|
SpringBoard Memory Module
|
TK
|
Visor PDAs Only
|
2MB to 16MB
|
Handspring, Hagiwara,
PalmGear
|
2 years
|
Handspring’s success
with the Visor ensures a decent shelf life for SpringBoard, but not beyond
the Visor platform.
|
|
Memory Stick
|
1.9” x 0.8”
|
All of Sony’s digital
products (still cameras, movie cameras, laptops, PDAs, AIBO, etc.)
|
4MB to 128MB
|
Sony, Lexar
|
2 years
|
Thanks to Sony’s
market power, they’ll make this technology…ah…stick -- and
use it on all of their products --but it doesn’t look good for many
other companies buying in.
|
|
PocketZip (a.k.a. Clik!)
|
2.2” x 2.0”
|
MP3 players, Clik! Drives,
Compaq iPaq PDA
|
40MB
|
Iomega
|
1 year
|
Nice move on Iomega’s
part of turning a failed tech (the Clik! drive) into an inexpensive MP3
storage medium. Too bad it’s not going to catch on.
|
|
PC Card disks
(a.k.a. FlashDisk and
DataFlash)
|
3.3” x 2.2”
|
Laptops, handheld computers,
sub-notebooks, anything with a PCMCIA slot
|
8MB to 512MB
|
Viking, Kingston, SanDisk
|
2 years
|
Wide deployment in laptops
will keep this tech around until more compact and cheaper technologies
prevail.
|
*Our educated guess as to
how long this technology will be viable.
The Prognosis
It looks as though the MultiMediaCard and SmartMedia will be
around for at least the next two to three years and are good technologies for
use across devices (e.g., you can buy several MMCs and use them in a compatible
digital camera, PDA and MP3 player). MMC might edge out SmartMedia in the end,
but there are currently more devices on the market with SmartMedia slots. You
should be safe with either technology. Sony’s Memory Stick only makes
sense if you plan on buying a number of Sony digital devices.
See also:
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