Saturday, April 19, 2003
Yet Another Flash Format -- CUD
Posted by Janak Parekh in "THOUGHT" @ 04:00 PM
Will this ever end?
"Taiwan-based Atech Totalsolution on Tuesday introduced a memory card called Compact USB Disk (CUD), featuring a built-in USB interface and compatibility with CompactFlash (CF) cards, the company announced in a seminar on small-sized memory cards. Only one-third the size of a CF card, the CUD card can replace a CF card in portable devices such as digital still cameras (DSC) by using a specially-designed cartridge. In addition, the CUD card can be connected directly to other digital devices such as PCs, PDAs and handsets via a USB cable or CUD adapter, while other memory cards need a card reader. According to Atech, the production cost for a CUD card is about US$25, compared to US$38 for a CF card."
If you check Atech's site, they claim that it's "smaller than SD, and faster than CF". They also feature the fact that it fits inline with the CF card. Argh. :evil: Yet another format, not too long after xD was unleashed. A CF adapter isn't enough -- it's not going to help me with my SD-enabled Pocket PC any more useful, will it? And SD is a perfectly workable standard, for which memory should get faster anyway. And just how much smaller a form factor do we want than SD cards? Quite honestly, SD and CF and MS are more than enough for me. I don't want to ever have a "20-in-1 reader". About the only good thing going for this format, according to the Digitech article, is its theoretical speed and its "open" licensing policy, but I don't see it hitting any level of market popularity at this point.
Enough of my rant -- what do you think? (Even if you don't care for the rant, check out the article - it has a very interesting comparison table of all the prevalent memory standards.)
"Taiwan-based Atech Totalsolution on Tuesday introduced a memory card called Compact USB Disk (CUD), featuring a built-in USB interface and compatibility with CompactFlash (CF) cards, the company announced in a seminar on small-sized memory cards. Only one-third the size of a CF card, the CUD card can replace a CF card in portable devices such as digital still cameras (DSC) by using a specially-designed cartridge. In addition, the CUD card can be connected directly to other digital devices such as PCs, PDAs and handsets via a USB cable or CUD adapter, while other memory cards need a card reader. According to Atech, the production cost for a CUD card is about US$25, compared to US$38 for a CF card."
If you check Atech's site, they claim that it's "smaller than SD, and faster than CF". They also feature the fact that it fits inline with the CF card. Argh. :evil: Yet another format, not too long after xD was unleashed. A CF adapter isn't enough -- it's not going to help me with my SD-enabled Pocket PC any more useful, will it? And SD is a perfectly workable standard, for which memory should get faster anyway. And just how much smaller a form factor do we want than SD cards? Quite honestly, SD and CF and MS are more than enough for me. I don't want to ever have a "20-in-1 reader". About the only good thing going for this format, according to the Digitech article, is its theoretical speed and its "open" licensing policy, but I don't see it hitting any level of market popularity at this point.
Enough of my rant -- what do you think? (Even if you don't care for the rant, check out the article - it has a very interesting comparison table of all the prevalent memory standards.)
