A memory card is an electronic data storage device used for storing digital information, typically using flash memory . These are commonly used in digital portable electronic devices , such as digital cameras as well as in many early games consoles such as the Nintendo Wii . They allow adding memory to such devices using a card in a socket instead of protruding USB flash drives .
48-538: FlashPath (FlashPath Floppy Disk Adapter) were a series of devices produced by the company SmartDisk, which allowed a variety of memory cards to be used in a 3.5" Floppy disk drive. The initial version introduced in May 1998 allowed SmartMedia cards to be used with a floppy drive. Later, Memory Stick and Secure Digital / Multi Media Card versions were made as well. FlashPath adapters were sold both branded by SmartDisk, and as OEM devices under other brand names. FlashPath
96-452: A RAID configuration. CF cards may perform the function of the master or slave drive on the IDE bus, but have issues sharing the bus. Moreover, late-model cards that provide DMA (using UDMA or MWDMA) may present problems when used through a passive adapter that does not support DMA. Original PC Card memory cards used an internal battery to maintain data when power was removed. The rated life of
144-720: A niche , while in mobile phones and PDAs, the memory card has become smaller. Initially memory cards were expensive, costing US$ 3 per megabyte of capacity in 2001; this led to the development of miniaturized rotating disk memory devices such as the Microdrive , PocketZip and Dataplay . The Microdrive had higher capacities than memory cards at the time. All three concepts became obsolete once flash memory prices became lower and their capacities became higher by 2006. New products of Sony (previously only using Memory Stick) and Olympus (previously only using XD-Card) have been offered with an additional SD-Card slot beginning in 2010. Effectively
192-546: A 5 GB "1-inch hard drive" in June, 2004, and an 8 GB version in June, 2005. In early 2008, the CFA demonstrated CompactFlash cards with a built in SATA interface. Several companies make adapters that allow CF cards to be connected to PCI , PCMCIA , IDE and SATA connections, allowing a CF card to act as a solid-state drive with virtually any operating system or BIOS, and even in
240-458: A CF card slot with an adapter. Formats that can be used this way include SD / MMC , Memory Stick Duo, xD-Picture Card in a Type I slot and SmartMedia in a Type II slot, as of 2005. Some multi-card readers use CF for I/O as well. The first CompactFlash cards had capacities of 2 to 10 megabytes. This increased to 64 MB in 1996, 128 MB in 1998, 256 MB in 1999, 512 MB in 2001, and 1 GB in 2002. The CompactFlash interface
288-514: A FAT32 format. The way many digital cameras update the file system as they write to the card creates a FAT32 bottleneck. Writing to a FAT32-formatted card generally takes a little longer than writing to a FAT16-formatted card with similar performance capabilities. For instance, the Canon EOS 10D writes the same photo to a FAT16-formatted 2 GB CompactFlash card somewhat faster than to a same speed 4 GB FAT32-formatted CompactFlash card, although
336-521: A block erase of the area to be written to, ECC calculation, write itself (an individual memory cell read takes around 100 ns, a write to the chip takes 1ms+ or 10,000 times longer). Because the USB 2.0 interface is limited to 35 MB/s and lacks bus mastering hardware, USB 2.0 implementation results in slower access. Modern UDMA-7 CompactFlash Cards provide data rates up to 145 MB/s and require USB 3.0 data transfer rates. A direct motherboard connection
384-449: A device. In 2001, SmartMedia alone captured 50% of the digital camera market and CF had captured the professional digital camera market. However, by 2005, SD and similar MMC cards had nearly taken over SmartMedia's spot, though not to the same level and with stiff competition coming from Memory Stick variants, as well as CompactFlash. In industrial and embedded fields, even the venerable PC card (PCMCIA) memory cards still manage to maintain
432-452: A few revolutions but current drawn can reach up to 350 milliamps and runs at 40-50 mA mean current. Its average seek time is 8 ms and can sustain 9 MB/s read and write, and has an interface speed of 33 MB/s. Hitachi's 4 GB Microdrive is 12 ms seek, sustained 6 MB/s. The CF 5.0 Specification supports capacities up to 128 PiB using 48-bit logical block addressing (LBA). Prior to 2006, CF drives using magnetic media offered
480-576: A growing number of cameras, video recorders, and audio recorders that use the faster data rates offered by CFast media. As of 2017, in the wider embedded electronics industry, transition from CF to CFast is still relatively slow, probably due to hardware cost considerations and some inertia (familiarity with CF) and because a significant part of the industry is satisfied with the lower performance provided by CF cards, thus having no reason to change. A strong incentive to change to CFast for embedded electronics companies using designs based on Intel PC architecture
528-647: A lithium battery to keep the contents in the SRAM. These cards were faster than their flash counterparts. Some of the first PCMCIA cards had capacities of 1 to 5 MB and cost US$ 100 per MB. Other early cards such as the Bee Card contained non-modifiable ROM , Write once read many EPROM or rewriteable EEPROM memory. In 1992, SanDisk introduced FlashDisk, a PCMCIA card and one of the first memory cards that did not require battery power to retain its contents, as it used flash memory. In 1994, memory card formats smaller than
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#1732858324398576-578: A lower cost alternative to ROM cartridges . Several competing and incompatible memory card formats were developed by several vendors, such as for example the Bee Card , Astron SoftCards, Sega Cards, NEC UltraLite memory cards, and the Mitsubishi Melcard which came in variants using 60 and 50 connector pins. The Sega Card was developed as a cheaper alternative to game cartridges. Some memory cards were used for memory expansion in laptops. JEIDA,
624-503: A niche in the professional camera market especially well. It has benefited from both a better cost to memory-size ratio and, for much of the format's life, generally greater available capacity than other formats. CF cards can be used directly in a PC Card slot with a plug adapter, used as an ATA (IDE) or PCMCIA storage device with a passive adapter or with a reader, or attached to other types of ports such as USB or FireWire . As some newer card types are smaller, they can be used directly in
672-539: A range of −45 °C to +85 °C. NOR -based flash has lower density than newer NAND -based systems, and CompactFlash is therefore the physically largest of the three memory card formats introduced in the early 1990s, being derived from the JEIDA/PCMCIA Memory Card formats. The other two are Miniature Card (MiniCard) and SmartMedia (SSFDC). However, CF did switch to NAND type memory later. The IBM Microdrive format, later made by Hitachi , implements
720-696: Is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994. CompactFlash became one of the most successful of the early memory card formats, surpassing Miniature Card and SmartMedia . Subsequent formats, such as MMC / SD , various Memory Stick formats, and xD-Picture Card offered stiff competition. Most of these cards are smaller than CompactFlash while offering comparable capacity and speed. Proprietary memory card formats for use in professional audio and video, such as P2 and SxS , are faster, but physically larger and more costly. CompactFlash's popularity
768-519: Is a 50-pin subset of the 68-pin PCMCIA connector. "It can be easily slipped into a passive 68-pin PCMCIA Type II to CF Type I adapter that fully meets PCMCIA electrical and mechanical interface specifications", according to compactflash.org. The interface operates, depending on the state of a mode pin on power-up, as either a 16-bit PC Card (0x7FF address limit) or as an IDE (PATA) interface. Unlike
816-601: Is based on the Serial ATA (SATA) interface, rather than the Parallel ATA /IDE (PATA) bus for which all previous versions of CompactFlash are designed. CFast is also known as CompactFast. CFast 1.0/1.1 supports a higher maximum transfer rate than current CompactFlash cards, using SATA 2.0 (300 MB/s) interface, while PATA is limited to 167 MB/s using UDMA 7 . CFast cards are not physically or electrically compatible with CompactFlash cards. However, since SATA can emulate
864-519: Is based on the Serial ATA interface. In November 2010, SanDisk, Sony and Nikon presented a next generation card format to the CompactFlash Association. The new format has a similar form factor to CF/CFast but is based on the PCI Express interface instead of Parallel ATA or Serial ATA. With potential read and write speeds of 1 Gbit/s (125 MB/s ) and storage capabilities beyond 2 TiB ,
912-456: Is declining as CFexpress is taking over. As of 2022, both Canon and Nikon's newest high end cameras, e.g. the Canon EOS R5 , Canon EOS R3 , and Nikon Z 9 use CFexpress cards for the higher performance required to record 8K video. Traditional CompactFlash cards use the Parallel ATA interface, but in 2008, a variant of CompactFlash, CFast was announced. CFast (also known as CompactFast)
960-518: Is hardware compatible with all standard 3.5" High-Density Floppy disk drives, but is not a drop-in replacement for real floppy disks. A special software device driver must be installed on the computer that is to access data via FlashPath. Thus, FlashPath is only usable with computers and operating systems for which such a driver exists and can be installed. SmartDisk was sued by PC Connector Solutions, LLC over alleged U.S. patent infringement by SmartDisk's Smarty and FlashPath products in 2000. However,
1008-505: Is less reliable than magnetic media. Car PC Hacks suggests disabling the Windows swap file and using its Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) to eliminate unnecessary writes to flash memory. Additionally, when formatting a flash-memory drive, the Quick Format method should be used, to write as little as possible to the device. Most CompactFlash flash-memory devices limit wear on blocks by varying
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#17328583243981056-442: Is often limited to 33 MB/s because IDE to CF adapters lack high speed ATA (66 MB/s plus) cable support. Power on from sleep/off takes longer than power up from standby. Many 1-inch (25 mm) hard drives (often referred to by the trademarked name " Microdrive ") typically spin at 3600 RPM, so rotational latency is a consideration, as is spin-up from standby or idle. Seagate's 8 GB ST68022CF drive spins up fully within
1104-447: Is prone to frequent soft read errors. The CompactFlash card includes error checking and correction (ECC) that detects the error and re-reads the block. The process is transparent to the user, although it may slow data access. As a flash memory device is solid-state , it is less affected by shock than a spinning disk. The possibility for electrical damage from upside-down insertion is prevented by asymmetrical side slots, assuming that
1152-644: The Japan Electronic Industry Development Association , began to work on a standard for memory cards in 1985, and developed the JEIDA memory card in 1986. The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) was an industry association created in 1989 to promote a standard for memory cards in PCs, and worked closely with JEIDA, adopting their 68 pin connector design. The specification for PCMCIA type I cards, later renamed PC Cards ,
1200-475: The format war has turned in SD-Card's favor. (full-duplex) Many older video game consoles used memory cards to hold saved game data. Cartridge -based systems primarily used battery-backed volatile RAM within each individual cartridge to hold saves for that game. Cartridges without this RAM may have used a password system , or would not save progress at all. The Neo Geo AES , released in 1990 by SNK ,
1248-683: The sixth generation of video game consoles , memory cards were based on proprietary formats ; Later systems used established industry formats for memory cards, such as FAT32 . Home consoles commonly use hard disk drive storage for saved games and allow the use of USB flash drives or other card formats via a memory card reader to transport game saves and other game information. Though some consoles have implemented cloud storage saving, most portable gaming systems still rely on custom memory cartridges to store program data, due to their low power consumption, smaller physical size and reduced mechanical complexity. CompactFlash CompactFlash ( CF )
1296-723: The CF Type II interface, but is a hard disk drive (HDD) as opposed to solid-state memory. Seagate also made CF HDDs. CompactFlash IDE (ATA) emulation speed is usually specified in "x" ratings, e.g. 8x, 20x, 133x. This is the same system used for CD-ROMs and indicates the maximum transfer rate in the form of a multiplier based on the original audio CD data transfer rate, which is 150 kB/s. where R = transfer rate, K = speed rating. For example, 133x rating means transfer rate of: 133 × 150 kB/s = 19,950 kB/s ≈ 20 MB/s. These are manufacturer speed ratings. Actual transfer rate may be higher, or lower, than shown on
1344-543: The Hasselblad CFV Digital Back for the Hasselblad series of medium format cameras. There are four main card speeds: original CF, CF High Speed (using CF+/CF2.0), faster CF 3.0 standard and the faster CF 4.0 standard adopted as of 2007. CompactFlash was originally built around Intel 's NOR -based flash memory, but has switched to NAND technology. CF is among the oldest and most successful formats, and has held
1392-539: The PATA command protocol, existing CompactFlash software drivers can be used, although writing new drivers to use AHCI instead of PATA emulation will almost always result in significant performance gains. CFast cards use a female 7-pin SATA data connector , and a female 17-pin power connector, so an adaptor is required to connect CFast cards in place of standard SATA hard drives which use male connectors. The first CFast cards reached
1440-560: The PC Card arrived. The first one was CompactFlash and later SmartMedia and Miniature Card . The desire for smaller cards for cell-phones, PDAs , and compact digital cameras drove a trend that left the previous generation of "compact" cards looking big. In 2000 the SD card was announced. SD was envisioned as a single memory card format for several kinds of electronic devices, that could also function as an expansion slot for adding new capabilities for
1488-781: The PC Card interface, no dedicated programming voltages (Vpp1 and Vpp2) are provided on the CompactFlash interface. CompactFlash IDE mode defines an interface that is smaller than, but electrically identical to, the ATA interface. The CF device contains an ATA controller and appears to the host device as if it were a hard disk . CF devices operate at 3.3 volts or 5 volts, and can be swapped from system to system. CompactFlash supports C-H-S and 28-bit logical block addressing (CF 5.0 introduced support for LBA-48). CF cards with flash memory are able to cope with extremely rapid changes in temperature. Industrial versions of flash memory cards can operate at
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1536-513: The battery was the only reliability issue. CompactFlash cards that use flash memory, like other flash-memory devices, are rated for a limited number of erase/write cycles for any "block." While NOR flash has higher endurance, ranging from 10,000 to 1,000,000, they have not been adapted for memory card usage. Most mass storage usage flash are NAND based. As of 2015 NAND flash were being scaled down to 16 nm. They are usually rated for 500 to 3,000 write/erase cycles per block before hard failure. This
1584-457: The card depending on several factors. The speed rating quoted is almost always the read speed, while write speed is often slower. For reads, the onboard controller first powers up the memory chips from standby. Reads are usually in parallel, error correction is done on the data, then transferred through the interface 16 bits at a time. Error checking is required due to soft read errors. Writes require powerup from standby, wear leveling calculation,
1632-565: The court ruled in favor of SmartDisk; a final ruling was made in 2005. In 2007, SmartDisk sold its intellectual property assets to Verbatim , creating the patent holding company SMDK Corp. The holding company issued a new set of patent infringement lawsuits in 2008. However, since the product was already effectively obsolete by then, most computer users were not affected by the lawsuits. Memory cards Common types of flash memory card include SD cards (including microSD), Sony's Memory Stick and CompactFlash . As of 2024 , SD cards are
1680-487: The devices be read by personal computers but also suits the limited processing ability of some consumer devices such as cameras . There are varying levels of compatibility among FAT32-compatible cameras, MP3 players, PDAs, and other devices. While any device that claims FAT32-capability should read and write to a FAT32-formatted card without problems, some devices are tripped up by cards larger than 2 GB that are completely unformatted, while others may take longer to apply
1728-443: The gaming industry (used in slot machines), as a natural evolution from the by then well-established CF cards. Current gaming industry supporters of the format include both specialist gaming companies (e.g. Aristocrat Leisure ) and OEMs such as Innocore (now part of Advantech Co., Ltd. ). The CFast 2.0 specification was released in the second quarter of 2012, updating the electrical interface to SATA 3.0 (600 MB/s). As of 2014,
1776-556: The highest capacities (up to 8 GiB ). Now there are solid-state cards with higher capacities (up to 512 GB). As of 2011, solid-state drives (SSDs) have supplanted both kinds of CF drive for large capacity requirements. SanDisk announced its 16 GB Extreme III card at the photokina trade fair, in September, 2006. That same month, Samsung announced 16, 32 and 64 GB CF cards. Two years later, in September, 2008, PRETEC announced 100 GB cards. Seagate announced
1824-501: The host device can read them. CompactFlash cards are often used instead of hard drives in embedded systems, dumb terminals and various small form-factor PCs that are built for low noise output or power consumption. CompactFlash cards are often more readily available and smaller than purpose-built solid-state drives and often have faster seek times than hard drives. When CompactFlash was first being standardized, even full-sized hard disks were rarely larger than 4 GB in size, and so
1872-581: The host device uses a suitable connector. Small cards consume around 5% of the power required by small disk drives and still have reasonable transfer rates of over 45 MB/s for the more expensive 'high-speed' cards. However, the manufacturer's warning on the flash memory used for ReadyBoost indicates a current draw in excess of 500 mA. CompactFlash cards for use in consumer devices are typically formatted as FAT12 (for media up to 16 MB), FAT16 (for media up to 2 GB, sometimes up to 4 GB) and FAT32 (for media larger than 2 GB). This lets
1920-535: The limitations of the ATA standard were considered acceptable. However, CF cards manufactured after the original Revision 1.0 specification are available in capacities up to 512 GB. While the current revision 6.0 works in [P]ATA mode, future revisions are expected to implement SATA mode. CE-ATA is a serial MMC-compatible interface based on the MultiMediaCard standard. A variant of CompactFlash known as CFast
1968-428: The market in late 2009. At CES 2009, Pretec showed a 32 GB CFast card and announced that they should reach the market within a few months. Delock began distributing CFast cards in 2010, offering several card readers with USB 3.0 and eSATAp (power over eSATA) ports to support CFast cards. Seeking higher performance and still keeping a compact storage format, some of the earliest adoptors of CFast cards were in
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2016-410: The memory chips in both cards have the same write speed specification. Although FAT16 is more wasteful of disk space with its larger clusters, it works better with the write strategy that flash memory chips require. The cards themselves can be formatted with any type of file system such as Ext , JFS , NTFS , or by one of the dedicated flash file systems . It can be divided into partitions as long as
2064-420: The most common type of memory cards. The basis for memory card technology is flash memory . It was invented by Fujio Masuoka at Toshiba in 1980 and commercialized by Toshiba in 1987. The development of memory cards was driven in the 1980s by the need for an alternative to floppy disk drives that had lower power consumption, had less weight and occupied less volume in laptops. Some were also marketed as
2112-509: The new format is aimed at high-definition camcorders and high-resolution digital cameras, but the new cards are not backward compatible with either CompactFlash or CFast. The XQD card format was officially announced by the CompactFlash Association in December 2011. There are two main subdivisions of CF cards, 3.3 mm-thick type I and 5 mm-thick type II (CF2). The type II slot is used by miniature hard drives and some other devices, such as
2160-715: The only product employing CFast 2.0 cards was the Arri Amira digital production camera, allowing frame rates of up to 200 fps; a CFast 2.0 adapter for the Arri Alexa/XT camera was also released. On 7 April 2014, Blackmagic Design announced the URSA cinema camera, which records to CFast media. On 8 April 2015, Canon Inc. announced the XC10 video camera, which also makes use of CFast cards. Blackmagic Design also announced that its URSA Mini will use CFast 2.0. As of October 2016, there are
2208-481: The physical location to which a block is written. This process is called wear leveling . When using CompactFlash in ATA mode to take the place of the hard disk drive , wear leveling becomes critical because low-numbered blocks contain tables whose contents change frequently. Current CompactFlash cards spread the wear-leveling across the entire drive. The more advanced CompactFlash cards will move data that rarely changes to ensure all blocks wear evenly. NAND flash memory
2256-460: Was first released in 1990, and unified the JEIDA memory card standard with the PC Card standard. This format later included support for other devices besides memory cards. PC Card was among the first commercial memory card formats to come out, but is mainly used in industrial applications and to connect I/O devices such as modems . Some early memory cards used SRAM as a storage medium, which required
2304-466: Was the first video game console able to use a memory card. AES memory cards were also compatible with Neo Geo MVS arcade cabinets , allowing players to migrate saves between home and arcade systems and vice versa. Memory cards became commonplace when home consoles moved to read-only optical discs for storing the game program, beginning with systems such as the TurboGrafx-CD and Sega-CD . Until
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