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/lexar-rolls-out-4gb-8gb-and-16gb-expresscard-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?

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.

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

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."

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

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 Expresscard interface itself, is around 266Mbyte per second...

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.

The references I've seen indicate that Expresscard has a maximum throughput of 2.5 Gbit/sec:
It's also worth going to the Sandisk/Sony press release:

http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.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.

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.

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).

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

http://www.crucial.com/store/listmodule/EXPRESSCARD%20SSD/list.html?cpe=InsiderMay07UShtml

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....

Price Drop!
No offense, but the P2 guys can't be happy with this...

Lexar is rolling out ExpressCard memory.
Checkout this link:

http://lexar.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php?vcode=LMI&partnum=EX16GB431

With competition heating up and prices dropping, one wonders about the looming death of P2.......

Makes the upcoming EX even more interesting than it already was.

So will these cards work with the XDCAM EX? I get the impression that XDCAM EX works with any Expresscards, so although SxS is going to be Sony/Sandisks version, regular expresscards should work as well

This link goes to a short blurb on SxS and its relation to ExpressCard.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0704/07041601sxsmemorycardformat.asp

(this is for 1080 material. Of course you can fit more video when using 720p 24p on P2 cards but then you end up comparing 720p video to 1080 video which doesn't really count.)

16GB card at $885.00 = 16 minutes of P2 footage
4 cards = 64 minutes
4 cards = $3,540.00
$3,540.00 for 64 minutes of HD on P2 cards.

16GB card at $190.00 = 48 minutes of XDCAM HD 35mbit footage
2 cards = 96 minutes or more then enough for the 64 minutes of recording time.
2 cards = $380.00
$380.00 for 96 minutes of HD on Express cards. This is almost at 1/10th the cost! If you wanted to figure out the cost for only the first 64 minutes worth of storage then it is actually more like $254.00 or well above 1/10th the cost.

(I'm not sure if 48 minutes is the exact figure for XDCAM HD 35mbit on a 16GB card but it is pretty close. Even if it is slightly lower like 40 minutes that is still a fraction of the cost of using 1080 P2 footage.)

So will these cards work with the XDCAM EX? I get the impression that XDCAM EX works with any Expresscards, so although SxS is going to be Sony/Sandisks version, regular expresscards should work as well

I don't think the Lexar ExpressCard SSD will work with the XDCAM EX.

ExpressCard devices can either use USB or PCIe. Sony's SxS flash memory cards use PCIe. While Lexar doesn't explicitly say which interface their memory cards use, it looks like it is USB. See http://www.everythingusb.com/lexar_expresscard_ssd_16gb_12492.html

Tom

I don't think the Lexar ExpressCard SSD will work with the XDCAM EX.

ExpressCard devices can either use USB or PCIe. Sony's SxS flash memory cards use PCIe. While Lexar doesn't explicitly say which interface their memory cards use, it looks like it is USB. See http://www.everythingusb.com/lexar_expresscard_ssd_16gb_12492.html

Tom

Well we will have to see. Physically the cards are the same. The card will fit into the slot. 480 mbits USB is also more then fast enough for 35mbit XDCAM footage so that wouldn't be a problem either. As long as the EX camera can recognize a storage device as a storage device it may have no problem working. Of course not a single person on this forum can know for sure or not until the camera comes out.

Mr. Tom Vaughan, I do believe you are correct.
My enthusiasm ran away with me.

I have included a number of links to products below, for
plugging in USB based ExpressCard form factor memory
cards. They expressly state that PCIe based products
will NOT be recognized.

http://www.siig.com/product.asp?catid=128&pid=1121
http://www.siig.com/product.asp?catid=128&pid=1131
http://www.siig.com/product.asp?catid=128&pid=1132

And we also know that the SxS specification is shooting for
throughput of 800 Mbit/sec. This rules out that it would be
USB based.

I do think having two sets of products with the same physical
form factor, plugging into the same physical slot, but in fact
using two different electrical interfaces is going to be cause
for some confusion. As we have been having here.

I think the most important point is that you already see a number of companies announcing ExpressCard storage, even if not all of them will use the ePCIe interface. Competition is heating up and prices will continue to fall. At the end of the year there will be a number of suppliers who will deliver SxS compatible cards for prices that will threaten the proprietary format of the P2 cards. A further threat to P2 is the fact that current day notebooks are fitted with ExpressCard slots and the P2 compatible slots are massively being abandoned. A third threat to P2 is availability. Let's say you are somewhere in back country and find you need another P2 card. ExpressCards can be found in a lot of computer stores, but for P2 you have to find a well stocked Panasonic dealer.

All in all, I think that P2's days are numbered.

Mr. Tom Vaughan, I do believe you are correct.
My enthusiasm ran away with me.

I have included a number of links to products below, for
plugging in USB based ExpressCard form factor memory
cards. They expressly state that PCIe based products
will NOT be recognized.

http://www.siig.com/product.asp?catid=128&pid=1121
http://www.siig.com/product.asp?catid=128&pid=1131
http://www.siig.com/product.asp?catid=128&pid=1132

And we also know that the SxS specification is shooting for
throughput of 800 Mbit/sec. This rules out that it would be
USB based.

I do think having two sets of products with the same physical
form factor, plugging into the same physical slot, but in fact
using two different electrical interfaces is going to be cause
for some confusion. As we have been having here.

Those devices are totally different because they convert the signal. They are designed to use the USB style cards with a USB port or older PCI card slot. They say they will not work with PCIE devices because the devices are not designed to read them and they would becomes a huge bottleneck. All those devices are just so people can easilly use the USB style PCIE shaped cards with older laptops or desktops.

The SONY EX camera is already a PCIE device so it already has the max bandwidth and interface. Again the cards are exactly the same shape and interface and the only difference is the speed. While it may be hard to make a newer faster device work on a slower older interface the opposite is usually much easier. Using a slower card in the EX could in fact work (although like I said earlier nobody can know for sure until they stick one inside and try it out.) The only difference is that the card would transfer video to your laptop at a much slower speed. the 480mbits/s is more then enough to write and read 35mbits/s XDCAMHD footage in realtime which is all that really matters when shooting.

The SxS cards are faster but this will only really matter when you want to transfer the video to another storage device. The SxS cards could maybe copy the card over in half the amount of time but to some people that may not be a big deal.

It all really depends on how the SONY EX views the cards. If the SxS cards are formatted in a special way then perhaps the camera can only view them as valid devices. If the camera views a card just as a storage device then it shouldn't really matter. We will not really know though until somebody physically sticks one of these cards into the camera to see if it will work. I also wouldn't really take the word from a company either as to if it will work. Being officially supported and actually working with no problems are two different things.

Finally, most of the cost of these cards is actually the flash media itself. I really do not see that much of a reason for SxS cards to cost that much more then the Expresscards. The only thing that changes is the interface transfer speed and considering Expresscard devices can cost $50.00 I doubt the interface itself will cost that much more to add to the SxS cards.

(Edit)

One last thing. The current USB bandwidth devices are designed to be plugged into Express card slots and be used as storage devices. Since the SONY EX is a Express card slot it makes sense that it also should be able to read the cards since the cards would be read by a laptop express card slot. It all comes down to if the SONY EX OS will be limited to work with only a certain type of card or if it will just view a storage device as a storage device.

In fairness to HDV, a sony HVD 63 minutes tape is ..around $9.00.

Finally, most of the cost of these cards is actually the flash media itself. I really do not see that much of a reason for SxS cards to cost that much more then the Expresscards. The only thing that changes is the interface transfer speed and considering Expresscard devices can cost $50.00 I doubt the interface itself will cost that much more to add to the SxS cards.

.

I agree completely with you on this one.
But on the other hand, just check out what P2 costs.
And the reason for that is...because Panasonic can IMO.