The CompactFlash Association, the guys behind the CF card format, has just released the details for the CompactFlash revision 5.0 spec. What’s new with the old card format? Oh not much. Except for a higher storage ceiling. So high, in fact, that it’ll probably take some time before we’ll ever see the full extent of its potential.

This might not be hot news for the everyday gadgeteer that’s pretty content with gadgets that use the more common SD and microSD card formats, but for CF users like you (if you use high-end DSLR cams), here’s the nitty gritty:

The CF 5.0 spec’s major change lies in the larger 48-bit (from 24) addressing feature that increases the storage ceiling from the previous generation’s hypothetical 137GB limit to a mind-blowing 144 petabytes—if only someone is ever interested in fitting all that space into the size of a CompactFlash card (and if someone’s willing to pay for that amount of storage when the time comes). It could take years, but yeah, someone’s bound to do it. Just because it’s technically possible now.

For the people who use the CF format, like photographers and videographers, the new spec also comes with a few more enhancements that include performance controls and video performance guarantees that ensure quality recordings without dropped frames. For the professional gadgeteer, that means this can be loaded onto really sophisticated equipment, namely high-speed HD cameras and DSLRs, with a promise of exponentially faster transfer and write speeds.

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Number crunching

Just how spacious is 144 petabytes? Here’s how to calculate the numbers, from megabytes to petabytes:

• 1 gigabyte = 1,024 megabytes
• 1 terabyte = 1,024 gigabytes
• 1 petabyte = 1,038,576 terabytes
• 144 petabytes = ridonkulous storage*

*If you’re looking for the actual number, 144 petabytes is 149,554,944 terabytes or 153,144,262,656 gigabytes. For a sense of scale, breaking that number down into iPod classic-sized chunks (at 160GB per iPod), that’s the equivalent of around 957,151,641 iPod classics. Now, we would have loved to break that number down some more into how many songs or HD movies it could potentially hold, but that would have been us admitting that we didn’t have actual lives.

Tags: CompactFlash, Flash Memory, Storage

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