Memory | Basit Ali's Blog - All about the tech world I live in

Buy SDXC and Micro SDXC memory cards now

Posted by BA on Nov 1, 2010 in Micro Card, Mobile Accessories | 1 comment

Next generation SDXC memory cards start emerging in online stores. Devices that support such cards are also becoming available. SDXC is the latest standard of memory cards that supports memory capacities starting from 16 gigabyte and goes up to 2 terabyte (2000 gigabyte). Such huge capacity cards will be very popular in HD video cameras and other multimedia producing and carrying devices.

Cards with 64GB capacity are available now. Cards with larger capacity will be available later.

You can click on the card below to buy it now:

Buy 64 GB SDXC card now.

If you have a digital camera, mobile phone or media device that supports SDXC cards, you are ready to get benefit from huge capacity memory cards. You can buy one now or you can wait till larger capacities like 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB or 2TB become available.

Memory Myth

Posted by BA on Oct 29, 2008 in Computer Science | 0 comments

I’ve been using different memory cards in different devices. I’ve used MMCs, SD, MicroSD, Sony Memory stick and so on. I never bothered re-checking their capacity and trusted on the label on the card itself. I have been using a 2GB MMC-Mobile in my good old N72 and I never went into the phone’s memory monitoring software to see actually how much memory is available on the card. Recenly I got a SanDisk’s 16GB SDHC card and when I plugged it into my Nokia N82, it reports it as 15GB. Thats loss of a whole GB of data capacity. Then I plugged it into my BlackBerry and found that it reports it to be 14.8GB. Another 200MB lost. Then I decided to actually try a few other cards around. I investigated a little further. I plugged my 8GB Micro-SDHC card in my BlackBerry and it reported it to be 7.6 GB. Thats again not 8GB. Then I plugged a common 1GB Micro-SDHC card into my Nokia N82 and it reports it to be 964 MB.

The key point is, I never noticed the capacity loss on 1GB card because its only 60MB. While on a 16GB card its losing a whole 1.2GB.

Why is that happening? I revisitied my basic data capacity and storage unit concepts. Let me list down a few basic facts for you.

1 kilo-byte = 1kB = 1024 bytes
1 megabyte = 1MB = 1024kB = 1024×1024 bytes
1 gigabyte = 1GB = 1024MB = 1024x1024x1024 bytes

Therefore
16GB = 16 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes.

In reality, what memory card manufacturers do, they put it as follows:

1 GB card has slightly more than 1000,000,000 bytes.
It s hould actually be 1073,741,824

Similarly, 16 GB card actually has 16,000,000,000 bytes. This makes the total to 14.90GB

So if you buy 1GB, you should expect actully something less than that.

The thing which is bothering me is, my Nokia reports my 16 GB card as 15GB, while my BlackBerry reports it as 14.8, while it actually is 14.9 GB.