Blu-Ray might really have a run for its money next year in terms of storage when SDXC, the next generation of SD cards, is rumored to be released. Expected to have 64 GB of capacity to start and 52 MB per second speeds, this technology would be faster than Blu-Ray (which has a maximum capacity to date of 50 GB and movies require at least 54 Mbps or 6.75 MBps transfer) and also probably have enough storage to replace all of your current SD cards.
This is quite exciting as even though external storage has come down quite a bit in price, I could truly see this giving Blu-Ray some serious competition in the HD recording market. Presently HD camcorders have had a hard drive in them because there has been no external storage to date that has been able to handle the capacity necessary for “Full HD” recording. Now, instead of having everything on the hard drive and needing to download it to your computer or put it on Blu-Ray, you’ll be able to grab one of these cards and put it into your camcorder. Then when you want to see your video, you can take it out and play it on a TV that has SDXC. That aspect alone could really help propel HD camcorders into the mainstream.
Although there is no roadmap released for SDXC, Blu-Ray has been expected to release 100 GB discs for a little while now, however, that never seems to have materialized commercially. Plus with the cost of BD-REs in most places, the prospect of a 64 GB (to start) card might be a very, very appealing solution for data backups. It’ll be interesting to see how far SDXC will go, but I suspect that 64 GB cards will be in 2010 with 128 GB following maybe one year after.
So things are definitely looking up in computer storage these days. Between Blu-Ray, SDXC, and massive external hard drives, there should be no excuse for anyone to ever lose important data or complain that they no longer have enough space.
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