DCAD - why doesn't this exists, today?
I am surprised that no one has thought about this ? I am almost certain that this will be a super useful product that will be a hit if done right. Ironically, it still doesn't exist today. It is so useful that compact external HDs/SSDs will become a thing of the past, if you still haven't guessed it yet... I will tell you what it is; before that I want to make sure that Sandisk, Kingston and others into similar line of business understand that though I don't have a patent for it, it will still remain as my original idea and that this post should stand as a proof. First, let me give it a name. It will be called DCAD(Digital Card Array Drive). Before anyone comments let me admit that DCAD is a lousy name\acronym, however, it is better than some grossly reverse engineered acronyms out there.
Over the past few years I have accummulated 2GB and 4GB SD and micro SD cards totalling to about 10GB. I really cannot use more than one in my phone or my camera at any given instance, what do I do with these unused SD cards ? I am sure a lot of folks already have this question or are likely to ask this this question sooner or later; that's where DCAD comes into play. DCAD will aggregate these fragmented storage into one logical drive i.e. an array of SD cards that can be made to function as a single drive with USB interface. The drive should be able to take some where between 10 to 20 SD\Micro SD cards. We could even build some redundancy at the cost of some memory for reliability into these drives, if required. The form factor can vary depending on what cards these drives can host, if it is all micro SDs it can be made super compact. DCAD will be particularly useful with more and more devices starting to support USB host functionality. Similar concept can be extended to other standards for non-volatile memory cards like MMC, compact flash etc.,.
Hopefully, I can put my idle SD cards to use soon... :-)
Over the past few years I have accummulated 2GB and 4GB SD and micro SD cards totalling to about 10GB. I really cannot use more than one in my phone or my camera at any given instance, what do I do with these unused SD cards ? I am sure a lot of folks already have this question or are likely to ask this this question sooner or later; that's where DCAD comes into play. DCAD will aggregate these fragmented storage into one logical drive i.e. an array of SD cards that can be made to function as a single drive with USB interface. The drive should be able to take some where between 10 to 20 SD\Micro SD cards. We could even build some redundancy at the cost of some memory for reliability into these drives, if required. The form factor can vary depending on what cards these drives can host, if it is all micro SDs it can be made super compact. DCAD will be particularly useful with more and more devices starting to support USB host functionality. Similar concept can be extended to other standards for non-volatile memory cards like MMC, compact flash etc.,.
Hopefully, I can put my idle SD cards to use soon... :-)
2 Comments:
why would you want to build a DCAD , storage is so damn cheap these days, before you realize you will be able to purchase micro sds that can store a Tera probably(and of course devices which can manage those SDs). There wont be a big advantage in using multiple SDs together
By
Badrinath.V.S, at 9:58 am, July 07, 2010
You are right it doesn't compete with HDs as in the mechanical ones, which still are behind terms of reliability and form factory. Solid state storage is still not cheap. To give you some numbers 32GB SSD starts at a $100. A 8GB SD card is around $10 that means with DCAD you cuold get the same for $60 = $40 + $20(DCAD), In most cases people must have already spent the $40 dollar, effectively making it $20. The fact that prices of these SD cards are likely to drop in future and that we will be accumulating more and more of these in the future makes the case for such a device.
By
~ythee~, at 3:11 pm, July 10, 2010
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