Specifications for Compact Flash 5.0 released

The specifications for revision 5.0 of the Compact Flash standard have been released by the Compact Flash (CF) association. In a nutshell, the new standard comes with a revised feature set, inclusive of the TRIM command that is designed to reduce wear and tear on flash memory.

The highlight though, is probably the extension to 48-bit LBA which gives a huge bump to the maximum capacity of Compact Flash cards that can be supported. As an example, the current Compact Flash 4.1 specification makes use of 28-bit addressing, which limits the size of CF cards to just 137GB of data.

On the other hand, the new standard will allow the creation of CF cards of up to 144 Petabytes. While such large cards are unlikely to be manufactured any time soon, CF cards of 2 TBs or more will likely appear in short order to support upcoming super high-definition video like Quad HD (2160p) and Ultra-definition (4320p).

For more on this story:
- check out this article at The Inquirer 

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