CompactFlash cards to offer petabytes of storage

The CompactFlash Association has announced the availability of its new CF5.0 specification, offering greater capacities and speeds. Enabling 48-bit support (as against the current 28-bit), the new specification theoretically allows for an increase in the maximum capacity to 144 petabytes (1PB = 1000 terabytes), up from the current limitation of 137GB and also increases data transfer unit size from 128KB to 32MB. Although it is primarily aimed at the camcorder market, we expect to see compatibility added to future HD-enabled DSLRs.