SmartMedia
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| Media type | Memory card |
|---|---|
| Capacity | up to 128MB |
| Developed by | Toshiba |
| Dimensions | 45.0 × 37.0 × 0.76 mm |
| Weight | 1.8g |
SmartMedia is a flash memory card standard owned by Toshiba, with capacities ranging from 2 MB to 128 MB. SmartMedia memory cards are no longer manufactured.
The SmartMedia format was launched in the summer of 1995 to compete with the MiniCard, CompactFlash, and PC Card formats. Although memory cards are nowadays associated with digital cameras, digital audio players, PDAs, and similar devices, SmartMedia was pitched as a successor to the computer floppy disk. Indeed, the format was originally named Solid State Floppy Disk Card (SSFDC). The SSFDC forum, a consortium aiming to promote SSFDC as an industry standard, was founded in April 1996, consisting of 37 initial members.
A SmartMedia card consists of a single NAND flash chip embedded in a thin plastic card, although some higher capacity cards contain multiple, linked chips. It was one of the smallest and thinnest of the early memory cards, only 0.76mm thick, and managed to maintain a favorable cost ratio as compared to the others. SmartMedia cards lack a built-in controller chip, which kept the cost down. This feature later caused problems, since some older devices would require firmware updates to handle larger capacity cards. The lack of built-in controller also made it impossible for the card to perform automatic wear levelling, a process which prevents premature wearout of a sector by mapping the writes to various other sectors in the card.
SmartMedia cards can be used in a standard 3.5" floppy drive by means of a FlashPath adapter. This is possibly the only way of obtaining flash memory functionality with very old hardware, and it remains one of SmartMedia's most distinctive features. This method was not without its own disadvantages, as it required special drivers offering only very basic file read/write capability (or read-only on Macintosh systems) and was limited to floppy disk transfer speeds. However, this was not so troublesome in the earlier days of the format when card sizes were limited (generally 8~16MB) and USB interfaces were both uncommon and low-speed, with digital cameras connecting via "high speed" serial links that themselves needed drivers and special transfer programs. The fifteen minutes taken to read a nearly-full 16MB card - directly to hard disk - via Flashpath using the slowest (128kbit/s) PC floppy controller was still simpler and slightly faster than the quickest reliable (115.2kbit/s) serial link, without the need for connection, synching and thumbnail previewing, and only beaten by expensive parallel-port based external card readers that could do the same job in two minutes or less (1000kbit/s-plus, comparable to USB 1.0) when connected to a compatible high-speed ECP or EPP port (and ~5 minutes using a basic PPT in failsafe mode).
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