New CompactFlash card to allow RAID-style 'mirroring'

Complete nonsense. You can achieve the same thing with proper wear leveling inside the cards controller firmware and using SLC NAND instead of the most peculiar MLC. Anyway I bet most card corruption comes from camera bugs and the inherent fragility of the FAT file system.

What if you lose the card? What if both partitions fail? What if contacts fail? What if the file system fails?

This is for people who buy first, then think.

Just a marketing stuff, nothing else.

Flash memory generally starts to fail after a certain number of thousands of write actions.
Since that card's 32GB twins are designed to be written at the same time at mirror mode, both partition will most likely start to fail at around the same time. Mirroring where both partitions that are failing... and that's when you really need mirror safe guard... does not sound safe.

Chances of card lost or total failure of circuit is definitely higher than chances of one partition is healthy while the other fails.

This doesn't make any sense. With hard drive mirroring, you have a backup in case one hard drive fails. But this is a single card with a single interface, so what's the chance that one copy of the file will be good if the other is bad? Pretty slim. The most likely failure will be at the interface.

One has to tell me first to what and to whom that will serve. If the card breaks, you throw the 2 partitions away. If one gets corrupted, the corrupted sector is mirrored, thus both will not work. If the card gets lost, both partitions are lost. So, is there anything we don't know here? I do not ask "that I know" since I think that we all ask the same question. On the other side, CF gets more and more replaced by SD, what is a bargain since you can fit 25 SD cards in a matchbox. Now, if they could make a CF body with 2 sd cards in slots, mirrored, that would make sense.

This offers a false promise of image security.

My Eye-Fi wifi SD card enables me to have my images on two separate devices, not one device with one set of contacts, one toggle switch, etc.

I have an SD card with its sliding 'Protect' lock tab broken off, it is useless.

So is a mirrored CF card.

What's the benefit of mirroring if both mirrors are on the same device? It's like having a "backup" partition on the same hard drive; sure in the event that part of the data becomes corrupt you'll still have a good copy, but if anything goes wrong with the disk (card) then you've lost both copies.

Unless it has two controllers it is really useless.

Maybe it will be as good as RAID. If so, then what a boon. If the two partitions are insulated from each other correctly that is... and time will tell. Auto backup in one card is a fantastic idea in theory and it will only take a bit of time to see if this idea delivers the goods or not. Naysayers, maybe it's not as good as it sounds (message that scarcity mentality), but you have to admit that if it does provide highly reliable mirroring in one card well that could be amazing for mission critical shooting. I'm in favor.

Well, I think it would depend on how this card is designed.

If the design is such that there are two seperate "cards" within one CF casing, and in normal mode another controller merges the two cards to fool the camera into thinking it's one card, then it seems fine to me because it would mean that in RAID Mode you really are backing up to two seperate cards.

If however, it's just one card partitioned into two then it's pretty pointless as a backup device.

I think we will have to wait a while to learn a little more about the design of this card (from an independent reviewer; this would be the kind of product that Rob Gailbraith would have been good at reviewing but alas his site is no longer running)

As to the comments before mine regarding faulty controllers, perhaps the way around that would be to have CF pins on two sides of the card, with a cap covering the pins you are not using; these covered pins (and the controller) would come into play if the other side failed.

about time Im suprised no-one has created a cf-sd adapter that holds 2x sd cards & a raid controller on board

So...if I have a Nikon D3, or D3X, or D3S, or a Canon EOS-1D X, 1D C
then I could have 2xCFx2
that is...both a back-up CF and a "RAID" CF
with quad pictures simultaneously
and
naturally two cameras to be REALLY safe with octa system setup
They could be on a same tripod side-by-side...
Maybe a duplicate tripod system and...
(but no back-up photographers with a similar setup, please {WTD} )

I wonder if this new CF will work on the old Nikon D3 series
or if it requires the latest and the greatest like Canon EOS-1D
(trolling)

This is not a gimmic.

You have to remember this is not a magnetic device like hard drives, where the whole drive fails when the disk stops spinning. This is random access memory. If one partition fails, the other side still works.

Background: CF cards of all brands use NAND chips from companies like Samsung or Micron. For example, a 32GB card can use 8 chips, each of which is 4GB. These chips are separate and only connect to the ATA memory controller. If one dies the rest don't die with it.

There are some kinds of failures that could render the entire thing uselsess, like when RAID itself fails, or if the card is damaged physically. Far more common is the problem where some memory cells are corrupted, or that a single NAND chip fails. That's what this card can deal with.

To all those who've experienced CF card failure; What brand+model were they?

These cards haven't failed for over 4 years and still going:
-4gb Sandisk Extreme III
-8GB Sandisk Extreme

My latest card, the 32gb Sandisk Extreme Pro, I bought last year and has had several corrupted photos, they were taken at high speed (8fps).

I'd have to say the regular Extreme line of Sandisk cards work well (for me)

Gimmick for sure.

upon reading the topic, i thought they managed to fit 2 sd cards into that single cf :)
but this raid on a single card thing is a joke

Or just buy 2 64GB cards for those of us who have cameras with two slots?

RAID 1 with a single point of failure. Cute.

I am sure it will sell more cards, though, since it halves their capacity.

It should take 2 SD cards and either mirror or span them. Otherwise, if the CF card fails, mirrored information will not be reachable anyway.

RAID 1 on a single hard drive with 2 partitions?

This is stupid, the things that cause most of these cards to fail would impact both sides. This is marketing gimmickry at it's finest

I've been using digital camera since 2001....not once have I ever had a corrupted memory card...just sayin'.

I find hard to believe that if the card fails one of the partitions will be safe....but that's just me.

Well, the whole point of Raid 1 is to write all data to two seperate harddrives at the same time - in case one failes, you have all data still availble on the second drive in the array .

Seperate is the key here, physically seperate with their own interface and controller .

Sounds good. This was the main reason I got the D7000, the dual SD slot allowing pictures to be stored on both. I'm curious what's required to enable this on the cards.

Quite interesting the read/write speed drops to half, I wouldn't have expected the read rates to be impacted.