New Ridata CF Cards to Support SMART

Except for speed, today's compact flash cards are not too different and that's a fact no matter if we're talking about big names in the industry or the little guys. Well, once in a while, along comes a company that manages to produce a ripple on the quiet waters of compact flash lake.

Advanced Media, a subsidiary of RITEK Corporation, has just announced the first Smart Compact Flash cards, which will be displayed at CES 2008. In case you don't know, Smart stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology, which is mostly used in computer hard disks to predict failures. Additionally, its embedded Error Correction Code (ECC) supports two random bits of a sector on-the-fly ECC corrections.

The new cards will be available in two series: RIDATA Supreme and RIDATA Lightning. The former will include models ranging from 1GB to 8GB and will have speeds of 150x and the latter will have capacities of up to 16GB with speeds of 233x.

"We are pleased to introduce the RIDATA SMART CompactFlash Card, which is the first of its kind in the industry," stated Harvey Liu, Advanced Media president.

"The flash memory market is growing quickly due to the number of new applications that use flash media for storage. As capacity continues to increase, RIDATA saw the need for an internal data monitoring system to ensure the safety of your data," he added.

Other specs include a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of 5,000,000 powered-on hours and a quoted maximum endurance of 100,000 times of program/erase cycles.

Although the SMART technology has not been entirely successful and this might also be the case with the new cards, it's good to see some innovation in this sector aside from speed.

Unfortunately, there's no information on pricing or availability, so hold on to those "classic" CF cards for now.

We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .