Patriot 16GB SDHC Cards Now Available

Back in August we reported on the impending arrival of Toshiba’s 16GB SDHC cards to the market. Now according to Engadget, it looks like Patriot has beaten Toshiba to the punch. Patriot's 16GB SDHC card touts the highest Class 6 speed rating and is available now on Amazon Germany’s website for 279.99 Euros, equivalent to a whopping $393 USD. That high price is considerably more than the $350 price mentioned for the comparably sized Toshiba cards expected next month but is in line with the usual early adopter premium in the tech industry. Toshiba has also promised an enormous 32GB SDHC card to reportedly be available in January for twice the price of their 16GB card.

Despite being one of the smaller flash & DRAM companies, Patriot’s products have a solid track record. I’ve owned several sticks of Patriot DDR memory for desktop PCs along with two Patriot SD cards, including a non-spec 4GB SD 1.1 card. All have performed flawlessly so this is encouraging news that after a sluggish summer, flash memory prices are set to drop yet again amidst increasing capacities.

Since no 16GB SDHC cards have actually hit the retail channels, no firsthand reports have emerged on these cards’ compatibility with Palm’s devices bearing fullsizes SDHC slots. Palm’s Treo 680 ships with native SDHC support while the updated Sprint and Verizon ROM 1.10 versions of the Treo 700p are verified by Palm to work with 4GB SDHC cards. I can report from personal experience than on all of the above Treos, 8GB SDHC cards do work but are recognized as two separate 4GB volumes due to the limitations of the Palm OS. So there’s no word as yet if the Palm OS Garnet file system will even be able to recognize such high-capacity cards, and if so, if the card’s entire storage capacity can be utilized.

While being architecturally similar to the Treo 700p, Palm’s Windows Mobile-based CDMA Treos, the 700w and wx, are only compatible with standard SD cards up to 2GB, according to Palm. SDHC cards up to 4GB in size unofficially work in these Treos via a hack found here but 8GB SDHC cards are not recognized at all by Windows Mobile on these devices, making for one surprising win for the aging Palm OS against comparable Windows Mobile-equipped models.