It seems the CompactFlash card association have been making giants leaps with their new memory card standards. They have just announced the CF 5.0 specification and, well, we just need to hope hard disks keep up as the figures they are talking about are CRAZY.

Ok, so there are no cameras that currently support CF5.0 but when it happens, well, here's some figures to keep you amused.

Currently, CF cards use 28bit addressing, a data transfer unit size of 128KB/se and a maximum capacity of 137GB. CF5.0 gives the following:
48-bit addressing
32MB/sec transfer unit size
144 petabytes of theoretical maximum capacity. Yeah, you read that right. And for those that don't know what a petabyte is, each petabyte is 1,000,000 Gigabytes. so that's 144 million gigabytes in a single compact flash card.

So, you'd best start looking at your hard drive storage now - or maybe just a couple of CF cards will do?! 

If you're of that persuasion and fancy an interesting technical read, here's the latest whitepaper on CF5.0 as a pdf.