SanDisk

August 29, 2007 Not so long ago we were using floppy disks with a 1.44mb capacity to save and transfer documents, even more recently a 500Mb thumb drive seemed like a revolution, but now it's all a matter of routine to be counting in gigabytes. SanDisk has introduced an 8 gigabyte model (that's the equivalent to 5555 floppy disks) of its Cruzer Micro USB Flash drive, double the largest capacity previously available in the Cruzer Micro line.  Read More

July 20, 2007 Sandisk evidently believes its time as a sponsor of the championship-leading Ducati Corse MotoGP team has taught it a thing or two about speed and style. The company just launched the Sandisk Extreme Ducati range, including its fastest-ever CompactFlash and SD cards, as well as a high-speed USB flash drive, all co-branded with Ducati Corse logos. While the cards will spend much of their time hidden in digital cameras and other devices, the USB key is dressed to impress, faired in Ducati red and black like the exotic Italian racebike. Ducati fans, much like the Ferrari fans of F1, have never been afraid to wear their passion on their sleeve - now they can wear it on their keyrings too.  Read More

June 28, 2007 SanDisk Corporation has begun sampling 6- and 8-gigabyte (GB) microSD High Capacity (microSDHC) flash memory cards to major phone manufacturers and mobile network operators (MNOs) for testing and evaluation. The new cards are ideal for the growing number of feature-rich multimedia handsets that bring together phones, music players, hand-held computers, digital cameras and more. Pricing has not yet been determined but we can expect to see them at retail well before the end of the year.  Read More

June 5, 2007 Gartner projects global consumption of Solid State Drives in consumer and business notebooks to leap from about 4 million units in 2007 to 32 million units in 2008 – SSDs are a technology whose time has come. SSDs we’ve seen until now have been a bit small to replace hard drives, but SanDisk, the folks who gave us the technology in the first place, appear to be reaching the “sweet spot” of memory storage for laptop computers, with the introduction of a 64-gigabyte (GB)1 SSD aimed at both enterprise users and early adopter consumers such as gamers and gizmagers. The little wonder will deliver 2 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF) – that’s approximately six times more than notebook hard disks. With no moving parts, SSDs are much less likely to fail when dropped, they start working almost immediately, offer 100 times faster data access speeds than a conventional hard disk drive and use roughly half the power, significantly extending battery life. Sold yet?  Read More

January 18, 2007 The Dolomite mountain scenery of Madonna di Campiglio formed the spectacular backdrop for the official launch of the new Ducati Desmosedici GP7 yesterday. The wraps were pulled off the all-new Italian bike by Loris Capirossi and Casey Stoner, the two Ducati Marlboro Team factory riders who will spearhead the Italian manufacturer's attack in the first year of the new 800cc category. The Desmosedici GP7 is characterized by having a new and exclusive colour scheme called "Red Racing Chrome", produced with a special paint that, like McLaren’s similar technology in Formula One, offers the bikes an innovative and technological chrome effect. The new 800cc engine is smaller and narrower than the 990 unit and acts as a load-bearing structure within the shorter chassis and the sub-frame is mounted directly on the engine.  Read More

January 17, 2007 With flash storage technology catching up to traditional disc platter storage devices and the price of NAND flash dropping quickly, Solid State Disks (SSD) look set to finally make their mark in 2007. It’s only eight months since we reported on Samsung’s World first PC with NAND flash-based solid state disk – a 32 GB affair. Then, at CES last week, Sandisk announced a 32GB 1.8-inch SSD and now Taiwanese manufacturer PQI has announced a 64GB 2.5-inch SSD which will be available before the end of 2007. A-DATA showed a 128GB 2.5-inch SSD behind closed doors at CES according to the Enquirer.  Read More

September 4, 2006 The increasingly mobile consumer now has the ability to watch their favorite shows and videos, whenever and wherever they want – it’s really just that most of us need a way to get the show from its original source into a form we can watch it on our mobile phone or PDA. SanDisk, the inventor of flash storage cards and world's largest supplier of flash data storage card products has introduced an interesting and potentially very useful Video Memory Card Recorder called the V-Mate which overcomes this problem entirely, regardless of the format of the original. The US$130 V-Mate enables users to record video from video inputs such as over-the-air television as well as cable, satellite, DVD players, personal video recorders (PVRs) like TiVo and video cassette recorders (VCRs) onto their flash memory cards. The V-Mate prepares the video, drops it on your memory card which is then inserted into their mobile phone, PDA, handheld game console like the Sony PSP (PlayStation Portable), video music player or notebook computer to play back their videos on the go.  Read More

August 22, 2006 Competition improves the breed, and in the hot-hot-hot world of MP3 players, the 8 GB SanDisk Sansa e280 is the best of breed this week. Unveiled yesterday as the world's largest capacity flash-based MP3 player, the e280 has a suggested price of US$250, audio, photo viewing and video clip playback capabilities and a microSD expansion slot allowing expansion to 10GB of music with a 2GB microSD card. The player features an open digital rights management system that allows users to purchase songs or access subscription download services from numerous sources. In keeping with the ever-improving bang-per-buck trend, SanDisk has lowered its prices on the entire Sansa e200 line of products, including the existing 2 GB (US$140), 4 GB (US$180) and 6 GB (US$220) models.  Read More

February 27, 2006 Just how many different form factors can personal storage take? We’re often amazed at the ingenuity of storage manufacturers in striving for bigger, faster, more convenient and simply devilishly clever new form factors, and we saw a few of them at this weekend’s PMA show in sunny Florida. Not new (but bigger) is the US$134.99 SanDisk 2 GB Ultra II SD Plus card, that looks and functions like a typical SD card but folds in half to reveal a high-speed USB 2.0 connector. Going one better was Pretec, which offered the first look at the both the world’s fastest CF Card and a flash drive with built-in card reader. The Pretec 133X CF Card is capable of running at up to 20MB/sec and 14MB/sec of access speed in read & write. The Pretec e-Disk II+ is an expandable USB flash drive with an embedded 512MB flash memory (default) which can be expanded to 4.5GB by simply inserting an optional SD/MMC card  Read More