SanDisk Pushes the Envelope Again

Flash disk storage cards have always been an appealing technology. They are extremely rugged, especially when compared to rotating media such as hard disk drives. In addition, Flash memory is a solid state technology which translates to very good performance in a range of applications. But Flash has suffered from two disadvantages: cost and capacity. Cost is still an important factor, however, companies are beginning to take on the capacity issue by storm. Most recently, SanDisk Corp. (formerly SunDisk) introduced the world’s first 85 MB Flash memory card housed in the Type II PC Card format used in most PDAs and laptop computers.

The card is the first to employ 32 Mbit Flash technology and can operate using both 3 and 5-volt power systems. This is an important consideration for power-savvy PDAs and mobile consumer devices. This also means that you can move the card, along with its data, between devices that work with either of the two voltages. By using 32 Mbit Flash technology, SanDisk was able to create a storage card that has nearly twice the write performance of its previous cards. In addition, by employing compression software, you can effectively double the card’s storage capacity to roughly 170 MB, making it more than functional even for resource heavy systems such as Microsoft Windows 95.

The 85 MB card has an industry standard ATA interface, which is the mobile equivalent of the IDE standard found on desktop computers. This also means that it is incompatible with certain PDA systems, including Apple’s Newton.

SanDisk Corporation
3270 Jay Street
Santa Clara, CA 95054
(408) 562-0500
(408) 562-3403 (fax)