SanDisk and Toshiba made two announcements yesterday that promised to deliver cheaper and bigger MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash media. First is their x3, aka three-bit-per cell technology, would allow the company to cram 20 percents more die per wafer than traditional 56nm MLC flash which uses two-bits-per-cell technology. Second is the use of 43 nanometer process technology that doubles the density per chip compared to the previous 56nm process.
I have a few of the Sandisk Ultra II 2GB SD version. I prefer them over the Extreme III Compact flash because the in-camera write speed is a tap faster. Although it’s slightly slower in between PC transfer but that’s not what i got it for. Now sounds about the right time for an upgrade. Sandisk has announced two new up-sized versions of the Ultra II SDHC and Ultra II SDHC plus to 32GB and 8GB with 50 percents faster than last version.
Less than three months after Vincent tested out SanDisk’s 8GB microSDHC memory card, the company has begun sending out 12GB versions to cellphone manufacturers to allow them to test their handsets with the newly massive chip.
So at CES this year SanDisk, BeInSync, Amazon, and BoomerangIt will all be coming together on a fairly impressive flash drive. Sure, you might see the flash drive as what it is physically, four gigabytes of flash storage, but thanks to Amazon you get 6 months free of an equal amount of online storage, and thanks to BeInSynce those four gigabytes on the flash drive and the 4GB online will be the same.
Essentially what this is, is a really nice card reader that also plugs into your TV an makes it really easy to throw your pictures up on the ole TV. There are card slots for the following card types: CF, MS, MS PRO, SmartMedia, xD, SD, and MMC.
Following the disagreement with ITunes early this year, NBC Universal turns partnership with SanDisk Corp for web-based content services. The hardcore Heroes fan must be thrilled to see the return of Hiro Nakamura once again back on the downloadable web format but that’s not all. Coming this January, 2 hit comedy “The Office”,”30 Rocks” together with “Heroes” will be feature on Fanfare and there are more to come from NBC’s sister network such as USA Network, SCI FI Channel, Bravo, NBC Sport, News and many more.
Earlier this month Samsung sent over their new 64GB solid-state drive for us to play with, and Vincent promptly slapped it into his MacBook Pro to see whether it made much of a difference in access speed. Well, we’ve finally dragged it away from him, extracted the SSD and put it through some benchmark testing.
As a test machine we used Alienware’s m9750 laptop running Windows Vista 32-bit (as we reviewed here), comparing the Samsung 64GB SSD with Sandisk’s 32GB SSD in both single and dual-drive RAID-0 configurations. After each hardware change we reinstalled the laptop’s OS using Alienware’s supplied restore disk, then ran HD-Tach and HD-Tune to test burst and transfer rates.
Today we unboxed an Alienware M9750 laptop with dual 32GB SSD from Sandisk. The laptop was provided to us by Alienware, via Samsung Semiconductor Group. This will give us a chance to bench mark the Samsung versus Sandisk solid state drive.
Make sure to check out our 64GB Samsung drive that we revealed earlier this month.
SanDisk is producing a solid state drive that works side by side your existing hard drive, to speed up booting, and eliminate long load times on frequently used files. The drive is in PCI Express form, so it will work in your desktop or notebook computers.
After a little sweet-talking at the SanDisk event, Vincent was allowed to spend a few minutes in the company of their marvellously capacious MicroSDHC. 8GB of storage in something the size of a thumbnail is plenty impressive, although if you insist on carrying around the accompanying card-reader (which I suppose you could pretend was some sort of Star Trek phaser) the whole package gets a little bulky.
SlashGear Japan
