Trascend has just upgraded to 32GB their Solid State Drive for ExpressCard/34 slots. It will accelerate your laptop PC using Vista’s Ready Boost, but it’s also compatible with Linux and Mac OS X, which will be specially useful once Leopard comes out. Why Leopard and technical specs after the jump.
Samsung has announced plans to put its 1.8-inch 64GB Solid State Drive into mass production. Consisting of 64 eight Gigabit single-level cell flash memory chips (each one’s circuitry is 1/2500th the width of a human hair) the new SSDs will be making devices faster, more efficient, and should boost battery life by up to 20 per cent. This move makes the Korean company the largest producer of high-capacity SSDs worldwide.
SAMSUNG Mass Producing Industry’s First 1.8-inch, 64GB Solid State Drive, Targeted for Notebook PCs [Press Release]
TrustedReviews (with that name, you know you must trust them) just tested one of those mythical Solid State Drives that everybody announces but nobody actually seems to get. This 32GB Samsung SSD has an EIDE interface, which won’t work with most modern laptops, but “its super fast access times are going to give you a nice boost in performance.” Sounds like a good way to give a speed bump to your old notebook. – Jesus Diaz
Samsung 32GB Solid State Drive [TrustedReviews]
Eye-Fi’s looking to give your digital camera a nice upgrade this Fall when it introduces its first 2GB Wi-Fi SD card. The card will let any SD-friendly camera upload pics wirelessly to photo blogs or to your PC. Pricing will be a bit steep ($100), but it beats buying one of those fugly Wi-Fi cameras. – Louis Ramirez
Product Page [via CrunchGear]
We too were groaning when the Multimedia Card Association approved yet another memory card standard dubbed the miCARD. But after seeing Pretec’s S-Diamond up close, we can kind of see why it’s useful.
Similar in theory to the Kingston microSD bundles we looked at yesterday, the miCARD comes with its own USB adapter. In this case, the USB adapter looks like the size and shape of an SD card, but fits directly into your USB port. Quite handy.
Still, another memory card format means we have to shell out even more money, but that’s the price of innovation. – Jason Chen
Pretec S-Diamond – First miCARD Customer [Everything USB]
PNY and SanDisk have some pretty slick new offerings on the solid state drives front, inching us ever closer to the time when all new laptops will come with flash hard drives for faster, quieter and more efficient access.
The MultiMedia Card Association (who?) has approved a new “global memory card standard” developed by a Taiwanese research institute—dubbed the miCard (Multiple Interface Card)—which will work with both USB and MMC slots.
Skepticism over new formats aside, the specs seem fairly impressive: initial transfer rate and storage will be around 480Mbit/sec and 8GB, respectively, with both improving over time. The expected maximum capacity? 2048GB. I can definitely get behind two terabytes in my pocket. (I’m also happy to see you.)
Twelve companies are already backing the new format:
You won’t care much about storage space if you’re lucky enough to win one of these cards. They’re the grand prize in SanDisk’s Hong Kong contest. All you gotta do is buy the real deal, scratch off some numbers on the packaging, and if you win, you get these little nuggets of gold. So how much will they fetch you? About five grand US currency. Not enough to retire, but enough to make me wish I lived in Hong Kong. – Louis Ramirez
SanDisk Gives Gold Memory Cards Away in Contest [Everything USB]
When it comes to looks, most USB flash drives are cut from the same cloth, which is why we’ve taken a liking to Zip Zip’s Lego drive.
The bite-sized drive is small enough to attach to your keys (via the strap) yet packs a full gig of storage space. It’s available in six colors for $59 a pop, so you better be a real Lego fan to splurge on one of these. – Louis Ramirez
Louis writes it up, but this is an Aussie production – and that $59 is technicolour AUD. Go you good thing!
galleryPost('ZipZipLego', 4, 'ZipZipLego');
Product Page [Zip Zip]
The race toward affordable solid-state notebook drives is about to goose itself into hyperdrive, but PQI is coy about the pricing of its SSD Turbo+ line of solid-state storage, starring its latest 256GB solid-state notebook drive. What’s so great about that? It’s a speedy Serial ATA (SATA) drive, and it’s in a 2.5-inch form factor, the perfect size for just about any notebook. Oh yeah, and the main thing is that it’s not a spinning, noisy, hot and power-hungry hard disk.
How speedy? How’s about 60MB per second, plenty fast for almost anything you want to do? Plus, the thing will probably last 10 years, certainly longer than you’ll hold onto any laptop, and it uses less power, too. PQI rolled out two intriguing external drives at the same time:
