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Golden Memory
Thanks for the memory, chaps
They are skimpy wafers of plastic and metal but "flash" memory cards have become the digital replacement for everything from a roll of film to floppy disks and rewritable CDs.
And the good news is they will get cheaper and their capacity will grow as the "price per megabyte" of making flash cards drops.
...Making it all possible is good old Moore's Law - which states that the number of transistors on a given chip can be doubled every two years. It was dreamed up by chip-maker Intel in the Sixties and still holds true.
SanDisk is shrinking the transistors on its chips to hold 4 billion bits of data this year - 16 billion by 2007.
"Flash" memory refers to units in which data is saved to chips that retain the data when the power is off. And there are no moving parts in flash memory, unlike PC hard drives.
...SD and Memory Stick take 80 per cent of the global market, with SD holding the larger share. The other formats will continue to lose market share with Compact Flash holding on with a loyal user base among photography enthusiasts.
But flash memory has competitors in hard drive vendors and emerging technologies such as Portable Blue, a Blue-Ray format that stores gigabytes of data on a tiny hard drive.
SanDisk believes the two can co-exist. "Are flash cards going to be in iPods one day? If the price gets cheap enough, maybe. It's a matter of cost."

posted by Jerry permanent link