SanDisk announces world's largest CompactFlash card @ 16GB
Posted on 27/09/06 01:48 by Seán Byrne                             
SanDisk announces world's largest CompactFlash card @ 16GB

There was a time when high capacity storage could only be offered on a CompactFlash card using a miniature hard drive (known as a Microdrive) and even still the capacity was limited up to a few Gigabytes.  Now SanDisk has pushed the capacity of CompactFlash cards even further with the introduction of 12GB and 16GB CompactFlash cards to its Extreme III line-up, making these the highest capacity CompactFlash cards in the world.   

These cards are targeted at professional photographers, particularly those who prefer to avoid changing cards where possible for continuous shooting.  They feature a minimum transfer rate of 20MB/sec and a 10 year warranty in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and a lifetime warranty elsewhere.  The 12GB and 16GB cards will be available for US$779.99 (€475) and  US$1,049.99 (€633) respectively in December.  SanDisk will also release an Extreme USB 2.0 reader for US$24.99 (€22) in November, designed to deliver data between the card and the PC as quickly as possible, reducing the bottleneck associated with most other memory card readers.

SanDisk®  Corporation today introduced the 12- and 16-gigabyte (GB) SanDisk Extreme® III CompactFlash® cards to its award-winning Extreme III performance line, making these the highest capacity cards in the world. The new high-performance, large-capacity cards are ideal for professional photographers who shoot RAW or high-resolution JPG files and need the performance, reliability and capacity to capture these large files.
 
 The new SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards can also be used with the Grass Valley™ Infinity Series Digital Media Camcorder, the first camcorder introduced in the broadcast industry that uses non-proprietary, removable, solid-state flash memory cards as recording and playback media.
 
The new cards will have minimum write and read speeds of 20 megabytes per second (MB/sec.) and will ship to photo retailers by the end of the year. The announcement was made at the Photokina trade show where SanDisk is demonstrating products in Hall 6, Stand D78/E79.

The full press release can be read here.

With the sheer capacity these compact flash cards are reaching and how cheap cards up to ~4GB have already got, it will not be long before they start replacing hard drives in higher capacity portable media players to even the hard drives in high end laptops, especially considering some consumers are already willing to pay such a high premium just to have a Blu-ray drive. 

With many USB2 memory card readers having limited transfer rate of 4MB/sec to 6MB/sec between most memory cards from my experience, it would be nice to see the introduction of SanDisk's upcoming high performance card reader, especially considering that most high capacity memory cards can deliver transfer rates of 10MB/second or higher.  This is more important when it comes to reading data from high capacity cards of 1GB or greater where a faster transfer rate would make a considerable difference to how long it takes to offload full memory cards.

Feel free to discuss about CompactFlash cards and other flash drives on our new Flash Memory forum.

Source: SanDisk - Press Releases

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