Stories about: SanDisk

A massive decline in the price of NAND flash memory, the chips that store photos in digital cameras and music in iPods, is prompting innovation among companies trying to increase sales.

Imagine how different the tech industry might have been had Gary Kildall accepted IBM's offer, back in 1980, to license his computer operating system for a top-secret project. CP/M would have been the OS that shipped with the original IBM PC, and the world might never have heard the name of Kildall's competitor, who eventually accepted the contract: a Mr. Bill Gates.

Storage and data transfer technologies were in abundant display at CES, but a couple of new technologies attracted significant interest and crowds.

Samsung Electronics is showing off a new 128G-byte flash-based SSD (solid-state drive) at the International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, one of the largest such drives shown to date.

In a world in which gadgets are getting ever-smaller, SanDisk's new Sansa View is, strangely, significantly larger than both its competitors and its own predecessor, the company's Sansa e200 line of media players.

Toshiba will begin manufacturing flash-based solid-state drives for laptops early next year, which the company said will offer faster boot times and lower power consumption than hard disk drives.

Micron Technology plunged headfirst into the nascent solid state drive marketplace this week with the unveiling of its RealSSD family of storage devices.

The first-generation Zune media player that Microsoft released last year was a me-too product with a few nice touches. So the question with the new, second-generation Zune is whether Microsoft is ready to surpass its competition, most notably Apple and its iPods.

SanDisk has announced Vaulter, an 8GB to 6GB capacity flash memory solid state disk (SSD) from which to boot a PC's operating system. It is in PCI Express mini-card format and works in parallel with a PC's hard drive.

Once, Apple's iPod had no serious competitors. Now, the iPod Nano faces serious competition from a handful of devices, most notably Creative Technology's new Zen media player.

SanDisk is suing 25 companies, including South Korean giant LG Electronics for allegedly infringing patents used in removable flash storage products including MP3 players and USB flash drives.