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Because all it does is change the choice to "Do I eject the drive properly, or do I check to make sure "quick removal" is enabled and then yank the drive?" Unless you already know it's been set (i.e. you personally set it previously for this drive for this instance), the latter takes more time than ejecting.

The #1 cause I've seen for corruption of data/partition information on USB flash and external HDDs is yanking it out too quickly, just before the copy has finished. In theory a journaling filesystem like NTFS should be immune to damage from this. But for some reason it occasionally seems to corrupt the partition table making the entire contents of the drive inaccessible unless you're skilled enough to repair it manually (usual cause seems to be the partition type number got changed).

That's a 10 minute or so repair process if you know what you're doing. If you don't, it's probably 30-60 minutes downloading the tools and stumbling around trying to figure it out. And if you obeyed Windows when it popped up the "You need to format this disk before you can use it" message when you plugged the drive in again, and formatted it, now you're looking at several hours for file recovery with no guarantee you'll be able to recover everything. (They really need to add a second line to that message saying that formatting will destroy any existing data.)

All this risk and time wasted just to save a few seconds by not ejecting. So I advise people to always eject the drive before yanking it. The seatbelt analogy is very appropriate. It takes very little time to do, but the rare consequences if you don't do it can be devastating.

Sandisk is better anyway.

Link to the actual press release instead of the ZDnet whoring link.

Maybe I missed this, but do they give any indication of whether speeds will be on par with the other cards in their Extreme Pro line? Having dabbled quite a bit in digital photography, I've been in situations where even 90 MB/s is enough of a bottleneck that the camera can't store images as fast as it can capture them. In sports or wildlife photography, shooting 4-5 images a second in raw format, with file sizes being in the 20-30 MB range, fast write speeds are critical. I ended up ditching all of my older, slower SD cards because having to wait 2-3 seconds for each image to save (once the camera's buffer was full) is painful.

Sure they do, but this isn't even twice as fast (write) as UHS-II cards that already exist, and which are backwards compatible with (slower) interfaces. The spec for USH-II goes to 312MB/s each way - faster than the write speed of this new option, and a bit over half the sequential read. And older uSD are compatible with the UHS-II readers. https://www.sandisk.com/home/m...

SanDisk, for example, revealed a 200GB microSD card back in March,

which implies this year, except it was 2015
https://www.sandisk.com/about/...

I get your point but 2TB 9.5mm 2.5" drives have been around for a while
It appears that 15mm gets you 4TB these days, assuming that's not just two drives crammed in the case
Looks like you can get a 4TB SSD in that same form factor (it's also 15mm if the spec sheet is to be believed)

https://www.sandisk.com/busine...

SanDisk's Infiniflash is 512TB in a 3U chassis that is SAS-connected. You can front this with something like DataCore's SANsymphony to turn it into a NAS/SAN appliance.

The pricing looks to be around $1/GB, which is a ton cheaper than building a SAN of that capacity, plus it's much smaller in power/space/cooling.

You'll want to check to make sure you are actually getting a 128GB card. I've gotten a couple of fake flash drives and cards over the years which report the proper capacity and will even format, but when you try to write actual data to the device you end up with corrupt files. If the price is too good to be true, it generally is, so I don't buy cards or sticks from vendors that I can't return anymore. Use H2TESTW to test the speed and capacity of your flash card/device: http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/S...

Exactly. I will not buy a device that doesn't have cheap, easily available removable memory. I've always been that way. I bought a Minidisc player when MP3 players were starting to get popular because Minidiscs were $5, while 128 MB cards which held about the same amount of music were around $200. Sony really could have maintained the market on portable music for at least 5 more years if they didn't put so much DRM on their Minidisc players. They could have made them as easy to use any other MP3 player, and they would have outsold everyone because you could bring so much music with you. They would have eventually lost out as flash drives got cheaper and larger, but for the initial period when MP3 players first came out, there's no reason why anybody should have been buying them at all.

Nope-- they would drop frames. The write speed is not sufficient for raw 4k video. It's good for about 1.5 hours of video, perhaps even more since 95MB/sec is the read speed, and not the (almost certainly) slightly slower write speed, and of course, it's unlikely that the camera will produce data at this exact speed.

The blackmagic cameras are typically used with SSDs. even though some SanDisk extreme Pro SDCards support 280 MB/s reads. This 512 GB card is hogtied by its slow speed, even though 95 MB/s would ordinarily be regarded as pretty speedy.

http://www.sandisk.com/products/usb/memory-vault/

Looks interesting.

I still get calls to support industrial processes driven by DOS based machines.

I am an old guy, raised with these beasts. I know the innards of these things like the back of my hand.

The harbinger of death seemed to be a dearth of disk drives compatible with old DOS machines. Even my stream of disk drives from the recycler is drying up. But it looks like SanDisk and Syba have pulled me and my customer's arse out of the fire again.

Its hard to throw away an enormous expensive piece of machinery because its controller ( which has been doing exactly what it needed to do for 25 years ) isn't supported anymore.

Sandisk pretty much has my money on music players these days..

Between the Sansa Clip+ and now the Clip Zip, they have the perfect mix of simplicity, compatibility, storage expansion options, and sound quality that sets the standard for all other players.

Dirt cheap, microsdhc slot, arguably the best sound quality in the market, and supports MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and suck WMA..

And rockboxable if you want to..

I've pretty much abandoned everything else in favor of these guys..

http://www.sandisk.com/products/sansa-music-and-video-players/sandisk-sansa-clip-zip-mp3-player

48-bit LBA was already introduced in CF 5.0 - "CF 6.0 Ultra DMA Mode 7 along with 48-bit addressing defined in the CF 5.0 specification" http://compactflash.org/2010/cf-6-0-introduces-industry-leading-performance-and-feature-enhancements/

2TB limit is questionable - "The proposed new specifications have the potential to extend theoretical maximum capacities beyond two terabytes" http://www.sandisk.com/about-sandisk/press-room/press-releases/2010/2010-11-29-sandisk,-nikon-and-sony-propose-industry-standards-for-next-generation-high-speed-memory-card-format

The next SD format is SDXC and a 64GB card is available http://www.sandisk.com/products/dslr/sandisk-ultra-sdxc-cards

TFA article is wrong. If you look at sandisk's actual press release they say the 100 life span is "based on reliability data from internal, accelerated lifespan testing for cards stored at normal room temperature, with humidity and static protection".

I think we are ultimately applying very different criteria. I use one of the 100+ "nobody" devices that you just linked to, and for me Ogg provides the best balance between audio quality and file size. That's my criteria.

In your criteria, you seem far more focused on avoiding "exclusion". Oh my gosh, what if I'm locked out of the most popular and trendy (and overpriced) devices? What if people don't want to download the pirate torrents that I go through the hassle of creating and publishing? What if I'm in a minority?!? Oh noes!!!

Cool. If anybody reading this is highly concerned about fitting in, then:

• Buy an iPod or iPhone
• Use MP3 for your own rips
• Just leech torrents rather than create them
• Ignore all the 20 paragraphs this guy wrote about FLAC
  (it is a good archival format, but it's silly to carry around on a portable device)

Presto, now you are just like most everyone else!

Anyway... if you want a lossless archival format, FLAC is the best choice. If you have a device with weak format support, or if creating torrents is a big deal to you, then MP3 is the best choice. But if you have a device that supports Ogg, and you don't really give a crap about sharing your own rips, then this format happens to provide the best ratio of quality to file size. Pick your criteria accordingly.

The class definition is the lowest speed. The 15MB/s may be a max speed rating. Case in point, San Disk's Ultra SDHC card. A card marked 15MB/s, yet is only a class 4 card. That means max speed is 15MB/s, but in some cases, it'll drop below 6MB/s. In fact, that 15MB/s is a read speed, it cannot write to the card that fast.

The thing you are referring to is the "U3" system. It's a portable apps-ish thing.

It's easy to remove with their tool.

http://apac.sandisk.com/Retail/Default.aspx?CatID=1415

Apparently Sandisk has some Write Once SD cards. Dunno about pricing and availability though.

you might need to borrow someone's Windows PC to update the firmware.

Nope. You just unzip and copy the update to the device. I don't remember the exact procedure, but I've done it before and it was fairly straightforward. The Sansa gear is pretty sane that way.

Sansa Clip, most of the iRiver stuff, most of the Cowon stuff, and Palm (Aeroplayer) all have support for Vorbis. Its not an echo chamber; just like many things that don't have commercial backing, you get to do some of the work to get it done. As it has been said before, Theora is a middle ground. Its not going to be the best on your speedy desktop. It will work on slower devices that would normally need an h.264 decoder chip. There is a bigger picture here, in hardware.

Every GNU/Linux distro can have Vorbis support out of the install. That can't happen with h.264 since Apple has patents on it. Apple supports a limited number of profitable platforms, thereby not covering the bigger picture in software.

I also would not like my computer to be infected by a hidden vulnerability in a closed h.264 implementation.

[Other smart phones] don't have enough memory to support a decent music library.

But some of them have microSDHC slots. SanDisk.com is selling 8 GB class-2 microSDHC cards for under $32.

Wikipedia Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates#Broadband_Internet_access
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etisalat#Internet_Censorship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_(telco)#Censorship

The two government-owned ISPs have generally blocked access to Skype, and some other wlel-known VOIP providers - however, the censorship is sporadic. Half of the Skype site is inaccessible, the other half is fine. VOIP traffic is sometimes blocked, sometimes allowed. Amusingly, when the SanDisk Cruzer (USB drive) went on sale here, it included installable copies of Skype. ( http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Item(2645)-SDCZ6-016G-A11-SanDisk_Cruzer_Micro_16GB_Black.aspx )

Had you considered Sandisk's (I believe there are other manufacturers with similar devices, but I can't remember which right now) Firewire CF reader?

There is something about the simplicity of the single-slot card reader and nice fast FireWire 800 interface, rather than some lambda-in-one usb monstrosity. My only complaint is it has no daisy-chaining port, the bus certainly has bandwidth to spare.

I have a certain curiosity about this card reader too, no sense in laptop users being left out of the fast card reader party (providing power to the Sandisk FireWire reader is the issue here - Apple's laptops are the only models I can think of with powered FireWire ports). I'd hope most operating systems these days wouldn't spit the dummy when presented with a hot-plug PCI-e device, but you never know.

Really, you need to use it as a generic noun. That means you would have to start calling OTHER mp3 players "iPods." For example, if you say "Check out these cool iPods that SanDisk makes," you would be using iPod as a generic. By the way, if you say that anywhere important, you are sure to draw a nasty letter from Apple's lawyers, as they guard their trademarks like they're the crown jewels. But ultimately, if enough people start using it that way, the TM is dead, despite all your best efforts. Just ask your buddies thermos, aspirin*, linoleum, and trampoline.

*Fun fact: Bayer also lost its trademark on "heroin" to genericization.

This, of course, is not legal advice, and although at least one court has said it's totally okay to do so (meaning, by way of fair warning, that it may be a Rule 11 violation to sue somebody for it in certain jurisdictions), I'm certainly not trying to genericize "iPod" or suggesting that you do so. iPod(R) is a registered trademark of Apple and the proper thing to say is "iPod portable music player."

Sandisk's Sansa e200 series of players have a similar connector, though I've never tested to see if it is actually the same or not.

http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=4353

http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3785

"The results indicate that the new Windows Vista operating system will run optimally when installed on the SanDisk SSD"

Check the date and the picture of the press release above and then read and understand the cnet link

"In the very low-end of the market, however, this is not an issue. "In very low-end, ultra low-cost PCs, existing controllers can get the job done for 8-, 16-, and 32-gigabyte storage because these are relatively unsophisticated...requirements," he said."

"The results indicate that the new Windows Vista operating system will run optimally when installed on the SanDisk SSD"

Sandisk Cruzer Titanium (I own two)

http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Catalog(1167)-SanDisk_Cruzer_Titanium_USB_Flash_Drive.aspx

This drive is the only one that can truly withstand being on my keychain and not breaking.

I have a sandisk Cruzer "Titanium" drive. The casing is made of metal so it is a bit more sturdy.

http://sandisk.com/Products/Catalog(1167)-SanDisk_Ultra_Cruzer_Titanium.aspx

(doh... which of course is make by SanDisk, not Corsair.)

And they've finally released the 8GB Cruzer Titanium... so now I'm tempted to upgrade.

Still doesn't change the fact that those little Cruzer Titanium's can take a hell of a beating. Nice size, nice weight.

The wife & me just got a couple of these 8G micro-SDHC cards. What's shown there is a reader with the micro SDHC card not inserted. It's actually pretty impressive (and comes with a lanyard & clip so you don't lose the reader).

You can get higher capacity drives than that in more compact packages. It's a little cheaper than the 4G version of this drive but the Sandisk product's got it beat to hell for coolness.

You can get 8Gb microSD cards for under $100 retail. You can hide that shit inside your belt buckle, shoe, watch, zipper, underwear, keyboard, seams of your jeans, label of your shirt, mobile phone, binding of a book. Hell, you could hide it physically inside your innocent thumb drive.

If you have more than 8Gb of super-sensitive data that you don't want customs to find and can't transfer over the internet you're smuggling way too much to be going through customs. The ease of bypassing these searches makes the idea of performing them laughable. The only thing they will do is piss off legitimate laptop-carriers.

Back in '84, when I bought a second-hand CP/M system, it ran off a 360K floppy. The guy who sold it told me that "You can buy a 10 Megabyte Winchester hard disk, and then you'll never run out of disk space".

I recently bought a 4 GB flash chip for my Sony-Ericsson W660i phone. Here are the physical dimensions from the product spec: 0.59" x 0.49" x 0.05" (L x W x H). The mind boggles.

Their 'for customers' page (here) clearly states: "We do not sell the MicroServer series directly to consumers."

In other words, this device is "available"... if you're a company rich enough to buy many of them. It's not "available" if you just want to buy one to play around with at home.

This is like those nifty SSD devices which are also not being sold directly to consumers.

These companies refuse to sell directly to consumers, presumably because they don't want to maintain a consumer-facing customer-service department. However, this is small comfort to those of us geeks who don't need a customer-service department...

If I were to buy a music player today I would not buy an iPod. I would probably buy a Sandisk Sansa e280. I have seen this 8gb flash player for as little as $100 recently. The MSRP is $150. With Rockbox there are reports of people getting MicroSDHC cards to work as well. So if you're really dying for more capacity you can spend $80 to get another 8gb.

It includes a user replaceable battery that does not void your warranty to do so. It supports drag and drop loading of music files and can be recognized by the OS as standards compliant USB removable media. Sandisk supports Rockbox developers to work on alternative firmware. It also has a MicroSD expansion slot and the obligatory FM radio. Add in about 20 hours of battery life and you've got a pretty good player.

But that's just me and what I care about. I would rather jump through hoops for inferior hardware that tries to be open than for superior hardware with unnecessary limitations. It's like the Apple engineers are saying "hey look, we can make this crazy interface with this revolutionary screen, but we can't figure out how to make a removable battery. Nor do we know how to let you just drag and drop music to the player. That is just baffling to us, in fact we might have a proof that it's impossible." Meanwhile the supposedly inferior player makers are cobbling together hardware with those very features using off the shelf components. It's bullshit, and I don't eat bullshit.

First I've heard of this as well. I've been looking for a way to DVR without having to deal with a living room PC or a subscription service like TIVO - something like the SanDisk V-Mate but with an integrated tuner - and such a beast doesn't seem to exist. A TV with an embedded HD looks like an interesting compromise, especially if the video is encoded in a relatively open format like MPEG2 or MPG4 (but I'm not counting on it).

Not quite. I'll admit I got burned through this, through turning off auto-run-on-plugin but not turning off auto-run-on-double-click. The culprit was a Sansa e200 mp3 player.

I'm pretty paranoid about viruses and malware, and I've never so much as had an infection until this drive. And my computer was moderately more secure than most-- it didn't run the autorun feature the instant I plugged it in. Unless you consider trying to convince all Windows users to modify their registry keys to disable autorun on all drives, I would say this is less user education and more on the heads of either Microsoft to turn off this "feature" by default or the companies that produce and sell these drives to test them before shipping them and test them when people return them.

As for myself, I've taken up the habit of scrubbing any USB drives, MP3 players, and hard drives of any type out of the box now.

I decided to test SSD drives on couple of laptop users some months ago.
Today we have none of them left, all went bad in a matter of weeks.
Tried SanDisk 5000 series, both 2.5" and 1,5". No luck.
1,8 died completely, 2.5 just got more and more bad blocks.
Will try with Mitron 7000 as well, when the damn thing ships.

But whatever they say, my suggestion is to keep out of this SSD business until there is more reliable NV memory than flash...

p.s. Writing is sloooowwww, I have commented it earlier here

I decided to test SSD drives on couple of laptop users some months ago.
Today we have none of them left, all went bad in a matter of weeks.
Tried SanDisk 5000 series, both 2.5" and 1,5". No luck.
1,8 died completely, 2.5 just got more and more bad blocks.
Will try with Mitron 7000 as well, when the damn thing ships.

But whatever they say, my suggestion is to keep out of this SSD business until there is more reliable NV memory than flash...

p.s. Writing is sloooowwww, I have commented it earlier here

6GB for $100, a lot smaller than a penny:

http://www.sandisk.com/Products/ProductInfo.aspx?ID=2447

The article refers to 40mb/sec, which is faster than the 5 to 10mb/sec the linked product will do. Other than speed, is there any advantage to the Intel offering?

I have been looking at booting a small embedded CPU with a CF card. Is there any particular type you would recommend? It's going on a R/C aircraft so it has to be able to handle lots of vibration and probably a few crashes. I was looking at these but are they overkill? Should I just go with the cheapest thing I can find? I will need to write to them as well. Probably a couple of times every hour. But when they are not in the air a standard HDD can be used.
http://www.lexar.com/digfilm/cf_udma.html
http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Catalog(1189)-SanDisk_Extreme_IV_CompactFlash.aspx
What distro of linux are you using?

Eric

The official press release is here:
http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=4025

Is it public what patents they are suing over yet? There seem to be no real details anywhere...

At 2.80W idle and 3.45W active for 128GB capacity, this SATA flash drive(pdf warning, power specs on pg. 9) uses slightly more W/GB than the Hitachi drive, but less than most mechanical disks. Hats off to Hitachi for delivering low power consumption with decent performance! If the other parts of our desktops were as efficient, we wouldn't need 300W PSUs for systems that do little more than email and web browsing.