SanDisk

Social networking and a bit of amateur sleuthing have reunited a Canadian firefighter with the camera he accidentally dropped to the bottom of the sea during a family vacation more than a year ago.

Stephen Wood was sure he'd said a final goodbye to his Canon EOS Rebel when it slipped from his hands into the Deep Bay off the east coast of Vancouver Island last summer.

"We figured the camera and the pictures were gone. We didn't even bother trying to retrieve it," Wood told CNET today. "It was on when it went in the water, and [it was] salt water, and at high tide, I think it's roughly about 60 feet deep there. It was also like 9 o'clock at night so it was dark." Not to mention that Wood and his wife had a baby in tow.

Conditions, in other words, were hardly ideal for a gadget-retrieval operation, so Wood accepted that he'd seen the last of the cam he'd received as a wedding gift from his firefighter pals. … Read more

The MP3 player will never die. You can show me your smartphones and your tablets and all of the dozens of ways we have now to listen to music, but there will always be a place in the world for a cheap, reliable MP3 player.

SanDisk's latest Sansa Clip Zip is proof of this point. Starting at just $49 (4GB) and decked out with an enviable array of audio format support (including AAC and FLAC), an FM radio, a voice recorder, a stopwatch, and a 1.1-inch color screen, the Clip Zip is destined to become the same kind … Read more

A little while ago I made a case that you should keep your hard drive when upgrading to a solid-state drive (SSD). That case is even more clear with the SanDisk Ultra.

This is the first SATA 2 (3Gbps)-based SSD I've reviewed since the Samsung 470, and it's also the first that trailed behind hard drives in terms of data transfer speed. In our testing, the Ultra was actually the slowest among all internal storage devices we've seen when it comes to copying files.

This doesn't mean the drive is slow in other operations. According to SanDisk the Ultra is optimized for random access, which helps boost the performance of applications, especially during launch. And indeed the drive helped improve the overall performance of a computer a great deal in our trials. Games and large applications took much less time to fully load when compared with a traditional hard drive. The drive also cut down the boot and shutdown time significantly. … Read more

Solid-state drive prices continue to fall, and SanDisk is doing its part with a new 240GB laptop drive for $450. But don't expect to pay that kind of price when getting an SSD directly from Apple or Hewlett-Packard.

Flash memory-based SSDs are the storage of choice in cutting-edge, weight-sensitive designs. They're standard in all the new 2011 MacBook Airs and will populate the new wave of Ultrabooks due later this year. Drives of 256GB capacity from first-tier suppliers such as Micron Technology were more than $500 earlier this year, so a new drive from SanDisk with comparable capacity … Read more

If you hate waiting for what seems like an eternity for your PC to boot Windows, Diskeeper's ExpressCache might get it going a little faster than molasses.

Recently shown off at Computex Taipei, ExpressCache has been demoed with an 8GB SanDisk SSD to cut program launch times as well.

In the demo below, the Windows desktop appears 15.5 seconds after the OS starts, compared with 33.4 seconds on an identical machine that isn't souped up (BIOS time isn't included). The times it takes for the toolbar to appear are 1.9 and 23.8 seconds, respectively.

In simultaneous launches of Adobe Photoshop, the times are 5.9 and 11.8 seconds.

The SSD acts as a cache for the HDD, and either component can be of any capacity and still work with ExpressCache. … Read more

Flash memory maker SanDisk is acquiring SSD developer Pliant Technology for $327 million in cash and certain stock-based incentives.

Announced by SanDisk today, the deal has already been approved by the boards of both companies and is expected to close by the end of SanDisk's second fiscal quarter in June, pending the usual regulatory reviews.

Headquartered in Milpitas, Calif., Pliant Technology sells flash-based SSDs (solid-states drives) specifically for the enterprise market. As such, the drives are designed to deliver high performance and reliability for use in data centers and similar environments.

"Flash memory is making significant inroads into … Read more

Announced about a year ago, the SD Card Association's SD 3.0 specification has yet to gain much traction. Panasonic and Toshiba both announced UHS-I SDHC products last September, with Toshiba claiming ultrafast write speeds of up to 80MB per second. But those cards have yet to materialize. At CES 2011, Kingston announced a new series of UHS-I cards, unfortunately dubbed UltimateXX, with a claimed 35MBps write speed, which are slated to be available this month. SanDisk now ups the ante, expanding its Extreme Pro line of flash cards from CompactFlash to SDHC, with the momentarily fastest spec of … Read more

When it comes to flash memory cards, large capacity and high data-transfer speeds usually are somewhat mutually exclusive advantages--if nothing else, to keep the costs down. But what happens when you give the product development folks an opportunity to indulge their fantasies?

SanDisk's new Extreme Pro CompactFlash card unveiled at CES, that's what.

This card from one of the premier brands in flash memory products has three superlative attributes: a 128GB capacity, a data-writing speed of "up to" 100 megabytes per second via a UDMA-7 interface, and a price tag one penny shy of $1,500. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--This may come as a surprise to those of us who have been using fully featured, multimedia-capable smartphones for a while now, but the idea of connecting one's cell phone to a computer isn't entirely natural for many consumers. At least, that's what SanDisk is banking on with its Media Manager pack, which the company showed off during MobileFocus at CTIA Fall 2010.

Although the term Media Manager may automatically associate with software in your mind (and you're not wrong), there's a reason I call it a pack. The product, which will be sold … Read more