Event Coverage

CES 2008: Show Floor Coverage (Part 2)

By Zachary Chan - 12 Jan 2008

SanDisk's Booth

SanDisk's Booth

 SanDisk's sleek portable video player gets an upgrade to 32GB of flash storage. The SanDisk Sansa View has a 2.4-inch TFT LCD display, plays back MPEG4, WMV and H.264 formats and about 7/35 hours of video/audio playback on a single charge. It even features an SD card slot that supports SDHC, even further extending available storage.

 On the smaller end of the scale, SanDisk has also upgraded their Sansa Clip to feature 4GB of storage. While we think this should have happened earlier, at least SanDisk fans will finally have larger capacities for mini players.

 SanDisk keeps on adding more and more features to their Cruzer line of USB flash drives that its hard to think there can be more, but this CES, SanDisk launched the Cruzer Titanium Plus 4GB flash drive which offers automatic online backup, online drive access, AES encryption, lost and found service via BoomerangIT, deleted file recovery and the usual crush resistant metal case.

 SSD capacities are too small and expensive, Windows ReadyBoost has too many variables and limited to Windows Vista, Intel's Turbo Memory didn't really work and now SanDisk is taking their shot at boosting HDD storage performance with their new Vaulter (8G, 12GB, 16GB) PCIe module. The theory is still the same, an external flash storage that sits between the system and HDD to act as cache. However, unlike Turbo Memory and ReadyBoost, Vaulter isn't just another cache, it tries to optimize data access between itself and the HDD - certain data types are stored on the Vaulter directly, while others are moved to the HDD. This way, you get to see SSD-like performance immediately without losing the huge capacities of traditional HDDs. One thing's for sure is that we can't wait to try this new gadget to see if it can offer notable improvements.

 Other SanDisk flash disk updates include specially developed VideoHD line of SDHC and Memory Stick PRO Duo cards that are speed-optimized for reading and writing HD videos.

 We're seeing a lot of movement into the 1.8-inch market for manufacturers going into SSD and SanDisk as just released a 72GB in said format, which is already much larger than most 2.5-inch products around today.

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