The near-ubiquitous USB flash drive is of course improperly named, as it has no drive as such, but the term was initially coined because the devices were seen as replacements for floppy disks drives for transferring data between PCs. The 1.44MB capacity limit of floppies was beginning to render them … [Read more...]
Sony Memory Stick technology and background
Sony are the only consumer goods manufacturer to have stuck with their own proprietary removable memory card. Their Memory Stick brand, introduced in 1998, actually covers a variety of different formats that have evolved as devices have changed, getting physically smaller but demanding more storage … [Read more...]
USB Flash Drives
These are not "drives" at all - the misnomer was gained as they were intended to replace old portable drive technology. Offering massive storage and access fast enough for boot facilities, USB Flash Drives are arguably the best current portable RAM for PCs. … [Read more...]
xD Picture Card , the Fuji and Olympus memory card
The full title of the xD card, the xD-Picture Card, gives away its target market, it being squarely aimed at the digital camera market. And if that wasn\'t enough, the fact that it was developed by Fuji and Olympus, two camera firms, gives the game away completely. The xD card is … [Read more...]
Guide to SmartMedia cards, introduced as Solid State Floppy Disk Cards (SSFDC)
The SmartMedia memory card format was one of the earliest, introduced by Toshiba in 1995, when it was referred to as the Solid State Floppy Disk Card (SSFDC). It was launched shortly after the CompactFlash (CF) and of much the same size but a lot thinner, at 0.76mm rather … [Read more...]
Secure Digital (SD) Cards – popular digital camera memory card format
Secure Digital (SD) is a memory card format used to transfer data between PCs and smaller devices, such as digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players and mobile phones. Because the memory used is solid state, i.e. it remembers what's been written to it when the power is removed, … [Read more...]
MultiMediaCard (MMC) – SanDisk and Siemens NAND memory card for phones and smaller devices
Ten years after releasing the CompactFlash card and watching it become very successful, SanDisk had a go at repeating the trick, this time in collaboration with German company Siemens, releasing the MultiMediaCard (MMC). This was designed to take over from CompactFlash in most markets … [Read more...]
Guide to SanDisk’s CompactFlash memory card
Memory manufacturer SanDisk introduced CompactFlash (CF) in 1994 as a small format memory card, which used the existing PCMCIA-ATA specification to communicate with PCs. These cards are roughly a quarter the size of a PC Card and use flash technology that allows data to be stored indefinitely, … [Read more...]