1GB solid state CF card you can buy now

11th December - 2001
By Ian Burley

Various vendors (Sandisk, for example - click here) have announced IGB Compact Flash cards, but as far as we know you can’t yet buy them. But we have found one particular IGB CF card that is shipping right now.

It’s made by the German company, Optosys and is a Type II (thicker) CF card that uses chip stacking technology to squeeze two 512MB Samsung NAND flash memory chips into the space of the card. Optosys has licenced the use of Lexar’s FC1410 BM2 ATA controller for the card. A 2GB card is in the pipeline for the first quarter of 2002.

The Optosys card is designed to work in most CF-II compatible slots and should not suffer compatibility problems exhibited by rival products like IBM’s Microdrive, which also requires a Type II slot, but consumes too much current for use in many devices with such slots.

The street price for Optosys’ 1GB card is US$900, or €1020, or roughly £640. That’s nearly three times the price of a 1GB Microdrive in the UK, but it’s solid state and you can get one now.

www.optosys.de

[Back to top of the page]
 

|Feedback| |Main news page| |Newsletter| |Home|