News

SanDisk is going to announce at the Consumer Electronics Show that it is already producing Secure Digital cards that can hold 1 gigabyte of data. Until now, the largest SD cards have been 512 MB.

The company hasn't made an official announcement yet, but it leaked the information to PCWorld.

Reportedly, SanDisk's 1 GB SD card will cost about $500. It is expected to be available around the end of this month.

Update: Silicon Power has announced that it is also introducing a 1 GB SD card.

With a gigabyte of space, consumers will be able to store up to 30 hours of digitally compressed music, more than 320 minutes of MPEG-4 compressed video, or more than 1000 high-resolution digital images.

SanDisk originally announced this card in March of last year. At that time it said the cards would be available in the third quarter but it must have run into problems that delayed the release.

Now the Number One Format

SD format held the top position in market share for the months of October and November 2003.

According to the most recent sales data available from the NPD Group, the postage sized memory card captured the number one position with 41.8% of the U.S. flash memory market in November, with CompactFlash at 26.5% and Memory Stick at 16.3% market share. It posted a 39% increase (11.8 points of market share) from its number one spot in October.

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