As a user who’s had to go through a number of failed drives and lost photos, music and videos over the past couple of years (seriously Seagate, you just lost a customer) I’ve personally been waiting for something like this. Specifically, a drive that promises to preserve your most precious data for 100 years… or at least as long as you live. Or as long as you’re still aware that you have some important data lying around from a few decades ago. Anyway, that’s exactly what SanDisk is promising with this fancy silver brick they just unveiled. Called the SanDisk Memory Vault, this drive was designed to keep your data safe for up to a century.
The smallest ever USB flash drive? We have no way to check SanDisk’s claim for the new Cruzer Blade, but we have to agree that this drive is really tiny. We couldn’t get a photo with a size reference, but if you see that hole on the corner, that’s where you loop a keychain through. So yeah, it’s tiny. About the size of a standard paper clip and about as light as a penny, the Cruzer Blade can easily be strapped to a keychain or mobile phone. Pretty handy if you ever needed a high-capacity mobile drive to go wherever your car keys go. Despite its size, it still packs a lot of data, with capacities ranging from the average 2GBs to a whopping 16GBs.
The Cruzer Blade is now available in the US and Canada, selling for $15 (2GB), $22 (4GB), $39 (8GB) and $78 (16GB).
While it’s a mystery why it took so long for the Xbox 360 to support USB flash drive-based storage, storage company SanDisk coming out with a flash drive branded specifically to plug into the console is a no-brainer. A little over a month after an Xbox 360 update added USB storage support, SanDisk stars shipping their Xbox 360 USB Flash Drive starting from $35.
The microSD standard has finally reached its ceiling: someone (SanDisk, actually) has finally released a 32GB microSD card. That’s 32GBs, or the storage capacity of, um, a $299 iPod touch, or roughly 32 1GB-sized movies, or 32GBs’ worth of photos (you get the idea), that can fit inside a tiny sliver of plastic that you can slot into your phone. This is the absolute maximum size for the microSDHC standard, so you can go out next month, buy this for $200, and not have to worry that they’ll come out with something bigger. Of course, $200 for a tiny card—even a 32GB one—is still $200, so if you’re willing to wait, the price should drop off as the next standard catches on. Now, if you’re planning for the future? Make sure your new devices support SDXC—or microSDXC for that matter—that’s what you’re going to want if you want to go beyond 32GBs.
SanDisk’s new Sansa Clip+ player is a tiny new shuffle-rival that’s not as tiny, but brings something new to the table: removable storage. A MicroSDHC card slot on this player allows you to bring even more storage–as long as you have enough microSD cards—and it also supports SanDisk’s slotMusic and slotRadio cards that are preloaded with songs right off the shelf.
