Best know for very fast memory card, Sandisk enters the Flash disc market with the SSD Ultra ATA 5000 1.8". Providing a storage capacity of 32 GB, it if for now only reserved to OEMs and will be integrated to laptops. Sandisk estimates that the additional cost due to this disk will be of $600.
About performances, Sandisk announces 62 MB/s reading sequential transfer rate, 35 MB/s writing and 0.12 ms access time. The disc power consumption is of 0.4 watts for writing and reading. This figure has to be compared to 1 watt for a 4200 Rpm 1.8" drive and 2 watts for a 5400 Rpm 2.5" drive.
In practice, Sandisk indicates that with the same laptop, Dell D420, Windows Vista boots in 35 seconds with this disc instead of 55 with a Toshiba 4200 Rpm 1.8" drive (the same figures fall to 12 and 31 seconds with Windows XP).
Sandisk also communicated some information about their future 2.5" drive: the characteristics are almost similar to the SSD Ultra ATA 5000 1.8" (63 MB /s, 38 MB /s and 0.2ms) and with a Dell D620, Vista would boot in 35 seconds instead of 48 seconds with a Fujitsu 5400 Rpm 2.5" drive (with Windows XP these figures respectively fall to 13 and 22 seconds).
We noted that Sandisk hasn't communicated the number of writings supported on a given cell of the disc.
LG announced that it will unveil during the Las Vegas CES, staring January 8, the first DVD player capable of reading both Blu-ray and HD-DVD. This release will end the current imbroglio about the choice between these two standards. The player will be available form March at a current unknown price: we have to hope that the additional cost compared to a mono format player won't be too important.
There will be necessary a price gap due to fabrication costs. LG will have to pay more royalties as the consortiums involved in the two formats haven't yet reached an agreement about a common format.