SanDisk announced today the launch of a 32 gigabyte, 1.8″ solid state drive as a drop-in replacement for existing notebook drives.

The new replacement drive uses non-volatile memory instead of a spinning disk and mechanical head to read and write data. Due to this, the SanDisk drive can offer very competitive read and write speeds without having to spin-up or seek files, with a fraction of the power consumption of a traditional hard drive with moving parts. Lower power consumption can be an important factor for those using notebooks on the road in order to increase battery life.

“This is an important milestone for SanDisk in our relentless quest to create new large-scale markets for flash storage solutions for consumers in the personal computing space,” said Eli Harari, SanDisk CEO. “The 32-gigabyte SSD that we are announcing today represents the fifth generation …

SanDisk is not the first to offer an SD card with USB, but I have to say I like this design a little better than the A-Data version simply because the removable portion of the card is hinge connected instead of being a part that is removed and can be lost.

The real feature here is that you are getting a USB interface built right into your SD card. Normally you would need some sort of SD card reader to insert your card into and transfer the data through a USB or other port. With the SanDisk Ultra II SD plus USB you do not need a reader since you can use this SD card in your camera, PDA or any other device that uses SD cards, and then remove it and connect directly to a USB port.

The …

SanDisk has come out with a cool new MP3 player. This player, which is not far behind the iPOD works off of flash memory of course, since SanDisk is way into the flash memory business, and is available in a 1GB and a 2GB version.

The Sansa c200 has a color screen and allows you to play music, view photos and listen to FM radio. The Sansa supports MP3, WMA and WAV files and syncs up to Microsofts PlaysForSure subscription music. It interfaces to your PC with USB and has a MicroSD slot for additional memory.

This is a nice MP3 player and at the time of this post is under $100 which makes it relatively affordable. One thing to note is that the Playforsure music subscription from Microsoft will require Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10+. If you don’t have these you …