For all of you heavy duty survivor types out there that need dependable technology for your spelunking, deep-sea diving or any other fun pastimes, Corsair claims to have created the world’s toughest flash drive.

The Flash Survivor sounds like it could survive a boat sinking or building detonation: it’s water resistant to a depth of 200 meters (or 20 atmospheres), encased in durable industrial grade aluminum, protected by a ring of rubber molding and surrounded by a metal tube with two end caps. In short, if you’re taking this USB drive anywhere where you really start to question whether it will come back in working condition you’ve probably got a death wish.

The Flash Survivor comes in 4 GB ($59.99) and 8 GB ($129.99) models, has a 10 year warranty and also has a 256 bit AES security encryption application pre-loaded to further protect …

What happens when 1 gig of memory for your flash memory card isn’t good enough? Well, maybe you might want to go all the way and take it to the max which for the moment is a whopping 8 gigsbytes.

SanDisk has unveiled an 8 GB SD High Capacity card, the biggest so far in the SD format. What that means in everyday terms is that you now have the ability to store more than 4,000 high resolution photographs, 15 hours of MPEG 4 video or 2,000 digital songs on a single card – does any of us have that many favorite songs? Well, it doesn’t matter because with this new SanDisk card you can store all of the one-hit wonders since Chuck Barry blasted on the music scene.

The 8 GB SDHC card will come bundled with a SanDisk MicroMate …

Today Intel, a world leader in silicon innovation, took their first crack at a new product line of solid state drives based on Nand flash memory.

The new Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive is intended to be used in the place of traditional hard drives offering a more cost-effective and high-performance storage solution. The Nand flash-based drives can offer quicker boot times and faster data access while using less power in systems such as PC’s, routers and gaming devices. Aside from just being able to improve boot times and the ability to find and read data faster, the flash memory based drives would also most likely last longer than a traditional hard drive since there are no moving parts involved.

“Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives including improved performance and reliability,” said …

Samsung has offered up some specs on their lineup of hybrid hard drives. Arguably the heart of any computer, the new drive is designed to consume less power than traditional HDDs. The hybrids use a buffer of non-volatile flash memory to cache data, improving accessing speed and increasing the boot speed. Additionally, since the drive only needs to spin for less than a minute every hour, the power consumption for a hybrid is 10-15% less than a traditional HDD.

The Samsung hybrid MH80 HDDs will be available in storage sizes of 80 GB, 120 GB and 160 GB. The buffer, OneNAND Flash, can be purchased in sizes of 128 MB or 256 MB. The company is saying that this flash will improve boot speeds up to 50%, offers five times the reliability of traditional HDDS while consuming 70-90% less power and increase battery life up …

Remember how cool flash drives were when they first came out a few years ago? As the storage capacity of the drives gets bigger and the technology needed to make one gets more miniaturized, there is now room for adding more features to the standard pocket-sized driver.

Enter eNECESSITIES, a company that will brand your slogan or message to their line of products so you can hand them out as company Christmas gifts to the employees or tech swag to clients that visit your firm’s convention booth. eNECESSITIES’ latest novelty is the USB Sound Flash Drive, a little innovation that could drive you insane if it falls into the wrong hands. Plug this USB into your computer and an audio message (up to 20 seconds) is played from the unit’s integrated speaker. Some people will load on their favorite song or a cute message …

Any concerns about losing the data on your USB flash drive due to damaging it would be dispelled with this IronDrive from R&D Electronics. The rugged flash memory device has been tested to withstand moisture, vibration, shock testing from all angles, caustic agents, EMI, and even nuclear effects.

The IronDrive comes in different capacities from 32MB to 4GB and can be customized if needed. The device connects via a 12 inch USB 2.0 cable and is able to transfer data to and from Windows XP/POS/CE as well as Linux and VxWorks. It is also rated to operate from -40 C to +85 C. The first concern that came to mind was whether or not the memory would last as long as its enclosure, and the IronDrive has a MTBF (Mean time between failures) of 4.66 million hours and is rated to 5 million write and erase …

Today SanDisk, the original inventor of flash memory cards, has introduced a 4GB microSDHC card. The significance of this release lies in the fact that this microSD card is the largest capacity to date for the smallest model of removable flash memory cards.

The 4GB capacity of the microSD also kicks it the tiny memory card into the microSDHC realm, defined by a new SD 2.00 specification that applies to any microSD card larger than 2GB. The new specification is required for capacities from 4GB to 32GB by the SD Association.

“Content is driving the demand for higher capacity flash memory cards in mobile phones,” said Jeff Kost, vice president and general manager of the Mobile Consumer Solutions division at SanDisk. “The new 4GB SanDisk microSDHC card will allow handset manufacturers and mobile network operators to plan rich media …

A report released from Prudential Equity Group recently indicated that Apple may scrap plans for the next generation hard drive based iPod in favor of using NAND flash memory instead. The change according to the report would result in smaller players and improvements in battery life and durability.

NAND flash memory is a very common source of memory for small thumb drives and memory cards, and is a type of non-volatile memory. Non-volatile memory means that it does not need a continuous power source to retain its data, and NAND flash memory is a durable design that works well for long-term use.

Using the flash memory for iPods would also mean less required power since there are no moving parts, and with the continuing improvements in flash technology the devices can be built smaller without compromising …

Sandisk recently announced that they along with Toshiba are planning on shipping their next generation of NAND flash memory in the first quarter of 2007 as they begin a transition in production at one of their joint wafer fabrication plants. The transition will mark the beginning of producing 56 nanometer multi-level cell flash memory chips from the previous 70 nanometer production. This will create the industry’s highest available density in a single chip MLC NAND flash memory.

This release comes after a number of recent announcements from Sandisk touting milestones in memory capacities, faster performance and flash storage solutions. The higher density in these chips equate to the potential of flash memory cards and thumb drives being available with higher storage capacities. Currently the capacity of memory devices is limited to how many chips …

Yanko Design has a concept of a USB flash memory storage device that is able to “stack” up the drives.

The Memory Infinite flash drive has a male USB port on one end and a female USB port on the other, allowing the flexible thumb drives to be stacked in line to add memory to your drive, instead of buying more drives.

The design of the flash drives make for a pretty cool gadget and a unique thumb drive, but the practicality of this concept may not e so simple. I can see this working out to conserve USB ports, and allowing something independently to use the extra port, whether it is another Memory Infinite flash drive or a webcam, but the idea of extending the memory of the first flash drive might cause some problems on where the actual data is stored. If it’s …

Once in a while I’ll need an SD card quickly on the go, or I get them confused on which one has what data. The super-flash folks at A-Data have a solution called the Super Info SD card.

We’ve seen a little innovation in SecureDigital cards recently with the USB/SD card interface, and we’ve also seen some portable hard drives that show you what’s on them. This solution from A-Data is another innovation for SD cards that allows you to view the capacity of the card as well as some identification of which flash card it is.

The Super info SD card from A-Data uses a bi-stable display technology to display the LED-like display without the need for continuous power. The display will show two characters to identify the drive and four characters to show the free …

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 …

The Korean company Sydnt has added a new flash drive to their Volvox product line. The Volvox USB webcam looks and acts like a USB flash drive, and comes in capacities of 512MB, 1Gb and 2GB.

There is one added feature that makes this flash drive unique; it also acts as a webcam that is able to take 1.3 Megapixel photos at a rate of 30 frames per second. It appears to have a flexible stiff cable that works as a USB extension and a stand so you can position your webcam however you would like.

There aren’t too many specs out about this camera flash drive, but it really looks like a pretty cool gadget. If it turns out to be something around $20 and I have $20 I will think about picking one up.

More photos are at Akihabara News …

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 …

The TravelDrive Mobile 25 in 1 card reader is very small and handy card reader with a USB 2.0 interface that looks a lot like a flash memory thumb drive, but instead of having internal flash memory it works as a card reader for 25 different types of memory cards.The drive supports the following memory cards, requiring no adapters or any type of drivers:

Secure Digital Cards: SD, SD Ultra, SD Extreme, Mini-SD, Micro-SD(Transflash)
Multimedia Cards: MMC, RS-MMC, Dual Voltage MMC, MMC Mobile, MMC Plus, MMC 4.1, RS-MMC 4.1
Memory Sticks: Memory Stick, Memory Stick Magic Gate, Memory Stick Select
Memory Stick Pro: Pro, Pro Magic Gate, Pro Ultra, Pro Extreme
Memory Stick Duo: Duo, Duo Magic Gate
Memory Stick Pro Duo: Pro Duo, Pro Duo Magic Gate, Pro Duo Ultra, Pro Duo Extreme

Most card readers that could handle this many different types are nowhere near …