If you’re in the market for overpriced flash memory, Sony has the 32GB Memory Stick Pro-HG Duo. Good news for those who use “Memory Stick Pro-HG Duo”. Depending on cost of course. 32GB will cost you about $100 on SDHC.

Super-fast 20MB/second data transfer. Perfect for HD camcorders or if you are handling large volumes of images. Camcorder users can shoot in Full HD mode (1920 x 1080) for an impressive 225 minutes using a single 32GB Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo HX.

Computer memory manufacturer Lexar Media is betting you might want to add a little extra something to those boring DDR3 memory modules – lights. The company announced today its Crucial Ballistix Tracer PC3-10600 (DDR3-1333MHz) modules in 1GB and 2GB sizes.

The Ballistix Tracer modules come equipped with “activity-indicating Light-Emitting Diodes (LED).” They “are illuminated in a random pattern based on memory activity, highlighting the system memory and allowing users to visually see how intensely the memory is working.” Performance enthusiasts, case modders and do-it-yourself users are among those expected to take these up.

OCZ Technology recently unveiled PC3-16000 4GB (2×2048MB) DDR3 kits for those needing high-performance memory. These join existing 2GB modules of similar design.

The OCZ DDR3 PC3-16000 Platinum Edition kits combine two 2GB modules for 4GB system density running at 9-9-9 latencies and a 2GHz data rate, according to OCZ. They reportedly achieve this at 1.9V.

Some Hewlett Packard scientists have come up with a new type of memory that is being hailed as a huge breakthrough. It’s a circuitry component called memristor, which allows data to be stored in circuitry even after the power is switched off. If all of the bugs can be worked out, the technology has massive potential. It could include benefits like computers that power up instantly, cell phones that go much longer without a charge and data loss in the case of power failures or battery death could be a thing of the past.

The memristor reside in the circuitry rather than be a separate memory module. That model allows PC builders to save valuable space. It could also lead to smaller systems that are much more powerful.

Kingston Technology is trying to connect with God knows which demographic by announcing today a microSD memory card preloaded with Ricky Martin material. You’ll find the Kingston 1GB microSD card with an accompanying USB reader kit available for around $11.

Now we really don’t have anything against Ricky Martin, but come on Kingston. This is a pretty lame promotion. If you must buy into it however you’ll find the 1GB microSD card loaded with Martin items like the tracks “Somos la Semilla,” “Tu Recuerdo,” concert images and a music video that opened his “Black & White” world tour.

According to an announcement by Numonyx CEO Brian Harrison, the company is expecting to have phase change memory (PCM) commercially available and start shipping this year. PCM is a new type of memory that would be in competition with Flash memory and has been in the works for decades but has yet to see commercialization.

Numonyx is a joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel and appears to be the first to announce a real-sounding time line for this type of memory. A number of companies have been working on phase change memory including an announcement from IBM in late 2006. Harrison says they are shipping samples now and will have the new memory widely commercially available in the next year or two.

SanDisk has announced from the CES floor it has begun to provide samples of a 12GB microSDHC memory card to phone manufacturers for testing and evaluation. This 12GB capacity marks what SanDisk says is the world’s largest for mobile phone storage.

A 12GB microSDHC card represents around a 50 percent boost in storage capacity over SanDisk’s current 8GB card. The card reportedly can hold, for example, a combination of 1,500 songs, 3,600 photos and 24.5 hours of video.

OCZ has a new memory module designed to take on the latest in games and memory-intensive multimedia programs providing increased memory stability due to these relatively large, wicked looking pipes coming out of it to help dissipate heat. The company is calling it the ReaperX HPC (heat pipe conduit) and it comes in capacities of 2GB and 4GB.

This new design has the conduit touching each individual chip according to the company, unlike previous models of the Reapers which didn’t actually come in contact with the chips. When we see these types of memory modules we always have to wonder however, just how much of it is built for actual functionality and how much is for show. The ReaperX HTC is rated at DDR2-800 with 4-4-3 timings and have Enhanced Performance Profiles built-in which make them compatible with the latest generation of NVIDIA SLI chipsets.

You’ve got a digital camera loaded with photos to share. You have a favorite photo sharing Web site. How can you transfer between the two? One new way looks to be the freshly announced Eye-Fi Card, a wireless SD memory card for digital cameras priced at around $100.

The Eye-Fi Card is available in a 2GB capacity, allowing it to hold around 1,000 images. The card allows one to connect through a wireless network to a PC or Mac to transfer photos over to. The interesting part is that you can also reportedly use this card to easily send images to a variety of online photo and social networking Web sites. You can set where to send your photos during a set-up process.

SanDisk knows those who own high performance digital cameras demand memory cards offering better transfer speeds and storage capacities. The company thinks it can meet that need with its new SanDisk Extreme III 8GB, priced at around $180.

The SanDisk Extreme III 8GB memory card is in the SDHC format and comes bundled with a SanDisk MicroMate SDHC Reader. A typical Extreme III 8GB card can store more than 4,000 high-resolution pictures or up to 16 hours of MPEG 4 video. Transfer speeds are rated at 20MB per second.

How soon do you think the day will be when you can store as many movies to watch on a device smaller than the size of your average flash memory stick as you have on your iPod? 20 years? 10? If the breakthrough that was announced at the University of Pennsylvania is as big as the inventors claim it is, that day may be here before the end of the decade.

Scientists at the U of P have developed a way to create self-assembling nanowires from germanium antimony telluride. These tiny lengths are about 30 to 50 nanometers in diameter and 10 micrometers in length and are made by freezing chemicals at low temperatures, turning them into crystals. The technical stuff is hard to follow but the end result is a revolutionary new form of data storage memory that uses low power consumption (0.7mW per bit), fast read/write times (50 nanoseconds or about 1,000 times faster than the Flash-based memory devices used today) and won’t have any data corruption after 100,000 years of usage.

Sony has unveiled some new very high-speed memory cards designed to work with digital single-lens reflex cameras such as the recently announced Sony DSLR- A700. The 4GB NCFD4G model will price at around $120 while the 8GB NCF8DG sells at around $200.

These new Sony high-speed memory cards join the company’s current line of 66x and 133x-speed models at a rocking 300x. They are CompactFlash in nature and will obviously offer increased processing and response times for those who need it.

SanDisk today announced it would begin making available an 8GB Memory Stick Micro (M2) memory card for use in mobile phones. The cards should be available for use by the end of the year, though no specific price points have been set.

The 8GB SanDisk Memory Stick Micro cards are effectively the largest capacity M2 cards in the world at the moment, according to SanDisk. The cards will allow consumers to listen to more than 2,000 digital songs, store more than 5,000 high-resolution pictures, and view up to 5 hours of MPEG-4 videos.

Moore’s Law seems in jeopardy with some recent memory design innovations by IBM. The new design triples the amount of memory on a microprocessor and marks the fastest access times ever recorded with eDRAM (pictured).

The new eDRAM requires about one-third the space of prior designs and vastly improves microprocessor performance in multi-core designs, graphics for gaming, and networking performance. The new memory also has significantly lower power requirements – needing only one-fifth the standby power of conventional SRAM.

SRAM or Static RAM is a fast volatile memory and preserves data only while continuously powered. SRAM has low power consumption but takes up considerable space on chips. DRAM or Dynamic RAM is commonly used in personal computers as a separate chip. Historically, DRAM has been considered too slow to be integrated directly onto the microprocessor.

IBM presented the breakthrough on-chip …

Solid state disks (SSD) offer a vast improvement over the spinning platters found in conventional hard disk drives. SSDs will help overcome the bottleneck caused by the latency of disk drives and will accelerate applications and lower power consumption. The net benefit of SSD is that consumers will have faster data transfer speeds when reading or writing large files.

Samsung announced today that it has begun sampling its 16Gb NAND Flash memory design with customers. Samsung’s 50nm Flash incorporates a new memory design which uses a 4KB page size, twice the conventional 2KB paging system for NAND flash. The new technology will improve both its read and write features to double the read speed, while increasing write performance 150%.

Samsung is hoping that early market introduction of higher density NAND flash memories will hasten the adoption of flash-based SSDs. Mass production of Samsung’s …