Sandisk Extreme III Memory Cards

Extreme III Product Line Based On SanDisk’s New ESP Technology, A Major Technological Breakthrough

The SanDisk Extreme III line of CompactFlash, SD and Memory Stick PRO digital film cards are according to SanDisk Corporation the world's fastest flash memory cards. The CompactFlash and SD cards have minimum write and read speeds of 20 megabytes per second (MB/sec.), while the Memory Stick PRO has minimum write and read speeds of 18 MB/sec. The SanDisk Extreme III cards, which range in capacity between one and four gigabytes (GB), have doubled the performance speeds of SanDisk's predecessor Extreme product line which currently has the fastest working cards in many of today's digital single lens reflex (SLR) cameras.

The new SanDisk Extreme III cards are targeted primarily at advanced and professional photographers who require high-performance flash memory storage cards for new high-end digital cameras. The cards will start shipping worldwide in October-November to high-end, retail photo specialty stores.

Yoram Cedar, SanDisk's senior vice-president of engineering, said, "SanDisk has developed a new ESP (Enhanced Super-Parallel Processing) technology that gives our new SanDisk Extreme III line its performance advantages. ESP technology is a major technology breakthrough that combines our in-house design of both NAND flash memory chips and controller chips using advanced 32-bit RISC processing and leading edge algorithms. Our engineers worked closely with major camera manufacturers in developing our new ESP technology."

Cedar also explained, "ESP has super-parallel write and read operations that are coupled with an accelerated flash data bus architecture to allow data to be transferred at twice the rate of most competitive cards. In addition, the ESP architecture streamlines every aspect of read and write data transfer operations through advanced hardware automation. The ESP architecture effectively removes the card as the bottleneck in data storage applications."

The cards also include RescuePRO software that allows photographers to easily recover accidentally deleted images, lost digital images or data. The software on these cards is compatible with both Windows and Mac and requires no driver download or special card reader.

SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards will be sold in 1, 2 and 4GB capacities with suggested retail prices ranging from US$139.99 to US$559.99 (EUR 135 to EUR 540, excluding VAT). The SanDisk Extreme III SD card will be sold in a 1GB capacity at a suggested price of US$139.99 (EUR 139, excluding VAT). And Memory Stick PRO Extreme III cards, sized in 1 and 2GB capacities, will carry suggested price tags of US$279.99 and US$559.99 (EUR 289 and EUR 576, excluding VAT).