I still remember the first SD card I ever purchased. It was around 9 or 10 years ago, and that roomy 16MB SD card let me fit an extra 4 songs on my MP3 player! I forget what I paid for it, but that SD card probably cost me close to $40. For that kind of money, you can get a 16 gigabyte SDHC card today. Here are a few from Amazon for $45 or less. Yet for some reason, SanDisk wants to charge nearly twice as much for an SDHC card that it says is designed specifically for netbooks.

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing particularly special about SanDisk’s new SDHC cards other than the word netbook on the sticker. But the company is putting an MSRP price fo $39.99 on the 8GB card and $79.99 on the 16GB version.

via Engadget

SanDisk is introducing its second generation of low cost solid state disks for netbooks today. The pSSD P2 and S2 SSDs offer vRPM (virtual revolutions per minute) of around 9,000 which makes them almost twice as fast as a 5400RPM hard drive. SanDisk’s SSDs also use a new technology called nCache which allocates up to 320MB of disk space for caching random write commands in order to offer faster, more reliable performance.

When the first netbooks with solid state disks hit the market in 2007, a lot of people expected them to be blazing fast machines due to the SSDs. But they weren’t, because as it turns out not all SSDs are created equal. There are high end solid state disks that offer vRPM speeds in excess of 40,000 and there are cheap disks that offer less than 1,000 vRPM (like the first generation pSSD disks that SanDisk launched in 2008).

All SSDs have a few advantages over hard disks, like the lack of moving parts which helps prevent damage in the event of a fall, and which helps computers run cooler and quieter. But if you want a super fast SSD you typically have to pay more for it.

SanDisk’s new line of netbook SSDs are actually cheaper to produce than the first generation of pSSD chips, but it’s too early to say how much they’ll wind up costing. SanDisk is hoping to see these modules used in new low cost netbooks offered by telecoms with ARM processors and Linux operating systems, and envisions these machines running as low as $199. But the pSSD P2 and S2 can also be used in higher end machines running Windows XP or Windows 7.

The new modules come in 8, 16, 32, and 64GB capacities, and are shipping today. SanDisk is primarily targeting the new chips at OEMs. While the company isn’t ready to make any announcements yet, I get the feeling that there are already at least a few companies building products around the new SSDs.

Update: The press release is online now.

Solid state disks are kind of the next big thing, right? They have no moving parts, like hard drives, and are both more durable and offer potentially faster read and write speeds than hard drives. Sure, they’re far more expensive at the moment, but prices are coming down. And as Asus, Acer, and others have shown, if you’re marketing a laptop as cheap, ultraportable, and durable, you can get away with using low capacity flash disks.

But what if you want the best of both worlds: a fast, durable solid state disk with a high storage capacity? Then it looks like you’d better stick with Windows XP or Linux for your operating system. CNet reports that SanDisk officials are saying that Vista isn’t optimized for solid state disks — and the current generation of solid state disks aren’t optimized for Vista.

SanDisk is working on higher capacity, faster solid state disks. But because Microsoft has effectively told PC makers to stop installing Windows XP (with an exception for low end laptops like the Asus Eee PC the MSI Wind), SanDisk expects that most next generation computers will be running Windows Vista. And Vista doesn’t perform well with SSDs, so SanDisk has to design workarounds to cater to Vista’s demands instead of vice versa. For that reason, SanDisk is behind schedule in developing 128GB and 256GB solid state disks.

[via Small-Laptops]

Chip maker Intel and flash memory maker SanDisk have separately announced plans to develop solid state disks for use in low-cost subnotebooks.