Digital cameras nowadays are feeling the pinch of available storage media.  The numbers are large:  a 5MP JPEG picture shot with a Kodak could be 700KB in size; a 7MP JPEG picture captured with a Sony could be as large as 2.5MB; a 15MP JPEG shot with a Canon EOS could be as large as 7MB.

Unlike hard disks which have seen falling prices as they push towards the single hard disk terabyte capacity, flash memory used by cameras and other small electronic devices are still expensive when you consider the cost/MB.  Another problem with flash memory is the write speed of larger capacity drives.  And the larger the capacity, the slower the flash drive write speed.

That expectation has changed though with the release of the SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash Series 32GB flash drive.  This drive also boasts of a 50% speed increase (which means that the write cycle time is half that of current flash disks of the same capacity).

As a backgrounder, flash drives have no moving part. This makes it more robust than hard disks, which are based on a spinning disk and a read/write head on an arm. One reason, however, why flash drives are slower is because of the software which evens out the writing among the drive sectors.  This mean that as the flash drive is used, all the sectors have approximately the same number of accrued write cycles.  The software on the drive keeps track of the number of times a sector has been written to.  It decides which sector to use based on a least-used algorithm.  A side-effect of this is that when a flash drive starts having bad sectors (after a sector has been written to more than 100,000 times), all the other sectors will go bad very quickly afterwards.

The SanDisk announcement is very significant for camera makers and, to a lesser extent, to computer manufacturers.  The larger capacity flash drives can containg more and larger files of the large megapixel variety.  Additionally, the cameras can now cycle faster and be ready to shoot in a shorter time.  This also paves the way for longer use by video cameras.  This is specially true for HD cameras which use flash drives.

For now, SanDisk has the niche all to itself.  They invented the flash memory, and they are deserving of leaving the competition far behind.