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(Credit: Lexar)

The market for consumer solid-state drives just got slightly more diverse.

Lexar Media announced Monday its latest line of solid-state drives (SSDs), the Crucial M225 SSDs. Lexar has been a known flash storage device maker, while Crucial is a known brand for computer system memory, or RAM.

The M225 SSDs come in three versions, 256GB, 128GB, and 64GB, and offer throughput speeds up to 250MBps in reading and 200MBps in writing.

These drives utilize a SATA 2.0 (3Gbps) interface and feature MLC NAND flash components housed in an industry-standard 2.5-inch drive enclosure. This means they are compatible with all laptops and applications where traditional 2.5 SATA hard drives are used.

For non-traditional applications, together with the M225 SSDs, Lexar also introduced the $30 Crucial SK01 External Drive Storage Kit that turns an M225 SSD into a portable storage device via a USB port or makes it compatible with desktop computers. The kit includes a 2.5-inch USB 2.0 external enclosure, a 3.5-inch SATA 3Gbps hot-swappable drive bay, and a 5.25-inch drive bay bracket.

The new Crucial SSDs are available now and cost $600 for the 256GB version, $330 for the 128GB version, and $170 for the 64GB version. All these drives and the external kit come with a five-year limited warranty.

LAS VEGAS--Lexar plans to introduce faster, higher-capacity CompactFlash cards using a new generation of the flash memory technology, a company executive said Wednesday.

Lexar's top-end 300X cards will be outpaced by new models shipping later this year.

(Credit: Lexar)

Lexar's current top-end 300X-rated CompactFlash cards use a standard called UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) to transfer data at 45MB/second, and their capacity tops out at 16GB. But using a new generation of the standard, UDMA 6, Lexar will release cards that have significantly faster transfer speeds and larger capacity, Jeff Cable, director of marketing, said in an interview here at the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show here.

Cable wouldn't be pinned down on precise details, but he said the new cards' capacity "probably" would be 32GB, and their transfer speeds likely would "pretty close to" UDMA 6's threshold of 100MB/sec, which is more than double that of today's UDMA.

Only newer SLR (single lens reflex) cameras support current UDMA technology, but it's spreading, and there are benefits. For example, cameras can take longer continuous bursts of photos, and photographers can zoom faster to check focus when reviewing shots on the camera LCD. Video, which is arriving in new SLRs, also can saturate data-transfer pathways.

Lexar Media, a maker of digital storage cards, announced on Monday its 16GB version of the Kodak-branded Secure Digital High-Capacity (SDHC) high-speed card.

The new card offers speeds up to 60x, which translate into about 9MB per second, allowing for capturing full-motion video without interruption. However, this speed is still not fast enough for dSLR cameras, whose photos can easily be as large as 9MB each, especially when you want to snap multiple photos at a time.

The new SD card works not only with Kodak cameras, but also any SDHC-compatible digital cameras, camcorders, and PDAs. It comes with a lifetime warranty and will be available in October, at which point you will also find 8GB and 4GB versions. At the moment it's unclear how much the new cards will cost.

(Credit: Lexar)

Photo enthusiasts take note. This morning Lexar announced that its Professional UDMA 300x CompactFlash Card will be available in late September in a 16GB version for $349.99 MSRP. By comparison, B&H has the 8GB card for $154.95 with an $80 mail-in rebate, which means buying two of those would be the better deal at this point. Of course, you can expect the 16GB card to street for less than its list price.

Here's what Lexar's marketing team has to say in its press release:

Designed for professional photographers and photo enthusiasts, this lightning-fast card is UDMA-enabled (Ultra Direct Memory Access), resulting in exceedingly fast performance. Speed-rated at 300x, which represents a minimum sustained write speed of 45MB per second, the new Lexar Professional UDMA 300x 16GB CF card dramatically reduces post-production time thanks to an improved card-to-computer transfer rate when working in conjunction with a UDMA-enabled device. In addition, the very high capacity of the card allows photographers to store more images and shoot for longer periods without interruption.

The release also adds:

When paired with a UDMA-enabled device, such as the Lexar Professional UDMA FireWire 800 Reader or the Lexar Professional UDMA Dual-Slot USB Reader, the Lexar Professional UDMA 300x 16GB CF card significantly improves the digital imaging workflow by accelerating the download of captured images to a destination computer.

A speed-boosting overhaul of CompactFlash memory technology could start arriving in cameras next year, but it's incompatible with the version used in today's higher-end models

The new version, called CFast, has faster data-transfer speeds that could let photographers take more continuous shots without waiting for the camera to catch up, cut camera makers' costs for built-in buffer memory, and make it swifter to review photos on a camera or copy them to a computer.

This a closeup of the a CFast-era CompactFlash card. Note that it's got a slot instead of pins and that it's got different ridges called keys down the sides to prevent it from being used in today's style of CompactFlash slot.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

"It's going to end up in the high-end cameras. The reason to move to it is purely for speed," said John Santoro, senior product marketing manager for Lexar, a flash card maker and Micron subsidiary. He predicts its arrival in 18 to 24 months. "It's my feeling the camera companies already have this on their road maps and want to start working on prototype samples as soon as the specification is finalized."

But as with many upgrades, the standard will break compatibility with today's technology. That means today's CompactFlash cards won't work in CFast slots, and CFast cards won't work in today's slots.

So the more certain you are that you'll buy a new high-end camera in the next couple years, the more cautious you should be before investing in an expensive collection of shiny new 32GB CompactFlash cards.

CFast spec almost done; prototypes to come
Last year, the CompactFlash Association began work on the new standard, and the specification is in its final stages, said Bill Frank, executive director of the CompactFlash Association.

"We expect the CFast specification to be published for distribution in the second quarter--hopefully in April or May," said Frank, who showed off CFast prototype cards and slots at the Photo Marketing Association trade show last month in Las Vegas.

Top-end CompactFlash today cards reach 45MB/sec, a speed rating also called 300x (1x is 150KB/sec). CFast, though, uses an interface called Serial ATA that today reaches about 375MB/sec.

In practice, today's cameras can't keep up with those speeds, and flash card readers struggle when transferring images to computers. But faster speeds are useful in cameras, as newer SLRs show: when data can be written to a flash card faster, it's easier to design faster burst-shooting modes into camera that otherwise must rely on more built-in conventional memory.

CFast cards have a different electronic signaling technology that requires a different physical interface, and cards and sockets are shaped differently to prevent people from mixing the older and newer cards. The new socket is tested for 10,000 insertions, just as with current CompactFlash, Frank said.

Camera adoption?
The next question is how CFast will arrive in cameras. CompactFlash today is used in higher-end SLRs from Nikon, Canon, Sony, and Olympus. But camera makers are reluctant to describe particular technology plans, and Nikon didn't even respond to a request for comment.

When I asked Chuck Westfall, technical adviser for Canon USA's professional products marketing division, whether CFast would catch on, he was equivocal. "It remains to be seen. What drives the market is cost and performance issues and availability," he said. Canon's caution, for example, meant it only moved its low-end Rebel SLR line to SD flash memory when the card format was very well established.

Richard Pelkowski, digital SLR product manager for Olympus America, also wouldn't commit, but he did acknowledge the general advantage of CFast. "Greater speed and greater capacity--we certainly realize the benefit of that," he said, adding that card speed not only lets images be written faster, but also lets photographers review them more easily and take advantage of features such as the side-by-side comparison in Olympus' new E-3 SLR.

SanDisk, another top flash card maker, was more circumspect than Lexar.

"At some point, the industry is going to have to transition to some other type of high-performance card," said Jonathan Hubert, SanDisk's director of strategic marketing for flash cards and accessories. CFast is one strong candidate, he said, but then suggested that the SD Card Association isn't resting on hits SDHC laurels.

Frank, perhaps unsurprisingly given his leadership at the CompactFlash Association, was the most bullish of all. He said that Canon and Nikon engineers are participating in the CFast specification development and that the first cards likely will hit the market in the second quarter of this year. "Since this affects the silicon (chips) in cameras, expect no less than a year for cameras to appear using CFast," he said.

Jump-starting the market
If it were up to the camera makers alone, CFast's future would be more uncertain. But there are industrial uses of CompactFlash, too, for computing devices embedded into all manner of things.

CompactFlash is used in routers, defibrillators, Apache attack helicopters, and General Electric locomotives, Frank said. Some slot machines have two--one for holding the operating system and another for logging transactions.

The CompactFlash future in some ways isn't hard to predict. The technology uses the same interfaces as conventional computer hard drives, and it's been following that road map with a few years' time lag.

Today's mainstream CompactFlash cards use an interface called IDE or parallel ATA, and a newer generation just arriving use a speed bump called Ultra Direct Memory Access (UDMA) that in practice tops out at about 80GB/sec. The CFast version uses Serial ATA technology, which was announced in 2001 and connects hard drives in virtually all PCs today.

Those industrial computing customers, who often don't suffer the power-consumption constraints of camera makers, are eager for the new technology, Frank said--indeed, they were the first to ask for it. Because they're using conventional SATA computer chips, it's not difficult to move to the new technology.

From there, it's a matter of jumping to the camera market, where Lexar focuses. "I think it's inevitable," Santoro said.

(Credit: Eye-Fi)

Wireless memory card company Eye-Fi just announced a partnership with Lexar to develop future products. According to an announcement on Tuesday at CES, Eye-Fi will combine its wireless technology with Lexar's flash memory and branding to produce a Lexar wireless SD card.

I spent some time with the original Eye-Fi Card back in November, and was pleased with what I saw. For a first effort at a new consumer device, the Eye-Fi Card worked as advertised and wirelessly uploaded photos to both local computers and online photo sharing sites with minimal fuss. Hopefully this will remain the case as wireless Lexar cards start to ship. The branding and interface might be slightly different, but since both products will use the same basic Eye-Fi technology, they should be similar and fairly direct to use. The original Eye-Fi card can't access public hot spots (hotspots must be registered on the card before it can connect), but perhaps future Lexar/Eye-Fi cards will see expanded Wi-Fi compatibility.

Lexar's new Professional UDMA Dual-Slot USB reader.

(Credit: Lexar)

Lexar is about to start shipping a new reader to complement its line of 300X Professional UDMA CompactFlash cards. First announced back in February, the reader features two slots: one UDMA-compatible CompactFlash slot and one SDHC-compatible SD card slot. The reader's slick design includes an integrated cover for the card slots. If you press buttons on the sides of the reader, the middle portion pops up and the slots become accessible. When you're done, just push the middle part down and the slots are covered, so you don't have to worry about dirt or dust getting inside the slots while you're toting the reader from one shoot to the next in your bag. A mini USB jack on the back lets you connect it to your computer with the included mini-to-full-size USB cable.

Lexar was kind enough to loan us a sample of the Professional UDMA Dual-Slot USB Reader, along with a 4GB 300X Professional UDMA CompactFlash card, to try out. When I hooked the card and reader up to a high-end Mac Pro desktop, I was able to get an average write speed (copying JPEG and various RAW image files from the computer to the card) of a little over 20 megabytes (MB) per second. On a not-very-high-end Windows PC I got an average write speed of 15MB per second. In both cases reading from the card and transferring images to the computer happened significantly faster; 35MB per second on the same Mac and 30MB per second on the same PC.

While those speeds might not seem impressive if you know that a 300X card comes with a claim of a top write speed of 45MB per second, if you've ever tested some of these cards, you'll know that the claimed speeds are always much faster than what you can expect in regular use. This reader/card combination's performance puts it among the fastest you can get right now. The Lexar Professional UDMA Dual-Slot USB reader is expected to hit stores around November 15 with a suggested retail price of about $45.

Lexar's new Professional 4GB SDHC card.

(Credit: Lexar)

Lexar this morning announced its first Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC) memory card. Part of the company's Professional line, the 4GB card carries a 133x speed rating, which Lexar translates into a minimum sustained write speed of 20MB per second. For those unfamiliar with the new SDHC standard, it was developed to let SD memory cards reach capacities larger than 2GB.

Of course, a new standard also means that SDHC cards aren't compatible with older readers or cameras that aren't SDHC compatible. Because of that fact, Lexar includes a small USB 2.0 SDHC reader with the new 4GB card. We hooked that reader up to a decidedly average PC (not a rocket ship) and were able to achieve write speeds of about 16.5MB per second. Given the fact that transfer speeds vary on different PCs, this was a good result with the system used.

As usual with Lexar's Professional series cards, the company includes some software. In addition to Lexar's Image Rescue 3, which can help you retrieve images that have been accidentally erased or lost due to card failure, you also get Corel Paint Shop Pro X image-editing software. This is a fairly good bargain, since the latest version of Paint Shop Pro (version XI) costs $100.

According to Lexar, the new 4GB SDHC cards and readers will be available in March, with a suggested price of $149.

It's not unusual for companies to recycle their marketing pitches for Valentine's Day, desperate to clear inventory that didn't sell over the holiday season. But some are stretching the concept of romantic gifts to ridiculous extremes.

(Credit: Lexar Media)

We thought an e-book reader was an odd choice, not to mention the ill-advised "Sonic Bomb" Valentine. But then we heard of Lexar's idea to engrave its $73 "JumpDrive Lightning" with some romantic message.

"Pre-load it with a few of your significant other's favorite love songs. Throw on some photos of the two of you for a digital scrap book of your relationship! (Or maybe get creative with a few sexy photos of yourself.)" It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

Or, as one fellow Craver said: "I don't think there's enough room on it to engrave, 'I know you're desperate, but are you desperate enough to go on a V-Day date with a guy who gives you a USB drive instead of roses?'"