History (1995): Three Competitors Vie for Miniature Flash Cards

Three competitors vie for miniature flash cards.

Toshiba America Electronic Components (Irvine, CA) showed off at Comdex its tiny Solid State Floppy Disk Card (SSFDC), which positions it in a direct face-off with SanDisk’s Compact Flash.

Toshiba’s unit contains one 16Mb NAND EPROM die that uses 5V power for a 2MB total storage. Size: 45x37x.76mm. The connection, in the style of smart cards, may be found on one surface of the card, although an adapter is currently available that converts the SSFDC to PC Card form factor for use in standard PCMCIA card slots. It is sampling now and will be in production in 1996. OEM evaluation unit will cost $40. Toshiba’s next capacity move: 4MB, in 3.3 or 5V.

After Compact Flash and SSFDC, the third rival in the field is the NOR Flash Minicard from Intel (Santa Clara, CAl, supported by AMD, Fujitsu and Sharp. It’s one third of a PCMCIA card (38x33x3.5mm), with a 60-contact elastomeric connector. The card supports 3.3 and 5V, and is driven by Flash Translation Layer software from M-Systems. $45 for 2MB.

Flash cards may be found in Chinon’s new digital cameras, as with those of Epson and Minolta, although Minolta runs with a PCMCIA III HDD drive.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 95, published on December 1995.