Pretec introduces 4GB SD card

Pretec Electronics Corp. has released a 4 GB (gigabytes) SD card, currently the largest capacity available for the SD (Secure Digital) standard.

Pretec 4GB SD card is the latest addition of its high speed line of 133X SD card, from 256MB to 4GB, with access speed up to 20MB/s. The card is constructed with 65 nano-meter 16Gb SLC NAND technology. The Pretec 133X 4GB SD card is available for customer sampling with unit price of US$699, with mass production scheduled for August 2005.

Pretec is also announcing the availability of 2GB MMC 4.x card (MMC Plus). With 8-bit data bus and 52MHz clock rate, MMC 4.x card can be 400% faster than today's SD card commonly available in the market, or 200% faster than the latest SD 1.1 specification.

Pretec 12GB CF card pricing is reduced from US$9999 to US$4999. The flash memory devices is a direct competitor to most small form factor hard disk drive such as Microdrive.

The company explains that although SD 1.1 specification and MMC 4.x are new, most consumer devices are being designed with this new standard. However the new cards are backward compatible with older digital cameras, mobile phones or other devices operating with SD 1.0 or MMC 3.x specifications.

Pretec introduces also today e-Disk II, an expandable USB flash disk by bundling SD/MMC cards which supports both SD 1.1 and MMC 4.x. Other than a flexible capacity USB Flash drive up to 4GB, users can adopt e-Disk II as a low cost and very high speed USB SD/MMC card reader to transfer data between computers and IA devices.