Pretec Electronics Corp. has released the 4GB MMC Plus 266X, currently the largest capacity MMC card, and also the fastest flash memory card, according to company reports.

Although maximum speed of today's popular MMC 3.x and SD 1.0 cards are 2.5MB/s (16X) and 12.5MB/s (83X) in SD's favor, the maximum speed of advanced specifications call for much higher speed of MMC 4.x at 52MB/s (346X) vs. SD 1.1 at 25MB/s (166X).

The Pretec 4GB MMC Plus 266X provides access speed up to 40MB/s, double of the speed of recently announced Pretec 4GB SD card 133X. The Pretec 4GB MMC Plus is available now for sampling with unit price of US$699 each, mass production is scheduled by Q4 2005.

Maximum capacity of SD card is 4GB under v.1.1 spec. and is also 4GB for MMC under v.4.1 spec. using so called "Byte Addressing" scheme if the file format of FAT32 is adopted. Pretec 4GB MMC Plus can be configured to be fully compliant with MMC 4.1 specification under traditional "Byte Addressing"; or alternatively Pretec 4GB MMC Plus can be configured under "Sector Addressing" scheme pioneered last year by Mu-Card Alliance.