Sponsored by SanDisk
Flash media and the age
of the “personal almanac”
WOULDN’T IT BE USEFUL to have your own personal almanac—a collection
of dependable and handy data and media files you could carry around with
you and access at will?
Collecting—and transporting—large amounts of information is exactly what
you can do with flash media (you know, those little cards you use in your digital
camera or those data-storage doodads your friends carry around on their key
chains). As opposed to the memory on your hard drive, flash media store information without a power source. Most commonly seen as “flash media cards” or
“flash cards,” flash memory cards are extremely stable and rugged, and have
decades-long archival qualities. In addition to being handy, compact and
durable, these cards allow you to erase old data and store new data.
Because of technological advances in flash memory, storage capacity for
some formats now exceeds 12 gigabytes. SanDisk, the company that invented
Compact Flash, will release a card later this year with an amazing 16 GB
worth of memory capacity. You could literally record your entire world of data
on just one card: photos, special events, music, video … just about everything.
Voilà, a personal almanac!
